Don Keith

The Bear: The Legendary Life of Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant Don Keith New edition

Four days after the funeral of legendary Alabama football coach Paul Bryant, the coach's bodyguard, Billie Varner, was helping Bryant's longtime secretary, Linda Knowles, clean out the Bear's office. Packed boxes and memorabilia lay everywhere. A nameplate and a few yet-empty boxes were all that was left on his huge desk, his high-back chair sitting empty as if waiting for Coach to step through the door once again, sit down, light up a Chesterfield, and make a call to Pat Dye. Finally the last box was sealed, and Varner said to Knowles, "If it's all right with you, let's just stay in here for a little bit longer. I'm hurtin' too damn bad to leave right now."
After a few silent moments, Varner sighed, a sad look on his face, and with a breaking voice said, "Linda, it won't be anything like he said it was going to be. You know, he always said he'd be forgotten as soon as we laid him to rest."
Soon he was recalling a recent trip he had taken with Bryant. "You can bet I heard some more of that kind of talk," he reminisced. "He knew his time was up, and he wanted to go back to Fordyce one more time. He did some talkin' while we rode, almost like he was reviewing his whole life, like he was determined to explain all those memories we just packed away."
"Did he seem happy, Billy?" Knowles asked. "On the trip, I mean?"
"Yeah, he did. He was as content as I've ever seen him." Varner exhaled more smoke, watching it climb toward the ceiling, and a broad grin spread over his face, the first in days. "And you should have heard the stories he told, the things he remembered. Every place we passed, it seemed to kick off a memory or story he had been waitin' to tell somebody for years."
Varner laughed out loud and eased back farther on the couch. He ignored the long ash on his cigarette, even when it broke off and fell onto his shirtfront in a gray smudge. He was remembering. Remembering the Coach's stories, just the way he spilled them out for him on that final trip home.
Home to Arkansas, where it all began. The story of The Coach.