(As the 20th anniversary of Bear Bryant's last game as coach at Alabama approaches, reprinted here is a column by George Lapides that appeared in the Memphis Flyer in December 1999. Following the column about Bryant's last game is an explanation of why the Bear and George enjoyed a special relationship. We will put this column on the website periodically between now and the anniversary of the famous last game.)
The Bear's Last Game
Coaching legend Paul Bryant took his final bow 16 years ago in the Liberty Bowl.
by George Lapides
It was going to be just another Liberty Bowl. Good, not great.
It was Alabama, football’s most dominant program in the Seventies, but in 1982, ’Bama would be entering the game coming off three straight season-ending losses.
And it was Illinois, 7-4 in the Big 10, with a potent offense and an exciting offensive-minded 46-year-old coach, Mike White.
But on December 15th, three weeks after they were invited to Memphis for the game on December 29th, it become The One and Only Bowl – the only post-season game that really mattered that year.
The stunning announcement shook football: The Bear said he was going into permanent hibernation.
Nobody could believe it. The man who had won more games coaching college football than anyone else was quitting. Paul W. Bryant would step aside after the Liberty Bowl as Alabama’s football coach and would turn over the reins to one of his favorite students, Ray Perkins.
Bear Bryant was a legend, a folk hero, and a living monument all rolled into one. No one had a greater impact in a profession than Bryant had in football. In the late 1930s, Bryant left Moro Bottom, Arkansas, about seven miles from the big city of Fordyce, to go to Alabama to play football. He became an all-American, then got his coaching start as an assistant at Vanderbilt. From there, he made three stops as a head coach before he heard “Mama” calling and went back to take over at Tuscaloosa in 1958.
Bryant learned the basics of defense from Gen. Robert Neyland, the T-formation from Bobby Dodd, and the wishbone from Emory Bellard and Darrell Royal. He won six national championships and the hearts of everybody who got close to him.
He never had to consult a poll to see how he was doing. As the late columnist Jim Murray once wrote, Bryant only had to consult the scoreboard.
Bryant’s retirement created a ticket demand the Liberty Bowl had only dreamed about in all its previous years. With one startling announcement, the Liberty became the bowl nobody wanted to miss. The demand for media credentials was overwhelming: so crushing that the Liberty had to hire Bryant’s former sports publicist at Alabama, Charley Thornton – by then associate athletic director at Texas A&M – to set up a sort of Liberty Bowl News Center.
Thornton was accustomed to dealing with huge games and important people, games such as Alabama vs. Notre Dame for the national championship in the Sugar Bowl, people like Joe Namath at the Orange Bowl.
The Liberty had to leave it to Thornton to determine which members of the media got seats in the way-too-small pressbox and who had to be relegated to seats outside on what would be a bitterly cold night.
Thornton set up a schedule of post-practice press conferences, and he ordered a heated press tent set up near the Alabama locker room to house the media for post-game interviews.
All the networks sent news crews to Memphis. So did practically every major newspaper in the country.
Alabama’s practice sessions at what then was known as the Kennedy Complex at Memphis State were like a zoo.
Bryant was mobbed by autograph seekers wherever he went, but especially when he arrived and left practice each day. Fathers carrying their little sons begged Bryant to sign something, anything. Moms holding little daughters were just as determined. Every day Bryant signed for as long as he could.
He was a little embarrassed at all the hullabaloo. The Liberty Bowl wanted to present him with a going-away gift at the annual luncheon. Bryant nixed the idea. Then they wanted to give him a big present at the black-tie party. Bryant nixed that, too.
But he was aware that this was a historical event, and maybe that explains why he sent friends signed and dated lithographs. Lots of famous people have them hanging on their walls even now.
Bryant was Page One news in both Memphis newspapers. Every day.
Radio station WREC did a two-and-a-half-hour special on him the night before the game.
“There never had been anything like that in Memphis before and there never has since then,” says Bud Dudley, the Liberty Bowl’s retired executive director. “It was ironic … the Bear’s first bowl game ever at Alabama was in the Liberty, against Penn State, and his last bowl was in the Liberty, too. He was good to us from start to finish.”
Nobody knew for sure why Bryant had picked that year to hang it up. He was 69 years old, had looked 79 for at least 10 years, but was still producing winners.
But Bryant knew.
In a private meeting in his suite at the Holiday Inn Rivermont after practice two days before the game, Bryant poured a drink for himself, plopped into an easy chair, and said he wanted to talk.
“There was a time when we’d hardly ever lose a game to a team we were supposed to beat,” he began. “Until last year, I remember it happening only two or three times. We lost to Georgia Tech in the Sixties when we had the better team, and old Bill Pace’s team at Vanderbilt really embarrassed us when they whipped us up in Nashville.
“But lately, it seems like we’ve been losing a bunch of times to teams we ought to beat. Georgia Tech last year. Southern Mississippi this year. We got more than 500 yards on Auburn this year and still couldn’t win.
“When you lose to teams you are supposed to beat, that’s the coach’s fault. I found I couldn’t rally my players anymore.”
He talked that way for about an hour-and-a-half, remembering all the good times and the few bad ones. He looked tired, even older. He got up, said he had to rest, and ever so slowly walked into his bedroom.
Billy Varner, a University of Alabama campus policeman who was Bryant’s chauffeur, said he was worried about the old man.
“I just don’t know what’s going to happen to him,” Varner said. “He won’t make it without coaching. That’s what he lives for.”
Of course, Alabama won the game. It was 21-15, despite the fact that Tony Eason, the Illinois quarterback, completed 35 of 55 passes for 423 yards (a Liberty Bowl record which still stands). But Alabama intercepted him four times (another bowl record) and Jeremiah Castille, a Tide defensive back, was the game’s MVP.
It was not pretty, maybe no prettier than Bryant’s first victory, a 60-6 massacre of Guilford in 1945, when the Bear was head coach at Maryland.
But Bryant liked the last one anyway. “I would have hated to have looked at this last roundup forever with a loss,” he would say, long after the record crowd and even most of the reporters were gone.
Billy Varner had it tagged right, though. Bryant couldn’t make it without coaching. Less than a month later he was gone.
The Bear thrived in football’s pressure cooker.
It was terribly sad that he lasted just a few weeks once he stepped out of it. 
