Leadership matters more than anything

As we start another college football season, lessons from the life of one of the sport’s all-time greatest leaders, Paul “Bear” Bryant, are perhaps worth highlighting

Where you start in life often explains where you finish. Paul Bryant (front, far left) started life in Moro Bottom, Arkansas. He didn’t want to go back.

Prologue

My first newspaper job, at age 23, was as the sports editor of my hometown newspaper. I’m also a life-long avid Alabama fan. Thirdly, I believe in writing about topics that interest me - topics I’ve researched and thought a great deal about. These reasons explain this column, which I publish as sports fans embark on another college football season.

I decided to write a college football piece that focuses on the importance of leadership - on how one person with exceptional personality traits could transform an entire football program and even affect how the population of an entire state (or nation) views itself.

In my opinion, the world needs more true leaders like Coach Bryant. The question of whether a coach - or any prominent person- can transform a state or organization like Coach Bryant did fascinates me.

Note: This column is informed (or biased) by the fact my late father played football for Coach Bryant from 1958 through 1961. This means I learned many “Coach Bryant stories” from an excellent source (my father). I also became close friends with several other people who were very close to Bryant and his family.

What explains Bryant’s greatness?

Just about every exceptional figure in human history has a back story that usually traces to his/her upbringing and childhood.

Like many American “success stories,” Bryant was raised in extreme poverty and definitely was not the product of a family from privileged or “elite”  backgrounds. 

Bryant was the last of nine children who grew up in the tiny rural hamlet of Moro Bottom, Arkansas in a share-cropper’s home with no indoor plumbing. His father suffered from a life-altering medical condition, which meant Bryant’s mother ultimately assumed the tasks of raising and providing for her children.

Bryant loved his family and his saintly, heroic mother, but he never wanted to go back to a place where he had to plow fields and drive a wagon into town with his mother to sell eggs. From reading his excellent autobiography Bear, it’s clear that he felt some people in the town looked down their noses at people like himself.

He wanted to escape this world and prove that he was someone special. Fear of returning to the life he experienced in childhood fueled Bryant’s entire life and career.

The fact he learned the value of extremely hard work and escaped humble origins benefitted him the rest of his life. Hard work and desire are usually the key characteristics of an exceptional life. Not insignificantly, Bryant could also easily relate to future players who came from similar circumstances.

While Bryant wouldn’t classify himself as an erudite scholar, he quickly perceived that excelling in one “silly sport” could propel him to a wonderful and significant life.

Like most excellent leaders, Paul Bryant was a genius at observing human nature and knew what buttons to push to make ordinary people achieve spectacular results.

But Bryant must have had an ego

I’m struck by two contrasts I’ve noted in other “great” people. Bryant came across as incredibly humble. He never seemed to place himself above others - as he never forgot his own humble origins.

However, at his core, he was also ultra-confident and must have thought he was special. He’s admitted that he was a ham and didn’t necessarily mind the fame that eventually surrounded him. 

This is probably why Bryant, as a 13-year-old, once volunteered to wrestle a bear at a Fordyce, Arkansas movie theater, an event that gave him his famous nickname.

In a section from his autobiography - supported by the accounts of long-time friends -  readers learn that the real motivation for Bryant volunteering to wrestle a bear was  two-fold: He wanted to impress a girl who was in attendance … and make some easy and needed money. This event, now part of national folklore, also showed Bryant wasn’t afraid of doing something everybody else was afraid to try.

As a student of Bryant’s life, I’ve taken note of the talks he gave to his players where he told them they were NOT like everyone else. According to Bryant, his players were special because they were willing to make sacrifices few others were willing to endure.

Bryant would constantly preach to his players: “You’re special. I know you are. You’ve got great Mammas and Papas. You’ve got class and I know you are going to show it.”

From my father’s stories and from studying Bryant, I know he was one of sport’s most-demanding taskmasters. He was this way because this was the “process” that had produced desirable results for him. But he also wanted his players to look at themselves as being special.

(He also genuinely believed that sports could teach invaluable life lessons. The one he harped on the most was that life was not always going to be easy and that you would have to pull some “gut checks” to get through challenging times.)

While his own personal toughness forms part of the Bryant legend, the coach went out of his way to provide first-class perks and experiences for his players. He wanted his players to dress well, behave in class and take their education seriously and have the best things possible. He didn’t want the students who came from more affluent backgrounds to be perceived as better than his players.

For example, my Dad lived in the only air-conditioned dorm on campus and ate the best foods (steaks galore) because he was a member of the football team. When the team travelled to an away game or a Bowl game, the players always stayed in the nicest hotels in town.

Coach Bryant provide these amenities because he wanted to cultivate the attitude that his players were indeed special. Players who genuinely believe they are different are more likely to exert the effort and display the discipline to win the all-important fourth quarter.

Coach Bryant’s self-confidence (and ego) were also revealed in his willingness to “stir things up” to achieve special results.

A real-world John Wayne …

In Alabama (and the entire South for that matter), Bryant is still revered and is often compared to the fictional characters portrayed by legendary actor John Wayne.

Wayne usually portrayed extremely tough characters who weren’t afraid to take on the movie’s villains; characters portrayed by Wayne didn’t really care what others thought of him. 

