Coach

...The old fox, however, managed to avoid serious punishment...

...In football, he explained, he knew where to go when he needed help...

...Hammer," writes Epstein, "had been preparing Occidental for detente for nearly a decade...

...This was the Bear whom Alabama football fans swore by, the supreme tactician with a plan for everything...

...Two doctors attached dozens of wires to him so that they could monitor his heart in the other room...

...Agnew, no mean scene-stealer himself, loved it...

...Not so, said true believers: If it had been Bear, he'd have won it in five days...

...It is his insatiable desire to be of help to others that makes Hammer come alive," opined Vice President George Bush...

...Here, obviously, was a man with a political future, a hardscrabble Arkansas farm boy who, grown rich and famous, still spoke the language of common folk...

...When Bryant concluded in the spring of 1971 that his new quarterback was a better runner than passer, he wasn't too proud to take lessons from a younger colleague, Texas coach Darrell Royal, on operating the triple-option offense...

...But who did he know-who could he trust-in the Byzantine world of politics...

...You'll have to excuse me if I seem a little nervous tonight," he rumbled...

...Export-Import Bank approved an unprecedented $180 million loan to the Soviet government...

...Schnellenberger's boy from the Hoosiers...

...A joke around Southern coffee-shops after 1967's SixDay War was that Moshe Dayan was actually Bear Bryant with an eye-patch...

...My own favorite Bear story, though it's not here among Dunnavant's vignettes, goes back to a fabled evening in the winter of 1971, when Bryant was on the dais with Vice President Spiro Agnew at a sports banquet in Birmingham, Alabama...

...Then: "Usually it's presidents...

...But it was his unique ability to cajole, persuade, even bully-whatever it took to get the job done-that gave Bryant a winning edge in the competitive world of bigtime college football...

...The next day he was back at his office at Occidental...

...In view of his "terminal" condition, the court mercifully sentenced the 78-yearold Hammer to one year's probation: On leaving the courtroom, Hammer had, as his lawyer delicately put it, "a miraculous recovery...

...No man ever so dominated the game that lives so close to the southern heart," writes Dunnavant...

...His life is a shining example of what resourcefulness, energy, intelligence, determination and sheer stamina can accomplish," raved Senator Edward Kennedy...

...I t was a self-awareness few men with large egos possess...

...There was a Gipp-like character in Bryant's career as well -Pat Trammell, the quarterback who led the Alabama team to a national championship in 1961, went on to become a doctor, then died of cancer at age z8...

...When the day for him to be sentenced finally came, writes Epstein, "Hammer arrived in federal court in a wheelchair...

...Half a century after Lenin had granted him an asbestos connection, Hammer had succeeded in opening a path to the world of American business...

...VICTOR GOLD is The American Spectator's national correspondent...

...Hammer quickly negotiated "a massive swap of U.S...

...Even then it wasn't Gipp's on-field exploits that gave the film what drama it had, but his death at an early age...

...A few minutes later, they strolled back into the living room Now, Howard," she announced, "the archbishop has convinced me that God will understand if you change your mind...

...A wildly misleading exercise in selfpromotion, it was praised by Hammer's friends in the most unqualified terms...

...By 1972, [he] had all his pieces in place...

...Did he think that his secret relationship with Moscow gave him a leg up on his competitors...

...Or was his pro-Sovietism a peculiar manifestation of filial piety-something Hammer felt he owed Papa Julius...

...Was he, perhaps, being blackmailed by the KGB...

...Grin and Bear It: He Made Alabama Win 85 The American Spectator . November 1996 He loved to walk out on the field, lean against the goalpost, and watch an opposing team whoop and holler before kickoff, because he knew his boys, who approached the game with a businesslike attitude, were going to knock them on their ass a few times and...

...Yet it would have been wholly out of character for Bryant to use a hokey story about Trammell's death to inspire his team...

...He was aced out of the 1989 Prize by the Dalai Lama...

...He considered football a metaphor for life, and southern fathers, who more often than not agreed, wanted their sons to grow up to become men of strength and honor like `Bear' Bryant...

...Coach is filled with such anecdotes, reminders thirteen years after Bryant's death of the special touch that set him apart from his peers...

...Despite his reputation as one ofAmerica's last authority figures, Bryant had a latent irreverence toward establishment customs that came through from time to time-especially after he'd had a few preprandial libations...

...He checked out of the hospital, discarding, like the props they were, his wheelchair, electrocardiograph, and emergency oxygen tent...

...To prevent them from interfering with his plans, Hammer became a major contributor to Nixon's campaign...

...It brought down the house...

...Trammell was Bear Bryant's kind of competitor, probably his favorite among all the players he coached in a career touching four decades...

...The coach looked around the large banquet hall, reached down to take a sip (of water), then began slowly...

...To finance the International Trade Center, the Bank lent the Soviet Union another $36 million...

...And several days later he showed up with the archbishop of the Louisville diocese of the Catholic Church, who took Howard's mother for a walk in the back yard...

...Pause, as members of the audience looked at each other, wondering...

...his body quivered...

