My Dinner with The Bear
GRAPHIC: Alabama coach Bear Bryant sat by silently while other schools’ coaches with less job security than him stuck out their necks on the social issue of their time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., citing bombings of Black churches and homes condemned, “the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time.” Bear Bryant was silent waiting on 1970.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: When I submitted this as a New York Times Op-Ed Guest Essay, I cautioned the Op-Ed editors their paper’s sports editors (who form the staff of The Athletic), carelessly believe the Bear Bryant myths. The folklore surrounding the 1970 USC-Alabama game was crafted and spread two decades after the game was played to both obfuscate Bryant’s foot dragging on integration and aggrandize USC’s role leading from behind. The popular misconception worked its way into the national folklore with the aid of poorly researched sports writing. The myth’s success has been at the expense of the true pioneers of college football integration in the 1960s.
For my website, this is an expanded version without concern for length limitations placed on the submitted essay. I will debate anybody, anytime, anyplace on the Bryant/1970 USC-Alabama myths.
With apologies to Larry David for borrowing from his New York Times column, “My Dinner with Adolf.” His send-up mocking Bill Maher for his dinner with Donald Trump inspired me to pillory Bear Bryant revisionist history. The story reminded me of a conversation with the late Hall-of-Fame sportswriter John Feinstein. He told me he once asked the great Jack Nicklaus why he endorsed Trump. Feinstein said Nicklaus told him Trump was nice to him. Feinstein added he exclaimed, “That’s because you’re Jack Nicklaus!” Trump is a modern-day Bear Bryant — able to charm guests who should know better.
By TOM SHANAHAN
Imagine my surprise when a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Bear Bryant Hilton with college football’s most celebrated segregationist coach.
The Bryant Hilton was the exclusive dorm the Alabama coach opened in 1963 for football players. The price tag was $1 million – equal to $10.4 million in 2025. At the time, Sports Illustrated compared it to the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami.
College athletes are supposed to be a part of their school — not apart from it. The student-athlete ideology of the era prompted the NCAA to quash athlete dorms. But now it’s long gone with NIL and the transfer portal transforming college sports. Recruits buy houses.
Another Bryant excess was fielding 140-player rosters – recruiting athletes just so they wouldn’t compete for Tennessee, Auburn or Mississippi. Don’t believe the grandfatherly image of Bryant wanting what’s best for his stable. Alabama exploited the unlimited numbers to share national titles in 1961, 1964 and 1965 without traveling above the Mason-Dixon Line. The NCAA eventually passed another “Bryant rule” to limit rosters.
During segregation, Bryant didn’t need to worry about stashing Black players. Jim Crow did that for him. The image of Bryant as a crusader is as fictional as Atticus Finch.
We’re living in a time when the federal government’s present administration whitewashes our proud progress in the post-World War II era through diversity, equity and inclusion. Rewriting history to whitewash Bryant’s segregationist days fits nicely with the anti-DEI climate.
For that reason, friends told me not to go the dinner. They cautioned the Ol’ Bear will charm me into believing Bryant favored integration just as he has managed to fool the national media.
I’ve been debunking Bear Bryant myths and the 1970 USC-Alabama game fairytale on my website, TomShanahan.Report, with articles and podcasts. My two books, “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans” and “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s,” also expose the myths.
GAME CHANGERS OF THE CENTURY is a documentary in development based on my second book, “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.”
Click here for a Sizzle reel teaser and here for the Investment Deck.
Why don’t you know these stories? The answer is sports journalism negligence. The sports media of the 1950s and 1960s avoided race and many milestones were lost to history.
Purchase THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s
Kentucky in 1966 and Tennessee in 1967 were the first Southeastern Conference schools to recruit Black football players. Auburn, Mississippi State, Florida and Vanderbilt followed in 1969. By 1970, Alabama and Bryant were playing catchup as the seventh of 10 Southeastern Conference football programs to recruit a Black player. The 1970s season also opened with 33 of 37 major southern programs were integrated.
As David Halberstam wrote in ESPN in 2002, Bryant wasn’t a leader on the social issue of his time. Jim Murray wrote similarly in the Los Angeles Times. Both writers were Pulitzer Prize winners.
