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The year was 1980 and Alabama football super deity coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was getting old. And he was worried — about the afterlife.
“Bryant was particularly concerned about one question,” Lars Anderson writes in his book Chasing the Bear: How Bear Bryant and Nick Saban Made Alabama the Greatest College Football Program of All Time.
Bear wondered whether he had performed enough good acts in life to earn a spot in Heaven. “I’m worried about Heaven,” he said. “I just don’t know if I can get in.”
This question haunted him until he died three years later.
His concerns were well-founded. Like the rest of us, this guy did some unholy things. As a kid he got challenged to fight another kid and told himself he would throw the first punch, which he did, bloodying the other kid’s face and ending the fight. This was early proof, which carried on when he coached Alabama’s Crimson Tide, that he believed violence was a necessary part of winning in life.
“For Bryant, football was a blood sport,” the author writes. “Backing his players who fearlessly attacked the opponents further cemented his reputation for being something of a football outlaw.”
The writer quotes the coach: “I want players who want to go jaw to jaw for sixty minutes. To go out and be reckless. You have to fight and bleed.”
Football was, in the Bear’s mind, “a game of intimidation and violence as much as it was about strategy and raw talent.”
Nick Saban, Alabama’s current super successful coach, shares this mentality. Like the Bear, he believes in yelling at his players, toughness, talent, and non-stop strategic adjustments.
He learned these values growing up in West Virginia. One day while working at his father’s gas station he was in a foul mood after breaking up with his girlfriend.
“You don’t have a girlfriend right now,” his father said. “Pretty soon, you’re not going to have a job, because I’m going to fire you. And if I fire you, I’m going to whip your ass.”
His dad’s toughness cut deeper. In eighth grade, Nick got a grade of D in music class. His father told him he could not continue playing on the basketball team until his grades improved.
The father then took his son to a local coal mine elevator and the two descended 550 feet into the Earth. “Is this what you want?” his father asked the boy. “You want to work down here the rest of your life?”
These formative stories about Bear Bryant and Nick Saban are helpful in understanding what drove these two men to make the University of Alabama a super force in college football. As head coaches of the Crimson Tide, both coaches have won six national championships.
The question I wanted to understand in reading this book is how and why? What drove these men?
There are many reasons, but one of the most apparent is the extraordinary preparation that each put into coaching these teams.
Bryant would write down on three separate notebook pads a post-game speech to give to his team: one if they lost, one if they tied, and one if they won. Who does that?
Bryant didn’t believe in giving his players a whole lot of water during boiling hot summer practices, reasoning this would prepare them to be tougher in games.
In a similar obsessive way, Saban fanatically fills whiteboards with all the positions of the players he’s recruiting with the precise height, weight, and speed needed at each position. He gives each of his players seating charts for team meetings. Every minute of every practice and meeting is scheduled, detailed, and choreographed.
And every off-season he has his players fully engaged in “The Fourth Quarter Program,” which is designed to be so difficult that when the team takes the field in the Fall they’ll be stronger and in better shape their all their opponents.
The author writes: “The Fourth Quarter Program is the endless quest for perfection that sets Alabama apart from the others.”
Saban prepares and distributes an itinerary of detailed minute-by-minute scheduling of what the players are required to do each day during winter workouts.
“Those six weeks were pure hell,” a player said. “He just killed us. He wanted to see who could handle it mentally.”
This mindset is consistent with the words Saban spoke during his first press conference in 2007 as the coach of Alabama.
“Everybody should take the attitude that we’re working to be a champion, that we want to be a champion in everything we do. Every choice, every decision, everything that we do every day, we want to be a champion.”
In his first public remarks as coach, he sent this ambitious message. Ultra-focused, incredibly precise, and thorough beyond belief, Saban articulated a serious philosophy from the jump.
Likewise, Bear Bryant was also all about winning championships – and nothing else was worthwhile. Bill Oliver, who was a freshman in the Alabama program in 1958, said “the varsity players could hardly walk after practice. Coach Bryant and the staff worked the heck out of them. It took every bit of courage they had just to make out onto that field. Everyone absolutely dreaded practice.”
But they had to suffer through it – or else. If you wanted to play for the Bear, you either played with passion and intensity always – regardless of anything – or you wouldn’t be around for long.
This all-or-nothing, ruthless intensity crystallized in 2019 after Clemson whipped Alabama in the national title game. The next day Saban berated his coaches, blaming them and himself for not coaching the players well enough. After that meeting seven coaches were no longer on the staff; some voluntarily bolted while Saban fired others. This upheaval after the team went to the national championship game.
To Saban, they had failed.
A month later the coach introduced his seven new coaches at an Alabama public gathering and each coach spoke. The author describes the scene:
“As each coach spoke, Saban stood off to the side, checking his watch, fidgeting, looking like a man who had places to be, people to call, problems to solve.”
He then stepped on the stage.
“You have to have talent on your team. You got to have everybody giving great effort. But you also have to have everyone focused on the right stuff. If you start focusing on outcomes, you get very distracted…all these things keep you from preparing the way you need to prepare. Eventually, if you don’t pay attention to detail it will catch up to you. That’s the goal of our team.”
He then finished his remarks:
“If you came here to hear some kind of speech about how we’re happy how we ended the season, that ain’t happening. Not happening.”
Having finished reading this book, I’m left to wonder what it all means. You have two men wildly successful winning coaching college football, two of the best ever. They worked hard and had high goals and prepared well.
But was Bear happy? Well, the book notes the job stressed him out constantly. Late in his career, he had to take three sleeping pills every night to cope with the worrying. He admitted his regrets for not spending much time with his children while climbing the coaching ladder to personal glory.
Saban stays so busy, is so regimented, and so focused that he rarely has time for small talk or anything unrelated to football. Even after they win national championships, he compulsively starts worrying about the next season, preparing and recruiting endlessly.
Sure both men became rich and famous. But I get a bit of a queasy feeling thinking that they reached these heights by pressuring college-age young men to push their bodies and minds to the point of exhaustion, to work so hard and practice so much and become so disciplined and regimented in their daily lives – so each coach could stay in power and enrich themselves.
The players got to enjoy the championship glory also. But Bear and Saban are the towering figures we all remember. They got the bulk of the adulation and deification and money and power and mansion vacation homes and spiffy cars.
These two men are admirable for teaching young men to work hard because they benefit from this throughout their lives. But these two demi-gods of college football also mentally and physically tormented their players, in Bryant’s case encouraging violent play and bloody outcomes; in Saban’s case being ruthless and screaming at players to do what he wanted, in firing coaches that uprooted coach’s families and their children.
All of this they did to be champions.
But will that be enough to get them into Heaven? Bear had doubts about whether he had done enough good to earn a place in God’s Kingdom. My guess is Saban doesn’t think about the afterlife much because it’s not on his schedule. He’s too focused on signing the best players in America to join his team. Always recruiting. Always preparing. Pondering the afterlife is a distraction from his to-do list.
Is winning at virtually any cost really winning? Is winning football games more important than seeing your children grow up? Is always talking about football with your assistant coaches and never getting to know about their personal lives a good way to live? Is firing them right? Is this sort of behavior good enough to get you into Heaven?
Bear Bryant wasn’t sure. My guess is he spent some time in purgatory and, along with the rest of us, so will Saban.
But hey, Roll Tide.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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