The One Historians Are Going to Remember (1970)
Pat Dye (1939-2020), Bear Bryant, Integration, and The Test of Leadership
Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.
I. Number 80
The legend goes like this: One day in 1969, a young assistant coach at the University of Alabama, Pat Dye, was watching film of a high-school quarterback from a town called Ozark. The head coach of the Crimson Tide, Paul “Bear” Bryant, wandered into the room, and Dye asked him what he thought.
“That quarterback looks alright,” Bryant said, according to the legend, “but I like that No. 80 catching all those passes.”
Number 80 was named Wilbur Jackson, and Wilbur Jackson was black, a wide receiver who had recently transferred out of a predominantly black high school in Ozark to the predominantly white Carroll High. In 1969, Alabama had yet to integrate its football team, for reasons that are both patently obvious and incredibly complex. But Bryant was interested in Wilbur Jackson, and so Pat Dye became interested, and he kept showing up at Carroll High and attempting to lure Wilbur Jackson to Tuscaloosa. Like most black athletes from Alabama, Jackson hadn’t even considered the possibility of playing for his state university; Dye admitted there was no way to know what might happen if Jackson did come to Alabama, but it felt to Jackson that the sheer force of Bryant’s personality might be enough to protect him.
By the time Jackson actually stepped onto a college football field in 1971 (he eventually converted to running back, while still wearing number 80), it felt almost anti-climactic. By then, the vast majority of SEC schools had already integrated their football teams; by then, Alabama had already integrated the campus as a whole and the basketball team; by then, even the state’s segregationist governor, George Wallace—who made his schoolhouse-door stand against integration at the University of Alabama in 1963—had begun to soften his racial stances in preparation for a Democratic presidential run in 1972. In the summer of 1969, the school’s Afro-American Student Association had sued the university for discrimination, upping the pressure on Bryant to recruit more black players; in the fall of 1970, Wilbur Jackson watched from the stands as a freshman—in an era when freshman were not yet allowed to play varsity football—as USC pounded Alabama behind running back Sam Cunningham and several other black players, in a game that would stand as the symbolic death knell for Alabama’s struggling all-white football program.
The legend goes that when Bryant went to shake hands with USC head coach John McKay, he essentially thanked McKay for kicking his team’s ass. The legend goes that Bryant had been trying for years to integrate his program, and had invited walk-ons to try out as early as 1967, but had been stymied by the racial politics of Alabama, and by the long shadow of Wallace’s virulent racism. But the truth, it would seem, may not be quite as romantic as the struggle. As one person told Bryant’s biographer, Allen Barra, “Bryant was a racial moderate who understood the politics of his state and insisted on a go-slow incremental approach to integrating his football team.”
Bear Bryant became head coach at Alabama in 1958. In 1959, he took his team to the Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia to face an integrated Penn State team, despite dissent by segregationists within the state of Alabama. And yet it took him the entire length of the 1960s and beyond to finally suit up a black player in a varsity football game. Bryant’s impact as a football coach and a public figure was undeniably towering; but there are so many myths about this era of Alabama football that its almost impossible to know what’s true and what isn’t. And fifty years later, as America once again wrestles with itself, it remains difficult to know how to fully reconcile Bear Bryant’s pragmatism with his overarching legend.
II. “Something Was Wrong With This Picture”
On Monday, as dozens of college football coaches issued statements of solidarity and racial reconciliation of varying quality in the wake of the death of George Floyd, Pat Dye—who had contracted COVID-19 while battling other health issues—passed away the age of 80. After working under Bryant, Dye led a revival at Auburn in the 1980s in the wake of Bryant’s retirement and death. He is best known as the guy who coached Bo Jackson, the guy who so often played for a tie that he earned the nickname “Tie Dye,” and yet another SEC coach who resigned from his job amid a late 1980s recruiting scandal. (Years ago, while working on a book that was partially about Bo Jackson, I interviewed Dye on his farm in Alabama. I remember he was generous with his time, and his dogs were very enthusiastic.)
Dye told one reporter that after his recruitment of Wilbur Jackson, several fans swore to him they’d never come to another game. “I told them, ‘That’s your choice,’” Dye said, and in that way, he became an indelible part of Alabama’s football history. But amid a period of unrest that hearkens back to the chaos of the late 1960s, it is worth wondering whether that Wilbur Jackson moment could have arrived sooner, and how it might have altered history if it did. And to make that case, I refer you to perhaps the greatest journalist and non-fiction author of the civil-rights generation, David Halberstam, who wrote this in 2002:
In Alabama, lest we forget, those were the George Corley Wallace years -- his mantra was segregation yesterday, segregation today, segregation forever. And the Bear was coaching at the University of Alabama in those years. More, he was an icon in the state at the time. And he was a formidable football coach and football coaches are supposed to judge players on talent and character, and not on anything else, not on any exterior prejudices. And he was a smart enough man to know that all kinds of great football players from Alabama, some of whom just happened to be black and were not able to play for him because of the prevailing prejudice, in many cases young men who were on their way to the pros, and he knew as well that he had the law of the nation on his side now if he wanted to play them, and that only local prejudice kept him from recruiting them, and most important of all, he was the one man in all of Alabama who could go ahead and recruit them, and stand up to George Wallace, and bring the culture along with him.
And for 13 years, when he could have made a great difference, he did very little and did not really dissent from the biases of the region. Yes, he let 'Bama play an integrated Penn State team in the Liberty Bowl in 1959. But that was good for him and his players and changed very little. In truth, he denied native sons of Alabama, great players, players better than he was when he was their age, their rightful place on the state university team. It did not take a genius at that time to know something was wrong with this picture, and to know that his failure to stand apart from the worst of the region's culture diminished him as a man on something profoundly important.
We know that he knew better, that he knew that what he was going along with was wrong, and that in the end he was placing a severe ceiling on the quality of his teams, which soon would not be able to compete with the best teams in the nation…the Bear was very late to the dance, especially because people are always talking about football coaches as leaders. In this case, he did not lead very well. We know that he was a divided man on this, and we know that he was slow, much too slow to act, and so here we have a real test of a man in conflict with himself, and of the complexity that takes us inside even the honored and most successful of men. This is subject matter for a very good movie. If I'm grading Bear Bryant -- and remember, I was working in the South during some of those terrible painful years -- I grade him out with a C+ on this one. At best a B-.
And it's the one test that really matters, the one historians are going to remember.
That is a hell of a condemnation of Bryant’s racial equivocation (and one that a number of experts would take issue with). But I suppose this the kind of thing a lot of us are attempting to understand more fully as we watch American cities catch fire, and as we endeavor to understand the anger fueling the protests over George Floyd’s death, and as those of us were born of privilege attempt to come to terms with the ramifications of that privilege.
I’ve long viewed politics as an exercise in pragmatism; I’ve subscribed to Martin Luther King’s quote about the long arc of the moral universe that seemed to guide the politics of the Obama Administration, for better or for worse. And I understand that, as Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde wrote of Clemson coach Dabo Swinney’s toothless statement about race and religion on Monday, you can only expect so much from a college football coach—even one as powerful as Dabo Swinney, or Bear Bryant before him. But perhaps Halberstam’s words are a warning to this generation of leaders, both within and outside of sports, as they face the inevitable choices that await them in this charged political era: Maybe, at a moment like this, pragmatism is no longer good enough.
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