The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  Neither man spent much time with his family. Susie would come home—she worked with mental patients in a local hospital—and see Billy’s traveling bag gone. Later that night, she’d get the inevitable call.

  She’d always ask: “When y’all coming back?”

  He’d always answer: “I don’t know.”

  The coach visited this house once. They were traveling, and Billy said he needed to get home for supper. Bryant asked whether there might be enough for him. Billy found a phone and called ahead, telling Susie to make her good corn bread. She shot back: “I thought all my corn bread was good!” They sat in the kitchen down the hall and ate and laughed. She liked Bryant, thought he had a good heart, even if he did almost always call her Sally. After one trip, when the men went to a horse track, Billy came home with an envelope from Coach. Bryant got the name right; “Susie” was scrawled on the outside. Inside she found $500 and a note. Buy what you want, he told her, not what you need.

  “I always did want me the old-timey ice-cream freezer,” she says. “I went and bought me one of those. I didn’t use it but one time. But I got it. We made ice cream, one time. Sure did.”

  These are the stories she can tell. About how Billy left her alone a lot of the time, how he gave up his life like Bryant did and how Billy never got to enjoy his retirement either. She laughs some, with only a little bitterness, about what was gained, what was spent, and what remains. All he has to show for two decades of service are his memories, and even those often hang just out of reach. Susie can tell you what she saw, but that’s it. “He never told me anything personal about Coach Bryant,” she says. “Nothing.”

  As she talks, there’s a noise down the hall, a rattle of movement and the thump-thump of a cane on the floor. The sound gets louder.

  “That’s him,” she says, standing so he can sit.

  “Come here, hon,” she says softly.

  Billy shuffles into the room wearing gray pajamas and black slippers. A diamond of belly shows through the puckered front of his shirt. His voice is deep and trails off when he’s unsure.

  “Too many football games,” he says. “I ended up playing football.”

  “You didn’t play football,” she says.

  Billy sits up, his voice and cane rising at the indignity.

  “What do you mean, I didn’t play football?”

  “You didn’t play no football,” she says. “Uh-uh. No, no. That’s a no-no.”

  Billy deflates, his voice and his body sinking back down into the chair.

  “She knows,” he says.

  She picks back up the conversation about Bryant, and Billy sits across the narrow room, listening. She answers for him when he seems lost.

  “You was at the hospital when he died,” she says. “Do you remember?”

  “No,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Something remarkable happens when Billy figures out where the den is located—at first, he stood in the living room confused while Susie called his name over and over—and inches down the hall, through the kitchen where Coach sat one time for supper, into a room decorated with photographs of Bear Bryant.

  He remembers.

  It happens slowly but clearly. His voice becomes higher-pitched, quick but not rushed, with confidence in the direction of the words, without the long pauses to read the maps inside his mind. All his memories are still in there, somewhere, only much of the time he can’t translate them into words. Today he can. The pictures seem to anchor him. The walls are covered with certificates and mementos of his service. He’s an honorary assistant coach for the 1975 season. He’s a 1978 national champion. To his left, surrounded by the small frames, is a large photograph of Bear Bryant at the 1982 Liberty Bowl, sicker than anyone but Billy and a few others knew, bundled tight against the cold. To his right is the famous painting “315” that shows Bryant on the sideline as he breaks the all-time wins record, and down the wall from that is a pencil-and-ink drawing of Bryant as a young man.

  “There’s Coach Bryant,” Billy says.

  That’s what he called him, like it was a Southern debutante’s double name. Always, Coach Bryant, just like Mary Wilkes or Sarah Catherine: Coachbryant.

  “That looks like him over there,” Billy says.

  “That’s him too.”

  He focuses on the shot from the Liberty Bowl. Billy always walked a few feet in front of Bryant, for reasons he’s trying to recall.

  “That’s him up there,” he says. “Right there with the hat on, in the middle. I’d travel with him to the games. I remember all of them. We’d go to the stadium. I’d drive him. I’d park the car. He’d get out. We went to the dressing room. I walked in front of him. To shoot him, they had to get me first.”

