The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize - Softcover

Dunnavant, Keith

 
9780312374327: The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0312374321 ISBN 13: 9780312374327
Verlag: Griffin, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Keith Dunnavant's The Missing Ring is more than a football book. It is both a story of a changing era and of an extraordinary team on a championship quest.

Very few institutions in American sports can match the enduring excellence of the University of Alabama football program. Across a wide swath of the last century, the tradition-rich Crimson Tide has claimed twelve national championships, captured twenty-five conference titles, finished thirty-four times among the country's top ten, and played in fifty-three bowl games.

Especially dominant during the era of the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, the larger-than-life figure who towered over the landscape like no man before or since, Alabama entered the 1966 season with the chance to become the first college football team to win three consecutive national championships. Every aspect of Bryant's grueling system was geared around competing for the big prize each and every year, and in 1966 the idea of the threepeat tantalized the players, pushing them toward greatness. Driven by Bryant's enthusiasm, dedication, and perseverance, players were made to believe in their team and themselves. Led by the electrifying force of quarterback Kenny "Snake" Stabler and one of the most punishing defenses in the storied annals of the Southeastern Conference, the Crimson Tide cruised to a magical season, finishing as the nation's only undefeated, untied team. But something happened on the way to the history books.

The Missing Ring is the story of the one that got away, the one that haunts Alabama fans still, and native Alabamian Keith Dunnavant takes readers deep inside the Crimson Tide program during a more innocent time, before widespread telecasting, before scholarship limitations, before end-zone dances. Meticulously revealing the strategies, tactics, and personal dramas that bring the overachieving boys of 1966 to life, Dunnavant's insightful, anecdotally rich narrative shows how Bryant molded a diverse group of young men into a powerful force that overcame various obstacles to achieve perfection in an imperfect world.

Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the still-escalating Vietnam War, and a world and a sport teetering on the brink of change in a variety of ways, The Missing Ring tells an important story about the collision between football and culture. Ultimately, it is this clash that produces the Crimson Tide's most implacable foe, enabling the greatest injustice in college football history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KEITH DUNNAVANT is the author of critically acclaimed books including Coach, The Missing Ring, and America's Quarterback. He has been one of the leading college football writers, an award-winning magazine journalist and lives near Atlanta.

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The Missing Ring

How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive PrizeBy Keith Dunnavant

St. Martin's Griffin

Copyright © 2007 Keith Dunnavant
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312374327
The Missing Ring
1. BROKEN PLATES
The door flew open, and the room fell silent.
"Nobody had to tell us to shut up," recalled Louis Thompson, a Tennessee farmboy seated somewhere toward the back. "You just knew."
As Paul "Bear" Bryant walked to the front of the Foster Auditorium meeting room on the first day of September 1963, he looked out over the gathering without saying a word, carefully studying the faces of his fifty-one newest recruits to the University of Alabama football program. He glanced at the big clock on the wall, above the blackboard, and started winding his wristwatch. It was so quiet, even the guys in the back row could hear the metallic tumbling of the stem.
Seated in old wooden chair/desks--which some of the more robust specimens found confining to the point of discomfort--the players looked up at their new coach, who loomed over them like a giant. With his chiseled face and towering frame, the charismatic Bryant, just eleven days shy of his fiftieth birthday, exuded an unmistakable toughness, even to a bunch of eighteen-year-old tough guys. Tough, after all, was a language they all understood. His steely eyes said, "Don't mess with me. I may be getting older, but I can still whip your scrawny little ass."
"Well, we're a little bit early, but we'll get started anyway," he finally said in a gravelly voice deepened by too many unfiltered Chesterfield cigarettes, a voice dripping with the sound of whiskey-drenched nights, a voice reverberating with tons of ambition and precious little regret.
After welcoming the newest members of the Crimson Tide and telling them to go back to their dorm rooms that afternoon and write a letter home, Bryant started talking about the importance of working hard, getting an education, and setting high goals.
"Look at the men on either side of you," he said, and heads immediately turned back and forth. He told the players that many of them would not survive the grueling days to come--that many would not be willing to pay the price.
At this suggestion, the very same thought shot through the mind of every one of those cocky young athletes: Not me! He's not talking about me!
"But," Bryant continued, his piercing eyes moving around the room, "if you're willing to pay the price and do the things I ask of you ..."
Then he challenged them to win the national championship, placing the ultimate achievement in college football within their reach but beyond their grasp.
Toward the middle of his little speech, Bryant noticed a player in the second row not looking him directly in the eyes. The coach walked up to the young man and slammed his large right hand on the player's desk with a loud crash.
"Boy, you look at me when I'm talking!" Bryant said.
"That was a message none of us would ever forget," recalled Decatur recruit Byrd Williams, seated nearby.
In the moments before Bryant walked through the door, the players had noticed that the old wooden desks creaked with the slightest fidget, so as they sat rapt, their eyes focused on him like lasers, the young men struggled against their own bodies to remain perfectly still. No one wanted to make a sound, even if it meant freezing in an uncomfortable position, even if it meant defying the laws of physics.
"I was scared to death I was going to move without thinking and that old desk would creak," Louis Thompson said. "I already had so much respect for Coach Bryant that I didn't want to do anything to displease him, so I sat there practically paralyzed, trying not to move a muscle."
Enormous power surged through all that motivated silence. All Bryant had to do was flip the right switch.
 