The media accepts the excuse Bryant — who didn’t have a boss — was somehow handcuffed by racist Alabama Gov. George Wallace and a bigoted fanbase
Never mind that Wallace wasn’t in office from 1967 to 1971. Never mind nobody fired Auburn coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan when Alabama’s in-state and SEC rival signed the Tigers’ first Black player, James Owens, in 1969. Never mind Alabama basketball coach C.M. Newton signed a Black player, Wendell Hudson, in 1969, a year earlier than Bryant signed his first Black player. And a year before that, in 1968, Auburn signed its first Black basketball player, Henry Harris, in 1968.
The entire 1970 USC-Alabama myth premise is Bryant scheduled the Trojans as a game to lose. He wanted USC’s Sam Cunningham, a Black fullback, to run over his team to gain permission to recruit Black players. Never mind Bryant had already signed future NFL players Bo Matthews and Wilbur Jackson to SEC letters of intent on December 13, 1969 (however, only Jackson enrolled on campus in the fall as Bryant’s first Black player).
The denouement was Cunningham ran for 135 yards and two touchdowns to lead a 42-21 victory at Legion Field in Birmingham. The myth, when spread in the 1990s, was declared a singular moment.
Never mind on that same day Stanford’s all-minority backfield, led by African American fullback Hillary Shockley’s 149 total yards and three touchdowns, beat No. 4-ranked Arkansas at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock. Alabama had Birmingham and Bull Connor. Arkansas had Little Rock and racist Gov. Orval Faubus. In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to enforce integration at Central High.
Stanford-Arkansas was nationally televised by ABC-TV and covered by Sports Illustrated’s godfather of college football writing, Dan Jenkins. USC-Alabama was limited to local radio networks and newspapers.
And Stanford-Arkansas wasn’t alone as a moment. On the same day Georgia Tech’s Eddie McAshan, the Deep South’s first Black starting quarterback, led the Yellowjackets to a win over integrated South Carolina at Grant Field in Atlanta. McAshan was featured on the cover of Jet Magazine, October 22, 1970.
The writers, directors and producers the 2008 HBO documentary “Breaking the Huddle,” 2013 Showtime documentary “Against the Tide” and similar ESPN films slant their stories based merely on opinions USC assistant coaches and players who postulated Bryant acted deliberately to schedule USC to end segregation. Never mind they can’t cite facts or comments from Bryant. And never mind that Clem Gryzka, one of Bryant’s longest serving coaches, scoffed: “Coach Bryant never scheduled a game to lose it.”
PHOTO: In the 1966 Game of the Century against Michigan State, coach Duffy Daugherty lined up 20 Black players, 11 Black starters, two Black team captains, College Football Hall of Famers George Webster and Clinton Jones, and the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title, Jimmy Raye of segregated Fayetteville, N.C. Notre Dame lined up one Black player, Alan Page. The limited number of Black players was typical in college football until Daugherty ignored the unwritten quota.
As for the dinner, John Hannah, a sophomore in the 1970 game who is a College and Pro Football Hall of Famer, was nice enough to caution me not to directly sit next to the Bear at dinner.
Hannah said in the Showtime film, “He smoked those old Chesterfield Kings without a filter. He sucked those things so hard the tobacco would stick in his teeth. He’d talk to you while he was spitting out the tobacco. So, you got tobacco stains all over your shirt.”
At dinner, Bryant told me he never claimed to have orchestrated a Nixon-like secret plan or southern strategy. He didn’t mention it in his 1974 book, “BEAR.”
I nodded. I knew the media did it for him by regurgitating instead of researching the 1970 USC-Alabama myth.
I told Bryant I recently learned Craig Fertig, who was a USC assistant coach, said of Cunningham on the team bus after the game, “This is what a football player looks like.”
Bryant cocked his houndstooth hat as he responded.
“Then John Papadakis, a USC linebacker, said I took Sam into my locker room and told my players, ‘This is what a football player looks like.’ But if you read my book, I never said it or brought Sam into my locker room. Hell, I’d never embarrass my players that way.”
I recited to the Bear the quote that Papadakis attributed to him in Don Yeager’s dubious book, “Turning of the Tide:”
“Gentlemen, this ol’ boy, I mean, this man and his Trojan brothers just ran your slow-motion asses right out of your own house. Raise your heads and open your eyes; this is what a football player looks like.”
He exhaled cigarette smoke in exasperation.