  He forms his right hand into a pistol, and Susie laughs, but then he starts to get lost again. His voice loses its pitch and clarity, sort of like he’s got a mouth full of pea gravel.

  “Shoot them I always thought.”

  His eyes get wide, bulging, like they do when he’s confused. Gaps open between the words, and sentences turn staccato. He laughs at himself when he recenters. His voice ticks up a few notches.

  “Coach Bryant used to be the coach at Alabama,” he says. “I keep trying to call that the Indian Hills football team. It was the university football team.”

  He looks back at the Liberty Bowl photograph. Today his memories seem to orbit around the idea of protecting Bryant from some unseen enemy.

  “He’s there in the black,” he says. “The white hat. There he is. He’s following me. We’re going into the stadium. He’s following me. I always felt if somebody was after him, they’d come at him from the front. I was a big guy”—Billy sits up in his chair, and his face becomes menacing; he bows up his shoulders and arms—“and by the time those bullets go through me, he’s gone. We had some guys behind us. I always thought about that. Somebody comes up to do something to Coach Bryant, they’re gonna have to get me first. They’re probably dead themselves because I was a fast gun. He told me one time, if somebody comes up and shoots me, they’re gonna shoot you first. I looked at him like, ‘What the hell you think I’m here for?’”

  He laughs and claps his hands. Four loud slaps. A half hour or more has passed. His clarity comes and goes. The pictures on the wall hold him. To his right, in the corner of the room, there’s the pencil-and-ink drawing, a fresh-faced Bryant, without the deep lines in his face.

  This is a portrait of Paul.

  “He’s young all the time here,” Billy says.

  The price for memories is regret, and somewhere in the middle of all this, Billy considers how he spent his life. Nobody ever has a plan. A man looks up and he’s 76 years old, with memories he can’t touch and not much else. Like his boss before him, Billy Varner has come to the place where he must consider what he did with his time.

  “There was so much going on,” he says. “So little coming out of it. You start thinking about what you could have been doing. You get a job out there you would have made $50 more a month. If I’d changed jobs, I would have been making $50 more a month. Oh, shit, $50 wasn’t worth it. You had more fun on that job. You can reach up and feel it. When things happened, and you were there.”

  The pitch of his voice starts to drop again, wavering between the treble of here and the deep bass of gone.

  * * *

  —

  The man Billy Varner is remembering has very little in common with the Bryant who is beloved by so many Alabama fans. Bryant’s inner circle, those who knew the man, is surrounded by reminders of this. A few weeks ago, as Linda Knowles took the elevator up to the fourth-floor office where she works for the Alabama faculty senate, a car with a houndstooth paint job drove past her building on Paul W. Bryant Drive, past Bryant-Denny Stadium, past the Paul W. Bryant Museum, which is filled with what can only be called relics, then
past the Bryant Conference Center. A houndstooth car is just the beginning. The university sells houndstooth beach balls and houndstooth pool floats, which you can enjoy with an adult beverage kept cold by a houndstooth huggie. Croakies to hold sunglasses, cuff links, purses, both the kind with handles and clutches. Even Knowles sheepishly admits she has a houndstooth umbrella. It’s a cult.

  Bryant’s son, Paul Bryant Jr., remembers his father’s birthday more than the anniversary of his death, but for most Alabama fans, everything changed “the day Bear Bryant died.” There’s even a song named that. This isn’t a celebration. It’s a deification. Yes, Bear died, but He is risen. Before every Alabama home game, the big video board plays clips of Bryant talking, sounding like he ate a carton of Chesterfields. Fans stand and cheer. Knowles cries every time. There is, always, a disconnect between the few people who miss Paul and the legion who worship The Bear.

