
          The Bear. A film from Embassy Pictures,
1984. Larry G. Spangler, producer; Richard Sarafian, director; written
by Michael Kane; starring Gary Busey as Coach Paul "Bear"
Bryant.
          Reviewed by Gorn, Elliott J.Elliott J. Gorn
          Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 20, 22-23
          
          I first moved to Tuscaloosa, carpetbag in hand, in 1981. I was
enough of a football fan to know that the University of Alabama
produced consistently strong teams and that Paul "Bear" Bryant was one
of the most successful coaches in the country. Still, I was
unprepared.
          Football at Alabama is unlike any other sports phenomenon I have
experienced. Lee Ballinger, a steel worker from Ohio and author of a
fascinating book on contemporary sports, In Your Face,
visited Alabama in the fall of 1982. He concluded that Ohioans love
their OSU Buckeyes, but that he had never seen anything like the
Crimson Tide mania.
          Earlier this year, I brought a friend to the Penn State game, which
Alabama won six to zero. My friend is from Connecticut, has been to
Yankee Stadium when New_York clinched American League pennants, but he
claims that the noise level in Bryant-Denny Stadium that day surpassed
anything in his recollection. When Alabama scored, he had to restrain
himself from leaping from his seat, throwing up his arms and shouting
"Orgasm!"
          So it was as seeker of enlightenment that I put down my two dollars
for a Saturday matinee screening of Larry Spangler's film, The
Bear. Unfortunately, I remain unenlightened.
          The Bear is not a singularly bad film, but it's not
a good one either. Gary Busey portrays Bryant with tolerable
believability; the filming is competent though certainly not
distinguished; the writing is a bit flat but I've seen worse. All of
the facts are there. The film opens with Bryant's record setting win
number 315, cuts to Fordyce, Arkansas where strapping young Paul
fights a bear at a local carnival, moves to his student football days
in Tuscaloosa, his courting of Mary Harmon, and his succession of
coaching jobs at Kentucky, Texas A and M, and Alabama, and ends with
his final game at the 1982 Liberty Bowl in Memphis. In documentary
fashion we go from locker-room to locker-room, half-time speech to
half-time speech, victory to victory. Along the way we are treated to
one close up after another of Bryant/Busey's face: Great man shows
grit, determination, courage, anger, compassion, etc.
          It is all too prosaic and predictable. I half-expected before
seeing the film that it would dwell heavily on conventional
pieties--Saint Paul, the devoted father and husband, telling the boys
to write their mamas, say their prayers and make their daddy's
proud. The film does emphasize this side of Bryant, sometimes
excessively. But producer Spangler's coach also smokes, swears
occasionally, and kicks a few 

