Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (19 page)

At the Colt factory he saw an early working model of the Paige typesetting machine. Into the development of this wondrous device Mark Twain plunged years of his time and almost two hundred thousand dollars of his and wife Livy’s fortunes. “In two or three weeks,” he wrote his brother, “we shall work the stiffness out of her joints and have her performing as smoothly and softly as human muscles.” But the machine — which he estimated would earn him fifty-five million dollars a year — was always too high-strung to be practical. It resides now in the basement gallery of his house. Its failure was the main reason Mark Twain had to move.

His favorite daughter, Susy, stayed behind in Hartford — staying with friends but regularly visiting Mark Twain’s now deserted house — as the rest of the family roamed. While they were gone she contracted meningitis, began going blind, took up some paper in Mark Twain’s house (she showed writing promise herself), and scrawled deliriously: “Mr. Clemens, Mr. Zola, Mr. Harte, I see that even darkness can be great. To me darkness must remain from everlasting to everlasting.” She died before the family could get back home. They were on their way to solvency by then, but they could never stand to live in the house again.

In 1903 it was sold to the Richard Bissell family.
*
It later housed a boys’ school, then a library. Now it’s a shrine. On my recent tour of the house, we were admonished not to touch anything, but I did sneak one turn of a doorknob. George Griffin, Mark Twain’s butler, is described by Kaplan as a gambler and a moneylender to Hartford’s black community. Our guide, Carolyn Volpe, said it was Griffin’s duty, when there were guests for dinner, to sit behind a screen in the dining room, awaiting discreet commands from Livy; but he would betray his presence by beginning to laugh, ahead of the punch line, at Mark Twain’s stories, which he had heard before. Livy would fire him for these lapses, and Mark Twain would hire him back.

Our guide pointed out the door to Griffin’s room upstairs. It hadn’t been restored, she said. “We don’t know what it looked like, because he was the only one who went in there.”

Didn’t Marse Mark ever pop in? Maybe the two of them would get together in there and sing a spiritual, share a pipe, or even josh about how they ought to take a raft down the Mississippi as Huck and the slave Jim did — Huck having decided, against all the strictures of civilized religion as he knew it, to commit the great crime of Mark Twain’s fiction: helping a sold man get free.

I wanted to know what it was like in there. I stuck my head in, heard a hum, saw metal ducts. Modern-day heating. A machine.

*
Richard Bissell, Jr., the CIA official who authored the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was born in Mark Twain’s house. Richard P. Bissell, who wrote funny novels about the Mississippi (and in fact was the first author licensed as a pilot on that river since Mark Twain), was born in Dubuque. Go figure.

D
O YOU RECKON MARK
Twain and Paul “Bear” Bryant ever sit around in Heaven chewing the fat?

“What is Man?” muses Twain, who tends to get off into that kind of thing.

“Well,” says the Bear, choosing to believe that the subject is pass defense, “there’s Man and there’s Zone. Down home I was always partial to Man, myself. Wasn’t anything technical about it. Just one old knotty-headed boy trying to haul in a projectile and anothun trying to change his mind.”

“I know of a bear,” says Twain (having been brought back to firmer ground), “that crossed paths with a missionary. The question arose, who would convert whom? The matter stood unresolved for only a short time. Thereafter the bear held to his ursine ways, and the missionary walked in the paths of the bear — or all of him did, I mean to say, except his eternal soul and his India rubber boots.”

“A bear don’t mince words,” says Bryant.

Bear Bryant’s teams — most notably at the University of Alabama — won more games than any other coach’s in college football history. While he lived, Alabamians told this story:

One day in Heaven a figure went stomping importantly by, wearing a whistle and a cap with an
A
on it, and a newcomer asked, “Who is that?” A longtime resident answered, “God — but he thinks he’s Bear Bryant.”

They also said Bryant was the only coach ever to have an animal named after him, but in fact he earned his nickname when he wrestled a traveling bear in a movie theater in Fordyce, Arkansas, where he grew up dirt poor. I have spent only ten or twelve days in Arkansas in my life, but I have already met two different people who claimed they witnessed that event. One of them said that he, in a suit, was the bear; but he was drinking and I believe he would have said anything. In Arkansas. I don’t think he would have said that around many folks in Alabama.