  The Bear, the rough-faced legend on the video board, was predestined to be great. Paul, who rode in a mule-drawn cart from Moro Bottom, Arkansas, and in the back of Billy Varner’s crimson Buick LeSabre, struggled, season after season. Paul never forgot the middle-class kids pointing and laughing at his mother. The number of people left alive who knew that Paul is small. It grows smaller all the time. Close friend Jimmy Hinton died a year ago; former assistant and confidant Clem Gryska died last month. The Bear wore houndstooth. Paul started reading a devotional in the final two years of his life that read, in part, “When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever, leaving something in its place I have traded for it.”

  Knowles has walked through the museum about 10 times. She settles in front of the exhibit of his office, the soft black-and-white couch players hated because they’d sink farther and farther down, the white telephone, the wide wooden desk. In real life, biographer Allen Barra reports, Bryant had a copy of Philip Roth’s masturbation-heavy literary masterpiece Portnoy’s Complaint on his shelf. That’s been scrubbed for posterity.

  Knowles and Varner cleaned out the real version of this office after Coach died. Standing before the exhibit, she can hear his voice all around her, literally, from the museum’s video displays. His voice might be what affects her most. At home, she keeps the microcassette of the last letter he dictated, the day before he died. She plays it sometimes. As she stands by the office exhibit, the speakers to her left loop audio of Bryant reading part of that devotional: “What I do today is very important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.”

  She stands still, surrounded by the strangers who’ve come to genuflect, and she thinks, “If they only knew.” And yet they don’t, and they almost certainly won’t. Bryant’s family and friends fiercely guard his legacy, but this omertà brings with it an accidental cost. Missing in the houndstooth beach balls and paint jobs is a person. Barra wrote the best biography of Bryant, The Last Coach, and even in his book, there is a Paul-sized hole at the center of the narrative. We get hints. “I know I’ve made this journey,” he told a reporter just before his final season. “I’m not sure I’ve enjoyed all of it. You miss a lot of things you shouldn’t miss.”

  When an assistant coach told him in 1970 that Vince Lombardi had died, Bryant spoke of regrets, and it shocked his friend. It was the first and only time he heard Bryant talk like that, and he realized that maybe his boss was a lonely man. There is certainly regret in Bryant’s choice of devotional. “I wish I’d read this 30 years ago,” he told a friend. “I wouldn’t have wasted so much valuable time.” He collapsed once from nervous exhaustion, chain-smoked cigarettes, ripped the filters off ones he bummed, passed out on couches, checked into alcohol rehab. There are actions that tell of unseen turmoil and doubt, but Bryant is never revealed.

  Barra found himself attacked for describing one bender at the 21 Club in New York City. This urge to protect, probably born from seeing the Saturday Evening Post erroneously accuse the coach of fixing a game, is also erasing something. We know Lombardi from David Maraniss’s biography, When Pride Still Mattered, and he comes across as smaller and therefore larger in the retelling, because his humanity is on every page. He is a man.

  Thirty years after his last season, Bryant’s humanity lives only in his family and a few aging friends, in former employees such as Knowles, in 72-year-old assistant-coach-turned-athletic-director Mal Moore, and, perhaps most of all, in Billy Varner. Paul W. Bryant is dying for the second time, and one day, in the not-so-distant future, only The Bear will remain.

  * * *

  —

  He’s gone.

  Billy’s voice drops back down, and the words press together, a slurry of confusion and rearranged thoughts, part truth, part fiction. Whatever order was brought on by the photographs disappears.

  He pauses. His eyes get wide. He spends a long minute staring at the remote control, trying to figure out how to turn up the volume. Finally, he asks for help. Susie is in and out of the room, doing laundry, listening to gospel music. Bear Bryant looks down from four or five different places.

  “I don’t ever talk to him now,” Billy says.

  He says something else, his voice deep, the sentences trailing off. “I don’t know whether he died or what” is what it sounds like he says. “I never did hear about him dying.”

  He smiles and clacks his cane. He puts a finger over his lips and says, “Shhh.” On the wall, there’s a candid shot of Paul and Billy in what looks like a living room. There’s the framed photograph of Bryant on a football field for the final time, with a “Thanks for the Memories” sign in the background. Billy sits in his big brown chair and looks at an oddly familiar man.