The obsession of an entire state began with one man and one football.
In the fall of 1892, after graduating from Phillips-Exeter Academy, the prestigious Massachusetts prep school, William G. Little returned to his home state and enrolled at the University of Alabama, then a sleepy military college. Twenty-three years after Rutgers defeated Princeton, 6-4, in the first intercollegiate football game on American soil, the sport was all the rage in the Northeast and Midwest, but it remained little more than a rumor in the Deep South. The athletic Little returned to the Heart of Dixie all fired up about the game, and, as far as anyone knows, the leather football he brought back from Massachusetts was the first ever possessed on the Alabama campus.
Soon after his arrival in Tuscaloosa, Little convinced a small group of students to form the University of Alabama's first football team. Naturally, he was elected captain, and a local man named Eugene Beaumont, who had learned about the game during his days at the University of Pennsylvania, was selectedas coach. On November 11, 1892, the Alabama contingent crushed a unit consisting of Birmingham area high school students, 56-0.
Over the next three decades, the Alabama football program slowly grew in scope and accomplishment, consistently producing winning teams and becoming a source of pride for the student body. In the early years, the team was often known as the "Thin Red Line," a moniker most historians believe was borrowed from a Rudyard Kipling poem of the day. In 1907, after watching Alabama battle cross-state rival Auburn University to a 6-6 tie on an extremely muddy field, Birmingham Age-Herald sportswriter Hugh Roberts referred to the boys from Tuscaloosa as the "Crimson Tide," and the label stuck. In 1915, when most players chose not to wear headgear, flimsy as it was, a fearsome lineman /fullback named W. T. "Bully" VandeGraaff became Alabama's first All-American. According to news accounts at the time, VandeGraaff was so tough and so tenacious, he once tried to rip off his own badly mangled and bloodied ear so he could keep playing against Tennessee.
The first truly great moment in Alabama football history happened on November 4, 1922, when the unheralded Crimson Tide traveled to Philadelphia and stunned the powerful University of Pennsylvania Quakers, 9-7. Some giddy fan whitewashed the score on the brick exterior of a Tuscaloosa drugstore, a reminder that could still be read more than twenty years later.
Acclaimed novelist Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump, may have summed up the unlikely victory better than anyone else in 2000 when he wrote, "It was as remarkable to some as if today a team, from, say, Norway, came to Tuscaloosa and beat Alabama." Indeed, for in 1922, the South seemed like a foreign country to many in the North, who looked down on the poverty-stricken, largely agrarian, racially divided South as a bastion of inferiority in every human endeavor. In this context, beating Pennsylvania was more than a football victory; it was a triumph of the Southern spirit--proof that the South, that Alabama, could compete and win against the best of the North in football and perhaps other things, a provocative, radical thought at the time. The thousands of ecstatic fans who showed up at the Tuscaloosa train station to greet the returning warriors stood at the vanguard of a movement destined to sweep across the state. The Crimson Tide was no longer just a team. It was a symbol of pride, a symbol of hope, and in the years ahead, the...

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Verlag
Griffin
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312374321
ISBN 13 
9780312374327
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
354
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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9780312336837: The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant And the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0312336837 ISBN 13:  9780312336837
Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2006
Hardcover