Let me interject here that I was once surrounded in a Birmingham hotel lobby by a swarm of drunks in red hats and miracle-fiber suits who were saying “Roll Tide” to one another. (“Roll Tide” is what fans of the Alabama Crimson Tide say the way other people say “What it is?” or “Shalom.”) And I didn’t like it. On the whole I would rather be surrounded in an airport by those kids who try to sell you
Back to Godhead
magazine. That’s how much I didn’t like it. But I never quarreled with the notion that Bear Bryant looked like God. That’s what quarterback George Blanda, an extremely craggy person himself, thought thirty-some-odd years ago when he saw Bryant’s granite face for the first time. When I saw the Bear for the first time up close, briefly in 1972, he had the hardest eyes I’d ever seen. Deep, like Raymond Burr’s, but a lot colder.

One of the things that persuaded Bryant to leave Texas A & M in 1957 and return to Alabama, his alma mater, was that he had been receiving bagfuls of letters from Alabama grammar-school kids who said they wanted to play for him if he ever came back. Was he perceived, then, as a kindly, understanding figure who would ease a boy’s way through the hard knocks of big-time ball? Well, hell no, he wasn’t. The Bear was known for his sign that read
BE GOOD OR BE GONE
. When he overheard players so much as hint that they had had enough of his slave-driving drills, he “cleaned their lockers for them and piled their clothes out in the hall,” as he recalls in
Bear,
his rousing 1974 memoir written with John Underwood. “I’d make them prove what they had in their veins, blood or spit, one way or the other.” Bryant would take a bad team and push it so ferociously over rough and blistered ground that the kind of player he disliked, the player accustomed to getting by on natural gifts rather than on hunger, would quit. After the Bear’s first spring practice at Texas A & M, only 27 players were left out of the 115 who originally reported. And people with a taste for soft living don’t even
drive through
College Station, Texas, much less enroll in school there and go out for football. Bryant liked the player “who doesn’t have any ability but doesn’t know it.” He liked country boys like himself — in his last years they tended to be black, he said — who would do anything to get away from the dusty, grinding, ungratifying labor in their backgrounds. The Bear would give them even heavier dust, harder grinding, and less sweetness than they were used to. He would get down in the dirt with them and fight. He would hardly ever give them a kind word. He would rasp the bunch of them down to a hard core that could beat all comers at “eleven man and sic ’em” football and then graduate with a will into pro ball, coaching, or business. (How would you like a man like Bear Bryant to come over to your house to sell you insurance? “You ain’t got enough coverage and you know it! Just git on out of this house and turn this nice woman and these pretty babies out in the street if you ain’t man enough to insure ’em. Go on! Go on! If you don’t hurry I’m gonna set fire to your car!”)

But what place did a man like that have in a university? Especially since the Bear in his own scholar-athlete days seldom went to class. He barely earned a phys ed degree from Alabama back when such degrees came even less hard than they do today.

Look at it this way, though: what if courses in education were taught in the kind of language and at the kind of pitch in which and at which the Bear taught football? I’ll tell you what: the nation’s educators would make more sense.

They wouldn’t be saying, “Evaluative procedures for the implementation of program goals and objectives have been identified, formulated, and prioritized based on acceptable criteria in order to foster enhanced positive learning experientialization.”

They would be saying, “What you got to do is, keep your weight low to the ground, get your head in under the student’s rib cage, and thrust upward. And
drive.
And by God if he don’t learn what you’re trying to teach him then, he must know something you don’t. Or else not know something you thought he did. And you got to find out which it is and what it is — what
ever
it is — and come right back at him.”

(I have tried and tried and tried to write the above passage in gender-unspecific terms. It won’t work. We need a new pronoun. For one thing.)