“Just because I’m from Moro Bottom, Arkansas, some Left Coast Californian thinks I talk that way?” Bryant chided.
I reminded the Bear in 1980 he was the coverboy for a Time Magazine piece as his career was winding down. I pointed out there wasn’t a single mention in the 5,100-word opus by writer B.J. Phillips about the 1970 USC-Alabama game impacting college football integration.
The Bear chuckled. Even his cackles are mumbled.
“I told B.J. I wanted to be the Branch Rickey of football when I was at Kentucky from 1946-53, but since they wouldn’t let me recruit Black players, I sent them to coaches in the North.”
I interjected again. The writer never followed up, asking for a coach’s name or a player’s name. No one asked him why he wasn’t Branch Rickey at Texas A&M, where he coached from 1954 to 1957, or his first 13 seasons at Alabama, 1958 to 1970.
And then soon enough sportswriters took a leap, crediting him for sending Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty his great players from the South — Bubba Smith, George Webster, Gene Washington and others. ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg wrote the Bear sent Duffy players, but when I correct national writers with an email, they don’t respond.
National writers seem to consider Bear Bryant turf sacred — not to be ventured into similar to Jermiah Johnson respecting a Native American burial ground.
Worse, the media later spread the Joe Namath/Charlie Thornhill trade story. Even Sports Illustrated wrote the about Bryant meeting Thornhill at a Virginia awards banquet. They said he sent Charlie to Michigan State to pay back Duffy for sending him Joe Namath. But Charlie was committed to Michigan State before he met Bryant. And Bryant got a call from Maryland coach Tom Nugent telling him Namath was still available. Both Namath and Nugent are on record saying Nugent sent Joe to Bryant.
I shook my head in disgust at the media’s negligence. Bryant didn’t know about Black players in his backyard. He didn’t care about them. Civil Rights attorney U.W. Clemon demonstrated that when he deposed him for a 1969 lawsuit. The Alabama Afro American Student Association sued him for failing to recruit Black players on a campus that had been desegregated since 1963.
I reminded Bear he cut five walk-on Black players from 1967 spring football. And when he was asked in a TV interview to explain an all-White roster, the Bear said on film, “‘I haven’t so far found many, if any, qualified academically and athletically both.’”
The Bear kept eating, ignoring that comment. I shook my head at his tone deafness. I could have brought up more contradictions, but we finished eating dinner as Bear lit another cigarette.
I thanked Bear for the dinner, and I told him I planned to highlight the contradictions to his folklore image.
The Bear, in a rare candid moment when no one was listening, laughed with tobacco juice showering me.
“You go ahead, partner. No national sportswriter, TV or radio guy or podcaster will believe you. Remember what Bryant Gumble of HBO Real Sports told you when you suggested to him a story on Duffy Daugherty leading college football integration instead of me.”
I nodded glumly and said, “He wrote me in an email, “My younger audience won’t understand the story.”
The Bear chuckled.
“Son, haven’t you learned by now facts bounce off my legend. David Halberstam and Jim Murray are the only national media guys who would listen to you. And they’re dead.”
I’m happy to report the Bear didn’t charm me, but I admit I walked away chagrined, turning to say, “You’re dead, but your myth lives on.”
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Tom Shanahan is an award-winning sportswriter and frequent contributor to Spartanmag.com in addition to posting on his website. His new book on Michigan State leading college football integration is, “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.” His first book was “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans.”
I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
Below are links to click on to purchase my books focused.
My books tell the true story of college football integration in the 1960s and address the myths and fiction that allowed a false narrative surrounding the 1970 USC-Alabama game to usurp the credit from the true pioneers. As I said when I spoke at the National Sports Media Association book festival, no two books provide an accurate portrayal more than RAYE OF LIGHT and THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
I’ll put my facts up against anybody, anytime, anywhere. Watch here.
Click here for my story on the 1962 Rose Bowl and Segregation awarded first place by the Football Writers Association of America. I tell untold stories on Michigan State’s leading role and the true pioneers of college football integration. Click here to read the summary as a first-place story.
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Click here to purchase The Right Thing To Do
THE RIGHT THING TO DO
The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s
Foreword by Ruffin McNeill
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Click here to purchase Raye of Light.
RAYE OF LIGHT
Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the 1ntegration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans
Foreword by Tony Dungy
