BIOGRAPHY:
*He held the record for the most wins of any college football team until 1985.
*Bear Bryant is credited with helping to stimulate the intergration of southern college football, by recruiting Alabama's first black player.
*While Bryant was coach, USC became the first fully integrated team to play in the state of Alabama.
*Earned his nickname, "Bear", when he agreed to wrestle a captive bear.
Died Jan. 26, 1983, Tuscaloosa, Ala (aged 69)
Born Paul William Bryant, at age thirteen, Paul earned his nickname, "Bear", when he agreed to wrestle a captive bear. 1971 was a turning point for Alabama and Bear Bryant in more ways than one. For the first time, the USC football team fully integrated. Bryant also engineered an offensive change from the pro-attack to the wishbone, thus setting in place a dominance of the 70's. While the University of Alabama and other southern schools had an intergrated student body for years, no SEC school had a black athlete on their football team. Bryant was credited with helping to stimulate the intergration of southern college football. Within a year, all other SEC schools had black athletes on their roster. On December 29, 1982, an era ended with Bryant's final game, the Liberty Bowl. It was the same bowl he had taken the Tide to in his first year as head coach. In a last rally of respect for the man who had brought the Tide from mediocre to mighty, the boys defeated Illinois twenty-one to fifteen. He began his career as a head coach in 1945 at the University of Maryland, College Park. Bryant resigned after the president reinstated an athlete Bryant had dismissed for breaking training rules. At the University of Kentucky, Lexington (1946–53), his team won the school's first Southeastern Conference championship; and won three of four bowl games. However, Bryant left Kentucky after losing a battle of wills with Adolph Rupp as to whether basketball or football should be the dominant sport. In 1954, Bryant took the head coaching position at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University, College Station, the team lost 9 of 10 games. In the next three seasons, however, they lost only four games and won one Southwest Conference championship. By 1958, Bryant returned to Alabama, where he spent the rest of his coaching career. In 1971 he recruited the first black player on the Alabama team, and he was credited with helping to stimulate the integration of college football at mostly white Southern universities. Alabama won six national championships (1961, 1964–65, 1973, 1978–79), and Bryant took Alabama to 28 bowl games. Bryant's teams at Alabama averaged 9.28 victories a year, an average unequalled by any other college coach. Bryant's career coaching record of 323 wins stood until it was broken by Eddie Robinson in 1985. Notable among Bryant's players were the future professional quarterbacks George Blanda, Joe Namath, and Ken Stabler. Bryant was a ten-time SEC Coach of the year and a four-time National Coach of the Year. The Football Coach of the Year Award was renamed in his honor, and today is called the Paul “Bear” Bryant Award. He was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, and memorialized on a postage stamp in 1996, thirteen years after his death.