deserving players. The
Bear's makers insisted on these elements of "authenticity" and
for their pains were prevented from filming on the University of
Alabama campus; Bryant's heirs pressured the Wallace administration
into keeping the film crews out-of-state. But even with the touches of
the "real man" beneath the legend, the film remains
hagiography. Toward the end, Bryant confesses to his black chauffeur
that he feels guilty for ignoring his obligations toward the Almighty,
but the coach is reassured (and we are reassured) that by helping the
boys become good men, he was doing God's work all along.
          I do not mean to be cynical. Bryant was a remarkable man, and he
deserves better than the cheap commercial hype, passing for devotion,
which he has received. Perhaps the Coach is not an appropriate subject
for a fine film, or good literature, or even first-rate journalism. No
doubt many viewers are satisfied with an unartful invocation of
Bryant's achievements. A Tuscaloosa family sat behind me as I watched
the film, and it was obvious that they enjoyed it. During the showing,
I heard the father patiently explain to his wife and young children
the precise dates of Bryant's accomplishments, who played on which
teams, and other details of the living past. I suspect that for this
man, a truly fine film was not necessary. Merely recounting legendary
events evoked layers of meaning, and his own vivid memories filled in
what the movie missed. For such individuals, the film has a talismanic
quality. Like a cross, or like Bryant's houndstooth hat, the movie
itself becomes a transcendent symbol of events whose significance are
so implicitly understood that no explanation is needed.
          Of course, an explanation is needed, maybe not for the converted,
but certainly for the rest of us sinners who listened in slack-jawed
silence as dewey-eyed fans assured us on the day of Bryant's funeral
that he was one of the greatest men who ever lived. Maybe, as my
students tell me, Paul Bryant was a great man because he was a
winner. But the story must be more complex.
          The Coach's personal history was well known, and it paralleled the
region's. Like so many of his contemporaries, Bryan t grew up a poor
farm boy, the tenth of eleven children in an Arkansas family. But as a
football coach, Bryant became intimately associated with that hallmark
of corporate life, that seedbed of the bureaucratic and technological
forces which transformed the South after World_War_II, the modern
state University. Bryant, as the film indicates, was recruited to give
the University of Alabama national visibility. Yet even as he
succeeded, he remembered his roots, spoke the people's language,
mingled among average Alabamians, asked how they and their kin were
doing. By maintaining this family feeling, Bryant allowed his fans to
have their cake and eat their cornbread too. Alabama competed
nationally, but did so with their own good ole boy at the
helm. Moreover, the aura of the hometowner making it in the Big Game
rubbed off on his teams. Bryant was a great motivator who got the most
out of his players, the majority of whom were local boys, recruited
out of small Alabama towns, the heroes of hundreds of communities who
beat up on bigger, better fed opponents.
          Despite the attempts to deify him, my impression has always been
that Bryant's flaws, in combination with his strengths, made him
appealing. Everyone in Alabama knew that he muttered unintelligibly
during his Sunday morning post-game television show because, like many
of his fans, he toasted victory too frequently or drowned defeat too
deeply the night before. Everyone knew about the revels of all-night
poker games at the Stafford Inn in Tuscaloosa for influential alumni
and Tide supporters. But again, these were the flaws which kept Bryant
in touch with his fans, allowed them to identify with his spectacular
success, because he too was human. The contradictions--Bryant's pious
devotion to mama, Mary Harmon and Southern womanhood, alongside his
revelling in rough male camaraderie--was a double standard his fans
understood.
          Moreover, Bryant's ascendancy came precisely when his region
suffered from a damaged national image and an internal crisis of
confidence. During the 1960s, when Northerners thought of Alabama,
they envisaged police dogs, Bull Connor's fire hoses, and bloodied
freedom riders. But Bryant offered pride, unity, and a sense of
accomplishment to the citizens of a state impoverished by a colonial
economy and torn by racial tensions. Never mind that until the end of
the decade his teams replicated the same pattern of institutional
racism which embarrassed so many individual Alabamians. The point is
that Bryant's boys not only won they did so with dignity. They were
truly proud representatives of a state still smarting from public
humiliation.
          The Bear fails to capture any of the context which
made Bryant's life meaningful, indeed, which makes all sports more
than just fun and games. C.L.R. James, the Marxist historian and
social critic, has written one of the finest works on sports I have
ever read. I know nothing about, cricket and understand the game
poorly. But by reading James' autobiographical musings on the sport, I
now have some grasp of the game's social importance. James describes
his own upbringing in Trinidad amidst accounts of fast bowlers, short
legs and off breaks:
          
            My father's father was an emigrant from one of the smaller
islands, and probably landed with nothing F5ut he made his way, and as
a mature man worked as a pan-boiler on a sugar estate, a responsible
job involving the critical transition of the boiling cane-juice from
liquid into sugar. It was a post in those days usually held by white
men. This meant that my grandfather had raised himself above the mass
of poverty, dirt, ignorance and vice which in those far-off days
surrounded the islands of black lower middle-class respectability like
a sea ever threatening to engulf them . . . My grandfather went to
church every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock wearing in the broiling
sun a frock-coat, striped trousers and top-hat, with his walking stick
in hand, surrounded by his family, the underwear of the women
crackling with starch. Respectability was not an ideal, it was an
armour. He fell greviously ill, the family fortunes declined and the
children grew up in unending struggle not to sink below the level of
the Sunday-morning top-hat and frock-coat.
          
          Not a word about cricket, yet suddenly we understand the appeal of
that restrained and genteel sport.*
          
            * C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary
(New_York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 17-18, originally London: Stanley Paul
and Co. 1963.
          
          It is this kind of description--placing cricket in the context of
race, class and colonialism, placing it against the backdrop of James'
own family history and the social conditions of the Carribbean--which
elevates his discussion 

of sport to art. Precisely this sort of
context is missing from The Bear. The American South is
no less complex nor less interesting than Trinidad. Bryant's
accomplishments, the tragedies of recent Southern history, and the
glories of Southern football all deserve their own C.L.R. James,
someone who can tell the story so others might understand.
          
            Elliott J. Gorn is assistant professor American Studies
at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He is completing study of
the early history of prize fighting in America, to be entitled
The Manly Art.
          
        