  “Is that him?” he asks.

  MARCH 2012

  Urban Meyer Will Be Home for Dinner

  A football coach tries to balance the kind of man he wants to be with the kind of man he is.

  I.

  Before you join Urban Meyer, who is walking toward the exit of the Ohio State football office, there’s a scar you need to see. A few years ago in Gainesville, his middle child, Gigi, planned a celebration to formally accept a college volleyball scholarship to Florida Gulf Coast University. It was football season, so she checked her dad’s calendar, scheduling her big day around his job. As the hour approached, she waited at her high school, wanting much, expecting little. Some now-forgotten problem consumed Meyer, and he told his secretary he didn’t have time. He wasn’t going. His beautiful, athletic, earnest daughter would have to sign her letter of intent without him. Meyer’s secretary, a mother of four, insisted: “You’re going.”

  Eighty or so people filed into the school cafeteria. Urban and his wife, Shelley, joined their daughter at the front table, watching as Gigi stood and spoke. She’d been nervous all day, and with a roomful of eyes on her, she thanked her mother for being there season after season, year after year.

  Then she turned to her father.

  He’d missed almost everything. You weren’t there, she told him.

  Shelley Meyer winced. Her heart broke for Urban, who sat with a thin smile, crushed. Moments later, Gigi high-fived her dad without making eye contact, then hugged her coach. Urban dragged himself back to the car. Then—and this arrives at the guts of his conflict—Urban Meyer went back to work, pulled by some biological imperative. His daughter’s words ran through his mind, troubling him, and yet he returned to the shifting pixels on his television, studying for a game he’d either win or lose. The conflict slipped away. Nothing mattered but winning. Both of these people are in him—are him: the guilty father who feels regret, the obsessed coach who ignores it. He doesn’t like either one. He doesn’t like himself, which is why he wants to change.

  * * *

  —

  Meyer strolls through the Ohio State football parking lot with his 13-year-old son, Nate. Years from now, when Urban either succeeds or fails in remaking himself, he will look back on these two days in June as a dividing line. On one side, the past 18 months of searching,
and on the other, the test of that search. In the car, he turns right out of his new office, heading some two hours north. There’s vital business at hand, which requires him to leave the football bunker on a summer afternoon.

  Road trip!

  “All right, fun time today,” he says, amped and smiling at his son.

  Fun? Smiling? Urban? There’s gray in his brush cut, weight back on his hips. The radio in the car, as always, is tuned to 93.3, the oldies station. “I Got Sunshine.” Tomorrow he will meet with the 2012 Buckeyes for the first time, beginning the countdown to the first practice, the first game, the first loss. Today he’s driving to Cleveland to take Nate to an Indians game.

  In front of him is a second chance. Behind, there’s his old dream job in Florida, which he quit twice in a year, and the $20 million he left on the table, unable to answer the simplest of questions: Why am I doing this? During the break, he studied himself for the first time in his life, looking for a new him or maybe trying to get the old him back—the person he was before a need for perfection nearly killed him. At least he can laugh about it now. During one of his many recent visits to a children’s hospital in Columbus, he told a group of nurses on an elevator, “My wife’s a nurse.”

  They turned, and he said, “A psych nurse,” which is true.

  He paused.

  “I’m her patient,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Like any man who destroys himself running for a finish line that doesn’t exist, Meyer often longed for the time and place where that race began: Columbus, 1986. As a 22-year-old graduate assistant for the Buckeyes, right down the road from his hometown of Ashtabula, Ohio, each day brought something new. He romanticized the experience; in later years, when the SEC’s recruiting wars got too dirty, he waxed about the Big Ten, where it was always 1986, which was just another way of hoping he could look in the mirror and see his younger, more idealistic self. After Jim Tressel resigned in shame a year ago, a joke passed among SEC insiders: “Who’s gonna tell Urban there’s no Santa Claus?”