"I've made a lot of mistakes in my life with the young men I have coached. But the greatest mistake I ever made was with you."
Unfortunately, the success of Bryant's training regimen came to be much better known in football than his own later condemnation of it. Fifteen years after Texas A&M'S championship team, the Virginia high school coach Herman Boone, subject of the film Remember the Titans and a Bryant admirer, was busing his team to a remote training camp and depriving his players of water during workouts.
Many attribute the death last season of the Minnesota Vikings star Korey Stringer to the same kind of practice routines that coaches like Bryant had long ago denounced.
Orley Adelson, the executive producer of the film, said she had only a vague idea of who Bear Bryant was before she was handed a copy of Dent's book. On reading it, she said, she immediately saw that "this was much more than a story of athletes achieving their own potential because of a great disciplinarian."
"It is also about a man of action who comes to question the very methods which brought him success," she continued. "It's about a man who comes to find his own limits."
In fact, the film, which was written and directed by the television veteran Mike Robe (Return to Lonesome Dove), begins with Bryant in a moment of severe self-doubt immediately after his greatest triumph, a 1979 New Year's Day victory over Joe Paterno's Penn State team that gave Bryant his fifth national championship. He is traveling to the 25th anniversary reunion of the so-called "Junction Boys," not knowing how the players he drove so relentlessly will receive him.
Evolution
"What's truly great about this script is that you can see Coach Bryant change and evolve," said Berenger. "I don't really believe he was a great coach at the time of the Junction. I believe he became a great coach because of what he went through there. He changed as much as the boys he coached."
Perhaps because he has become such a dominant figure in college football, Bryant has, up to now, eluded filmmakers.
`The bear'
A truly awful 1984 biopic, The Bear, starring a miscast Gary Busey, quickly slipped into oblivion. The coach's only other screen appearance was a brief comic walk-on in Forrest Gump, in which he was unnamed, except in the credits [he was played by the character actor Sonny Shroyer], and identified only by his traditional houndstooth checked hat.
George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN, said he hoped that The Junction Boys would be an exception -- the latest one -- to the Hollywood adage that "sports movies don't sell."
"They must sell to someone," Bodenheimer said, "because they've been making them as long as they've been making movies. In fact, Americans have always loved good movies with sports themes. It's just that most movie studios don't know how to reach that audience today."
Bodenheimer said that ESPN's production of sports-related films like The Junction Boys and the recent A Season on the Brink, about the former Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight, was "a natural growth" for the sports cable channel.
"Who was it that said, `Sports are merely unscripted drama'?" Bodenheimer asked. "All we're trying to do now is find the best stories and put a script to them."
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