...Attendants stood by with an oxygen tent and other emergency paraphernalia...

...Coach: The Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant Keith Dunnavant Simon & Schuster /367 pages / $24 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold...

...Called "the Great Rehabilitator" in those years, the young coach was beloved by alumni and weekend gamblers (his teams always beat the spread), if not by the players subject to his Nietzschean practice drills...

...Though master of his trade, he was never too old to learn or to adapt...

...He followed that deal up with a contract to build an International Trade Center in Moscow...

...Keith Dunnavant, though an Alabama alumnus, manages a fair degree of detachment in Coach...

...But, understand," Bryant continued, "I'm not used to eating dinner with vice presidents...

...Always the showman, Bryant was milking the moment...

...To finance the fertilizer deal, the U.S...

...The consensus might have stood, had Edward Jay Epstein not spent the last fifteen years or so tracking down the real Armand Hammer: A master manipulator who used money, art, fraud, and a seemingly endless series of lies (what Hammer called his "razzmatazz") to penetrate the American establishment, while simultaneously maintaining his allegiance to the Soviet establishment...

...The Bear nervous...

...In the end, though, writes Dunnavant, Bryant's own experience as a poor country boy enabled him to reach black players as readily as he reached the sons of Kentucky coal miners and Texas ranch hands...

...Gary Busey, an unlikely choice, played Bryant fairly well, even managing the coach's rumbling growl as he walked the sidelines...

...But when a citizens' delegation urged 44 It would have beenwholly out of characterfor Bryant to use ahokey story aboutTrammell's death toinspire his team...

...77 Bryant to run for governor, the coach turned them down...

...But the movie had only a short run because the lives of football coaches, for all the superficial "drama" of the game, simply don't play well on the screen...

...but even after unofficial canonization, Bryant prided himself on knowing both his possibilities and his limitations...

...all that extra juice would burn off...

...Bear thought "Win-one-for-the-Gipper" pep talks were so much blather-he used an earthier term-because they produced, writes Dunnavant, "only a momentary burst of adrenaline that soon evaporates...

...Did he retain, despite his wealth, his youthful commitment to socialism...

...True, there was Knute...

...So when he was asked, in 1972, to make an anonymous $54,000 donation in laundered hundred-dollar bills, Hammer was only too glad to oblige...

...If there was trouble with the kicking game, he could flip his Rolodex to find a kicking expert...

...The Capitalist Prince would live another fourteen years, working to the very end to preserve detente, rescue the Soviets from their Afghan quagmire -he offered to develop a major oil industry in Pakistan if its president, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, would stop supporting the Afghan rebels-and win the Nobel Peace Prize...

...Another pause, as the audience, thinking that was the punch-line, gave a little laugh...

...It was about the same time the Alabama coach, having integrated his ball club, sought the advice of Grambling's Eddie Robinson on the nuances of coaching young black athletes...

...But that night it was the Bear who stole the show, just as surely as he'd stolen Mrs...

...Rockne: All-American, but the real hero, as Ronald Reagan fans know, wasn't Rockne but George Gipp...

...Recruiting young Howard Schnellenberger during his coaching days at Kentucky, the Bear won over the player, but was stymied when Schnellen berger's mother said her boy, having given his word that he would play his football at Indiana, couldn't go back on it: So Bryant politely retreated...

...Precisely what kept Hammer loyal to the Soviets over so many years is a matter of conjecture...

...They made a movie of the late Paul "Bear" Bryant's life about a dozen years ago and it failed, one of the few projects associated with the man to suffer that fate...

...Malcolm Forbes, Linus Pauling, and Barbara Walters also weighed in...

...As described by former sportswriter Tom Stoddard in another recent book, Turnaround (Black Belt Press, $22) -the story of Bryant's first season-at Alabama-those sessions were brutal, bloody, and, by today's standards, probably illegal...

...Of course, not all of President Nixon's advisers looked kindly on Hammer's Soviet dealings...

...phosphate for Soviet ammonia, potash and urea...

...It was a reputation Bryant first earned by reviving football programs at Kentucky and Texas A&M, before returning to his alma mater in 1958...

...His face, usually tan, was ashen...

...As I recall, the Vice President made a pretty good speech...

...Whatever the answer, Dossier is a genuine tour de force, one of those rare books that helps explain how the world really works...

...He details not only Bryant's glory daysdeveloping players like Joe Namath, winning six national titles, breaking Amos Alonzo Stagg's record for college wins -but the off-the-field imbroglios that followed the Bear throughout his career...

...In 1987, he published his autobiography, Hammer...

...A hard drinker with a taste for the high-life in New York and Las Vegas, Bryant played as he coached: full-bore, nothing held back...

...This particular evening, by eyewitness count (mine), he put down no fewer than four double-bourbons before taking the podium to introduce Agnew...

...86 November r 9 9 6 . The American Spectator...

...He had no idea that the money was being used to pay for the Watergate cover-up, and when his illegal contribution was eventually exposed, Hammer at first denied everything, rendering him liable to a jail sentence for obstructing justice...