The Very Heart Of Alabama

THERE'S nothing like August in Alabama. Everywhere I go--to Dreamland in Tuscaloosa, to the tri-oval in Talladega, to the golf course at Shoal Creek--there's the same soundtrack playing in the background: Football fans chattering about how this could be the year for the Crimson Tide.

It happens every summer in Alabama, the most pigskin-obsessed state in the union. In August strangers talk about how good the new quarterback is going to be, and old friends argue like sworn enemies over whether coach Mike Shula is a genius or should be fitted for a dunce cap. Forget broaching the subject of Taylor Hicks or Bo Bice at the watercooler. In August in Alabama, the discussion revolves around the Crimson Tide and the sweet promise of the approaching autumn.

Where does all this come from, this bottomless passion, this love affair between state and team? On a recent blue-sky summer afternoon, I tried to figure it out by making a pilgrimage to Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham to see the Bear. My tour guide was Birmingham resident Ben Davis, a 31-year-old friend of mine so fanatical about the Tide that a painting of coach Paul Bryant hangs on his living room wall.

At the gates of Elmwood, I ask an attendant where the final resting place of Bear Bryant is, and he points to a faraway hill. As we drive on, Ben says, " Coach Bryant meant so much to this entire state. Back in the '60s the national image of Alabama was Kennedy sending the troops into Tuscaloosa, and the water hoses and the dogs repelling people who were fighting segregation. But Bryant was a breath of fresh air. He gave Alabamians something to feel proud of during a very difficult time, and he's still the life force of the program."

TWENTY-THREE years ago, on a foggy January morning, eight Alabama football players walked slowly down Greensboro Avenue, carrying a casket made of Southern pine. Thousands of fans--many wearing plaid houndstooth hats--watched in silence as the players lifted the coffin up the steps of the First United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa.

Three days earlier Paul Bryant had died of a heart attack at the age of 69, just three hours after he'd visited with his successor at Alabama, Ray Perkins. As word traveled through Alabama that the Bear was gone, the state came to a virtual stop. Thousands of workers--white- and blue-collar alike--simply walked off their jobs. Churches filled. Governor George Wallace declared two days of official mourning, and the state flag at the Capitol in Montgomery was lowered to half-staff.

Inside First Methodist a Who's Who of college coaches lined the pews. Frank Broyles, Woody Hayes, Darrell Royal, Bud Wilkinson, Eddie Robinson, Charley Pell, Jackie Sherrill and Howard Schnellenberger all listened as the Reverend Joe Elmore quoted a few of the aphorisms Bryant drilled into his players. "That to be a man is a matter of character and class," Elmore told the crowd of 400. "That the Number 1 goal in life is to be a human being."

After the service the Bear's coffin was placed in a hearse, which led a cortege of more than 300 cars on a 60-mile journey to Birmingham and Elmwood Cemetery, where a crowd of 5,000 gathered. The eight players then carried the coffin, blanketed with crimson and white carnations, to the grave site. Before Bryant was lowered into the red clay, the mourners recited the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. The casket then went into the ground and, just like that, the Bear began living in memory.

BEN AND I follow a crimson line painted on the roadway that twists and turns and leads us toward block 30, which is where we've been told Bryant's grave is. Ben and I talk about the iconic image of Bryant--the Bear leaning against a goalpost in his houndstooth hat, watching his boys warm up in the autumn twilight before a big night game--and of all the Bear sightings in Alabama today. There's a Paul W. Bryant Museum, a Bryant academic center and a Paul W. Bryant High School. And of course there's Bryant-Denny Stadium, which sits on Bryant Drive.

"People in Alabama love Coach Bryant," former Tide coach Gene Stallings recently said. "They just tolerate all the rest of us."