1996

Paul "Bear” Bryant is a Mount Olympus figure in college football.

Keith Dunnavant's COACH is the definitive Bryant biography.

Dunnavant takes readers deep into Bryant's impoverished youth in rural Arkansas, when he was forever marked by hateful voices and once wrestled a bear to earn a precious dollar. The football scholarship he landed to the University of Alabama fundamentally altered his life.

On the sidelines, Bryant became a giant. For twenty-five years as the head coach at Alabama, and thirteen years before that at Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas A&M, Bryant pushed his players to excel with a combination of charisma and fear, winning 323 games and six national championships.

Bryant was so relentless in his pursuit of victory that two-thirds of his A&M team quit in 1954 at the infamous Junction pre-season camp. As a disciplinarian, he was such a stickler for rules that he suspended star Bama quarterback Joe Namath with two big games to play. And he was the gutsy leader who secretly switched to the wishbone offense in the summer of 1971, when many critics thought he was over the hill, ushering in one of the greatest decades in college history.

COACH shows how Bryant survived headline-grabbing controversies—including the SATURDAY EVENING POST allegation that he fixed an Alabama game against Georgia—and the vagaries of a changing social landscape to become college football's greatest coach and the foremost Southern icon of his time.

This is the epic story of a larger-than-life figure who overcame poverty and insecurity with intense desire and steely will, reflecting the transformational power of the American experience while emerging as a beacon of pride for Alabamians who felt defensive about their place in the world.