In movies and in the real world, people pick up on this rare quality and actually grow to respect (and depend) on such figures. Such people become real “leaders.”

After he’d been hired as Texas A&M’s coach in 1954, a young reporter interviewed Bryant. The reporter told Bryant his editor sent him to the pre-season training camp because he’d heard Bryant was “stirring things up.”

Bryant (paraphrasing) told the reporter, “If I ain’t stirring things up now, just wait.”

In my opinion, the world needs more real leaders who aren’t afraid of creating a buzz and changing the way things had previously been done. 

If you think the culture of an organization needs dramatic changes to produce superior results, work your program. Perhaps one key to producing positive change is a confident leader who is willing to “stir things up.”

Several would-be scandals  illustrate a quality about Bryant that I still admire today.

In the early 1960s, Bryant was accused of teaching - and prospering from - violent coaching techniques. He and former Georgia Coach Wally Butts were also accused of conspiring to fix a college football game.

Bryant didn’t meekly accept these charges; he fought back - just like he fought that bear. He sued The Saturday Evening Post (and ultimately received a huge settlement), and he used his own allies in the press - plus testimonials from his own players -to debunk the charge that he taught violent football techniques - an allegation that insulted Bryant as it implied his teams’ successes came from nefarious or non-honorable tactics.

The applicable life lesson here is that a real principled leader isn’t going to stand around meekly and let others slander or libel him. A real leader, falsely accused, hits back harder than he’s hit.

Comparisons to Nick Saban …

In a future sports column, I plan to compare and contrast Nick Saban and Coach Bryant.

While Coach Bryant is one of my heroes, I can make a strong case that Saban is college football’s “GOAT.” However, I can make a contrarian argument this person might still be Bryant.

Saban’s remarkable success is largely attributed to the fact that Saban figured out the “Most Important Thing” in college football - e.g. recruit the very best players in the country.

Bryant’s similar success is not explained by the fact he brought in the best high school players from around the country.

When Bryant coached, schools didn’t have unlimited recruiting budgets and the Internet didn’t identify all the five and four-star prospects from all 50 states.

At Alabama - where Bryant won six national championships and could have won several others - the vast majority of his roster was made up of home-grown players from the state of Alabama.

(When my Dad was a senior on Bryant’s first national championship team in 1961, only one starter and regular player was from outside the state of Alabama. The rest of the 35 or so key players were from the state of Alabama.)

Most of these players were from small Alabama towns and most grew up in poor backgrounds (although not as poor as Bryant).

Many Bryant observers have noted that Bryant could take a player of average talent and make him above average or even great.

Probably the best assessment of Bryant’s coaching genius was provided by “Bum” Phillips, who later became an NFL head coach but learned football from Bryant as one of his assistants at Texas A&M.

Said Phillips (again paraphrasing): “Coach Bryant could take his’n and beat your’n. (But he could also) take your’n and beat his’n.”

Coach Phillips’ astute point was that it wasn’t the athletic ability of Bryant’s players that explained his remarkable winning record over four decades (at four schools), it was … the coach.

Somehow, after being around Bryant every day for years, his players came to believe they were better than the other team’s players - so they played with greater confidence and expected to win those games.

That and they were probably terrified of letting their coach down.

For whatever reason, Bryant’s players came to believe they were indeed special. Eventually, they emulated the key qualities of the leader they might have feared, but definitely respected. 

Alabama will win in the future because

Bryant won in the past 

Nick Saban came to Alabama at a time when most pundits said Alabama football had become a dysfunctional mess. Believe it or not, many people said you couldn’t win big at Alabama like Bryant had.

Saban knew this popular view was false and, not lacking self confidence himself, wasn’t afraid to follow in Paul Bryant’s formidable shadow. To Saban, the tradition and legacy of winning Bryant had restored at Alabama actually made his job much easier.

As Saban has said many times, the tradition established by Bryant helped make possible a modern-day football dynasty (of 16 years) that actually eclipsed the one Bryant had achieved over 25 years.

That is, history and tradition established in prior decades still matter today. 

My take-away is that just one leader - a person who is driven to excel, who has “the right stuff” and doesn’t mind doing things his own way - someone not afraid of stirring things up - can produce special results.

The right leader(s) could change the course of America as well. It’s the genuine leaders who matter the most. 

***

ADDENDUM: It's hard to explain the impact Bryant had on the people of the state of Alabama, but a few pictures might. Bryant's funeral was in Tuscaloosa, but he was buried 50 miles away in Birmingham. An estimated 400,000 Alabamians viewed this 50-mile funeral procession. My father, as a former player, attended the funeral and was in one of several chartered busses of former Bryant players. He confirms that EVERY over-pass on Hwy 59 between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham was over-flowing with people showing their respects to Bryant. The only funeral I can compare this to might be Elvis's or maybe President Kennedy and Roosevelt.

Note the 17th photo - which shows people on one of the highway over-passes.

https://www.al.com/galleries/OKGEBFG2IZE6TOFKCWIUH2XSPA/

I hope readers don’t mind an occasional sports column. I’m actually surprised that Substack doesn’t have more popular sports-themed newsletters as the mainstream sports coverage and commentary are as bad as the mainstream news coverage. Good luck to your favorite team, this fall!

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