re: Bear Bryant died 35 years ago today

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You know somebody somewhere has that shite still hanging on their wood-paneled Bama room wall

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I'll drink a fifth of jack and cheat on my wife to celebrate.

A lot of us older guys remember exactly where we were when certain things happened ...

When we heard JFK had been shot.
When Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot.
When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
... and when Bear Bryant passed-away.

I had come home on leave and attended the Liberty Bowl with my Dad just a couple of months earlier. I remember my Dad saying, "I hope he lives a long time after retirement - a lot of men don't. They die when they don't have anything to do anymore."

I was on a mountain top in the Mohave desert. We were practicing invasion plans for Iran. We had parachuted-in two days earlier and were military gaming against the California National Guard because they were the largest NG armoured unit in the country at the time and they could stage and roll play Iranian OpForce tactics against us.

We had just made it back to our ORP after hitting a unit of theirs and it was cold as frick, and windy, that night.

I had an excellent RTO last name Curtis from Hershey, PA. I asked him to see if he could dial up some civilian channels through his PRC-77 ... and he did. He got a local TV station out of Barstow.

Almost as soon as he dialed it in they were doing sports and the sports guy says, "college football lost one of it's all-time greats today. Bear Bryant, the long time Alabama coach passed away today ..." and he went on to talk about it and I just remember thinking, damn, he's gone. We'll never see him on the sidelines again.

I think most Southerners, especially fans of the SEC, were sad to hear the news.

We had two guys in our unit from Alabama, one a former Hughes Award winner at Auburn as the Top ROTC graduate in the country and another from Jim Nabors' hometown ... I know I am going to spell this incorrectly but it's a little town not far from where we had all gone to jump school in Columbus, GA ... Sylacauga I think is how you spell it.

Both guys were choked-up. It just proves that a true leader of men transcends rivalries and has the ability to touch everyone during the course of his life.

Bear Bryant did that.

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A lot of us older guys remember exactly where we were when... Bear Bryant passed-away.

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And a lot of us don't.

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I think the younger guys generation is now

"where were you during 9/11"

Which i was still pretty f'n young for.

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You're right ... that's the modern biggie.

I was in the Dallas airport on my way home after having been in Seattle for five days. It took me three days of scrounging rides and swapping rentals to drive home from Dallas first catching a ride to Texarkana and then finding another ride to Memphis before actually finding a rental I used to get me to our mountain home in Hendersonville before my final leg back to Lake Murray.

I missed all of the TV news reports ... everything was just a cluster frick. Caught one of the buildings being hit on the TV at the Dallas airport. Almost immediately they announced all flights grounded ... then 1000s of people scrambled for the rental car desks and it was chaos from there.

So I missed almost all of the TV coverage over the next three days and that made it a little different for me I guess.

He was an even tempered, kind, and compassionate soul

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Re: standing at attention: You all don’t know what a powerful presence the man had

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Lol

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She said that on the day of the funeral he was slumped down in the couch with his dress clothes on, tie mangled out of frustration, holding a bottle of Jack with tears pouring down his eyes.

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This dude was a better fan and a better man than almost everyone on this board.

I would have liked to see him coach

And auburn rolled toomers upon hearing of his death.

Yea, They seriously did.