You Can't Bend The Rules For Anybody

Bear Bryant was a hard taskmaster.

So hard, in fact, that a movie was made about a brutal 10-day training camp he ran when he was head coach of Texas A&M. The 1954 camp started with over 100 players, but only 39 were left at its conclusion. Bryant’s autobiography disputes this number, estimating the number was actually 27.

Using a relatively common post-war technique to ‘toughen up’ his players, Bryant ran sessions all day, refused to let the players have water breaks in 100-degree heat, and allowed minimal sleep. (Memo: don’t do this!)

The conditions were so egregious that the players left were called ‘survivors’.

Unapologetic, Bryant writes: “Well, when you’re teaching a boy to work for the first time in his life and teaching him to sacrifice and suck up his guts when he’s behind, which are lessons he has to learn sooner or later, you are going to find boys who are not willing to pay the price.”

He continues, “But there’s one thing about quitters you have to guard against: they are contagious. If one boy goes, the chances are he’ll take somebody with him, and you don’t want that. It’s always sad, really, because if a kid quits I’ve got to feel I’ve failed—not him or his daddy or anybody else, but me. I’ve failed by selecting him in the first place, or by not handling him right.”

Texas A&M finished 1-9 that season, dead last in the conference.

Two years later, with the ‘surviving’ sophomores now seniors, A&M went undefeated, won the conference, and were ranked 5th in the country.

It’s a wild story — look it up.

Like most men who served in the military during that time in history, Bryant was a stickler for discipline. “I had a rule about being late for practice, and you can’t bend the rules for anybody,” Bryant writes.

At a training camp when he was head coach at Kentucky, Bryant punished a player for being 30 minutes late to practice by making him walk around the cow pasture (literally, their training venue) and covering up the cow shit. “It was a formidable mess, too,” Bryant admits.

The next day, Bryant overslept and was 20 minutes late to practice. After training had concluded, the same player stopped him and said, “Uh, just a minute please, Coach Bryant. We had a kangaroo court while you were sleeping this morning. We decided your punishment would be to dig up all that mess, load it up, and cart it off.”

You can’t bend the rules for anybody — not even Bear Bryant.

“I was out there two hours getting it done,” Bryant gasps.

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