I’m not trying to tell you that a college-football education resonates with human values. One evening in the early 1970s, a distinguished Tide lineman went before an audience of freshman players with a live squirrel he had just captured bare-handed on campus. He proceeded to rip the struggling animal apart, exclaiming as the blood flew, “This is what you got to do to win!” and then chewed on one of the torn-off legs. Poets, scientists, and department heads do comparably destructive things, though, and college teaching might make more sense and a deeper impression if it were more sanguineous. You always wonder what you might have learned if you’d had the chance to be scourged for a while by somebody who, like a standing dire emergency, was dreadfully good at getting some version of the most out of people.

The University of Alabama is not the nation’s most rigorous academic institution. They say it is almost impossible to get anybody to take a class there after 2:00
P.M.
But a hundred football players — some of them good students and all of them under pressure to absorb something one way or another — don’t drag down a student body of 17,300. On the other hand, what might be the effect on a university if it had a
learning
team? Spurring one another on. Reaching down deep. Stressing fundamentals.
*

In 1977 I went down to Tuscaloosa to confront the Bear. I entered his office at nine-thirty one morning. He was a big, fleshy sixty-four-year-old man, sprawled and restive behind his big sleek desk. The walls were paneled like a corporation exec’s, except for the built-in blackboards. On one of these, different hands had chalked “26/47 Belly” and “I love you, Grandpoppa. Love, S.G.B.”

I told the Bear that people were wondering whether college was worth it anymore. What did he, as a man who had done a lot of teaching that helped bring people out of poverty, think of that? How would he motivate students today?

He shrugged, not just modestly, and said he didn’t know.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting if other subjects were taught the way you’ve taught football?”

Maybe you have heard Kris Kristofferson on one of his albums introduce his song “To Beat the Devil” in a grave just-post-deep-deep-hangover talking bass: “I came across a great and wasted friend of mine … I saw he was about one step away from dying, and I couldn’t help but wonder why.” The Bear’s voice sounded like that, but he was saying, “I certainly don’t think football is as important as English or some academic department. Except that it’s hard to get a crowd out to watch an examination.”

His eyes were a lot less imposing than I remembered. He hadn’t gotten to work until nine. He used to get in every morning at five-thirty, after stopping off somewhere on the way to throw up from the tension. In the old days he had spent evenings confronting his players in their dorm rooms. Now he hung out a lot at night at the Indian Hills Country Club.

“I wish to heck I’d gotten an education. I think it’d be more fun. If I could go speak to the Rotary Club and not use the same old adjectives over and over …”

I told him I’d never heard anybody complain about his adjectives.

“I’d study grammar. When I follow Bud Wilkinson at a coaching clinic, it’s like daylight and dark, and I’m the dark.”

That the Bear could think himself less eloquent than old network-bland Bud Wilkinson astounded me. In his book Bryant tells how he presented himself for the first time to a thousand Texas Aggies:

“I took off my coat and stomped on it.

“Then I took off my tie and stomped on it.

“Then, as I was walking up to the mike, I rolled up my sleeves.”

Here, in his office, he already had his coat and tie off.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know whether you ever motivate ’em or not. I doubt I have. … My old players get together now and talk about things that happened; I don’t even remember. Got to look ahead to the next day. … Up until a few years ago I didn’t do anything but work. Now other people are doing the work, most of it anyway. I’m trying to learn to relax. I don’t read many books. Watch television — John Wayne, Bob Hope.”

I asked him, “If you were to go back and take a course that you missed out on, what would it be?”

“I’d go back and take spelling.”

Well, people had been telling me that the Bear had mellowed a lot. Investments had made him rich. In his book he had said he didn’t try to “bleed and gut” players anymore; he tried to save them. He was letting them grow their hair longish. Communication was the key today, he said. He couldn’t get down and scuffle with them anymore.

Maybe now God and the Bear sit around mellowing together. With John Wayne. I bet it galls all three of them, though, that the Duke, who had been the Bear’s choice to portray him in his autobiographical movie, didn’t live long enough.

To tell the truth, I thought that at some point during my visit with him the Bear would say something that would make me jump, like “Boy! Run through that brick wall over there and write a sharp account of whatever scene is on the other side. And I don’t want to pick up one damn iota of overt reference to the wall.” And I would have seriously considered doing it.