Like every American who has followed football, Tom Berenger knew the name Bear Bryant, the man who made winners of teams at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M and Alabama. "But I'm not sure I knew exactly what I was getting into when I decided to do The Junction Boys, Berenger said. "It's like messing with someone's interpretation of God."
A God in progress would be a more accurate description of the Paul "Bear" Bryant played by Berenger in the ESPN film The Junction Boys, made from Jim Dent's 1999 book. This Bryant was not yet the national figure he would become at Alabama, where he won six national championships.
In 1954 he had just left the University of Kentucky, disgruntled after a power struggle with the legendary basketball coach Adolph Rupp. The head coaching job at Texas Agriculture and Military was not the most sought after in the country; as Dent wrote of the all-male, all-military institution, "It looked like a penitentiary, boasted the color scheme of a grocery bag and possessed all of the glamor of a stock show." Bryant, determined to make his mark, would show the military school what real discipline was.
Loading 111 players into two buses, he took the team to Junction, a small town half a day's ride from the campus, where A&M had an agricultural and engineering facility. (The film was shot in Australia, whose outback in the fall is a dead ringer for west Texas during the summer.) For 10 days, away from the prying eyes of press, alumni and parents, he put his players through a regimen that Jack Pardee, a future National Football League player and coach, called "hell, without the frills."
"We regularly worked out in 114 heat," said Pardee, an all-America linebacker at Texas A&M. "You'll hear people today say it was 120, but there is no need to exaggerate."
The players went through workouts for eight hours at a time with no water, and went without food for even longer stretches.
Cuts, bruised ribs and dislocated shoulders were all treated the same way -- with ice packs, when ice was available. One player nearly died of dehydration, and many more thought they would.
Up the junction
Two buses carried the players to the Junction; only one was needed to carry them back. Two-thirds of the team quit during those 10 days, most of them sneaking away in the night. The 35 who stayed endured even more misery during the 1954 season, winning just one game and losing nine, but they became the nucleus of a legendary 1956 team that went unbeaten and gained national recognition.
The team's eventual success on the field is far from the whole story, however. Bryant, the 11th of 12 children, had picked cotton as a boy to help feed his family and clawed his way through the Depression on a football scholarship at Alabama, where he was the "other end" on a team with Don Hutson, who would have a Hall of Fame career with the Green Bay Packers.
For Bryant, football was less a game than a means of survival. It took him years to understand that his methods for producing winning teams might have been unfair, even dangerous. In time, he came to repudiate his own tactics and not only forgave players who quit, but also sought their forgiveness.
To one player who had walked out on him at A&M, Bryant later wrote, "I was so glad to read about your successful and happy life there in California.
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