he shocking news of Coach "Bear" Bryant's death on January 26, 1983, produced an outpouring of emotion not seen for a sports figure in years. National newspapers reported his death on their front pages ("Crimson Tears," wailed the headline in the New York Post). Three days later, America watched in awe as an estimated quarter of a million mourners lined the fifty-five-mile stretch from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery to pay their respects as Bryant's three-mile-long funeral cortege drove by.

Scores of Bryant's former players, including Joe Namath, Lee Roy Jordan, John David Crow, and Marty Lyons, were in attendance. So were the greatest living football coaches, including Southern Cal's John McKay, who said, "It was like a presidential funeral procession."

Even though Bryant maintained that he was "just a football coach," he was for millions much more: the greatest coach the game had ever seen, and the heir to the tradition established by Knute Rockne. He took his Alabama Crimson Tide teams to an unmatched six national championships. But to the players, journalists, and fans whose lives he touched as a player and a coach, he was the last symbol of values that transcended football: courage, discipline, loyalty, and hard work.

To his critics, Bryant represented the dark side of big-time college football-brutality, fanaticism, and blind adherence to authority. The real Bear Bryant, however, was far more complex than either his admirers or his detractors knew. While maintaining a public friendship with Alabama governor George Wallace, he continually sought ways to undermine the governor's segregationist policies, finally forcing a legendary football game in Birmingham with the University of Southern California in 1970 that opened the floodgates to the integration of football at the University of Alabama.

Yet no understanding of Bryant, the great coach, is complete without the story of his remarkable transformation from a driven country boy to a figure of national prominence. As Allen Barra movingly shows in The Last Coach, Bryant, the eleventh of thirteen children, was born in tiny Moro Bottom, Arkansas, in 1913 and grew up in nearby Fordyce-where his legend was born when he wrestled a live bear on the stage of a local theater. A star on the Fordyce High School Redbugs football team, he was good enough to get a football scholarship to the University of Alabama, where he would meet and marry the love of his life, campus beauty queen Mary Harmon Black.

At the height of the Depression, football took Bryant to the Rose Bowl with Alabama's 1934 national champions, then on to a career as an assistant and, in subsequent decades, as a head football coach at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and finally Alabama, matching wit and grit with the greatest coaches of two generations-men like Tennessee's General Robert Neyland, Oklahoma's Bud Wilkinson, Notre Dame's Ara Parseghian, Ohio State's Woody Hayes, and Penn State's Joe Paterno. Along the way, Bryant stirred numerous controversies, including the infamous "Junction Boys" training camp episode in 1954, during which almost two-thirds of the Texas A&M football team quit, yet none of these incidents derailed his unstoppable march toward Amos Alonzo Stagg's all-time record for college coaching victories.

Through it all, Bryant's influence has endured and prevailed as his former players and assistants continue to define the best in not only college but also professional football. The Last Coach, then, is the gripping story of a true American legend.