This week in 1982, an Alabama sports writer did the unthinkable … or at least people thought he did

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of stories marking the 40th anniversary of the end of the Paul “Bear” Bryant era at Alabama, which came in 1982. This story examines when signs first began to appear that Bryant’s program might be slipping and when rumors began in earnest that he might soon retire.

It took a 25-year-old outsider in his first year covering Alabama football to do what few at the time had any inclination to do — call Paul “Bear” Bryant’s bluff.

Readers of The Birmingham News on Nov. 8, 1982 — 40 years ago today — were greeted with a buzz-worthy column carrying the byline and smiling headshot of Don Kausler Jr. on Page 5C of that day’s newspaper. In his weekly Alabama beat column, Kausler appeared to suggest that it was time to take seriously rumblings by Bryant, then in his 25th year at the Crimson Tide helm and at the time the winningest coach in college football history, that he was considering hanging up his trademark fedora and moving into a long-rumored retirement.

The column, which carried the headline “It’s time for Bryant’s next move,” was published two days after Alabama lost 20-10 to LSU at Birmingham’s Legion Field. That loss came on the heels of an equally shocking 35-28 loss at Tennessee in mid-October, the Crimson Tide’s first to the Volunteers in 12 years.

Kausler’s column made reference to post-game comments the coach had made following the LSU loss, when he said the players were “entitled to better leadership than I’m giving them.” Bryant also told Kausler following the taping of his Sunday television show that he planned to discuss his future “soon” with university president Joab Thomas.

“Nobody is going to tell Bryant to quit,” Kausler wrote in his column. “It will be left to Bryant to make up his own mind. But if he is sincere about his own ineptitude, he should retire. He should retire now. Today. … One way or another, the time has come for Bryant to announce his future plans. He has hinted too long — and now too strongly — that he might not be back next season.”

That same day, Thomas issued a statement to various media outlets, indicating he was not taking Bryant’s rumblings about retirement seriously. “I have the utmost confidence in our football team, which is undoubtedly of national caliber,” Thomas said. “And I certainly have no questions about the abilities of the winningest coach in intercollegiate football history.”

In numerous media interviews in the following days, Bryant did not exactly walk back what he’d said after the LSU game. He did say on his Tuesday night radio show that he had no plans to retire and that he hoped to be at Alabama “another 15-20 years, but I’ve got to do a better job than I’ve been doing.”

Kausler argued at the time, and continues to insist to this day, that he wasn’t calling for Bryant to step down. He was only suggesting that Bryant put an end to all the rumors once and for all and publicly announce if the 1982 season was in fact going to be his last.

Needless to say, Birmingham readers and Alabama fans didn’t take it that way. The Birmingham News telephone lines and the letters to the editor section were both flooded with complaints.

“The column was probably a little on the snarky side,” Kausler said. “And (subscribers) read it, but it also circulated word of mouth — one reader would read it and directly know what I wrote. But then when they would talk to somebody else about it. ‘I think this guy from The Birmingham News is saying that Bryant ought to retire.’ And that was not the case. But from what I understand, The Birmingham News switchboard blew a circuit that day. They had so many letters to the editor, that it filled an entire page.”

Bryant was 69 years old in 1982 — a full two years younger than current Alabama coach Nick Saban, for instance. However, years of smoking and drinking coupled with the hours and stress of big-time college football made him appear to be a much older man.

Bryant’s superannuated visage was everywhere on television and in print during the early 1980s, culminating during the 1981 season when he chased and then surpassed Amos Alonzo Stagg’s record with his 315th career victory. Numerous profiles of Bryant were written during those years, and most at least attempted to answer the question as to when the end might finally come.

Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford had written a lengthy profile of Bryant in November 1981, as he was approaching his record-setting victory — which he would record in the regular-season finale vs. Auburn. Deford wrote of a man who was clearly slowing down, who needed nearly a dozen forms of medication just to function on a daily basis (Bryant had apparently stopped drinking by that point, however.)

“I get so tired of it at times,” Bryant told Deford, whose story for some reason quoted Bryant phonetically. “But I do love the football, the contact with my players. I still get a thrill outta jes goin’ to practice. Jes steppin’ out there. I do. That’s my hobby.”

Others had noticed signs of slippage in Bryant, notably in recruiting. Alabama had lost out on two generational running backs in its 1982 recruiting class: Marcus Dupree of Philadelphia, Miss. (who signed with Oklahoma) and McAdory’s Bo Jackson, who signed with Auburn.

Jackson had apparently been turned off by the lack of personal attention Bryant had shown him, and by a conversation with assistant coach Ken Donahue, in which Donahue allegedly told Jackson he might not start until his junior year. There was also reportedly concern from Jackson’s mother, Florence Bond, about a gun-related incident during the 1981 season, when fullback Ken Simon fired shots from his car at another motorist and was not even suspended.

Paul Finebaum, then in his third year as a sports writer at the Birmingham Post-Herald and not yet a columnist, wrote an extensive story about Bryant’s future on Feb. 9, 1982, the day before national signing day. The story, which carried the headline “Beyond Bryant: Will time, gossip crumble the house that Bear built?”, quoted Jackson, Auburn coach Pat Dye and others, and noted that several key Alabama assistants had recently left the staff — or were looking to do so — because they surmised the end was near.

“We ran a half-page picture with the article, a picture of Bryant’s face that they had blown up,” Finebaum said. “The lines in his face look like the craters of the moon. … Pat Dye told me it was such a devastating shot at Alabama because it talked about how they blew it on Bo. It was a couple of days before recruiting was over and Dye got somebody to buy 50 or 100 copies of the newspaper and they put them in the mailbox of every one of the undecided recruits, to try to show that Bryant was done. So that was really the moment that it hit me.

“Until then, I don’t think you could really sense it too much. Because on the field, they were good. But that was the first time I ever dealt with it publicly. You could just feel it, but the public just was not in the mood to hear it.”

It’s apparent four decades later, however, that few at that time realized how quickly Bryant’s dynasty was crumbling. After all, Alabama had won the SEC championship in 1981 with a 9-2-1 record, had beaten Auburn for the ninth consecutive year and Tennessee for the 11th straight season and had narrowly lost in the Cotton Bowl to national power Texas.

Even in 1982, Alabama got off to a 5-0 start — including a 42-21 win in Birmingham over eventual national champion Penn State — and was ranked No. 2 nationally heading into the annual showdown with the Volunteers in Knoxville. Tennessee won 35-28, with jubilant fans rushing the field at Neyland Stadium, tearing down the goal posts and depositing them in the nearby Tennessee River (sound familiar?).

Kausler was in his first year on the Alabama beat, a young University of Missouri graduate who had spent two years covering Major League Baseball in Milwaukee before moving south. His editors at The News — then the afternoon paper locked in a fierce battle for readers with the morning Post-Herald — told him when he was hired he was to “treat Bryant like any other coach.”

Still, Kausler said like many others, he viewed the Tennessee loss as a “blip.” It was only after lackluster showings in victories over Cincinnati (21-3) and Mississippi State (21-12) and then the disastrous 20-10 loss to LSU — in which Alabama fumbled seven times and rushed for only 42 yards, losing to the Tigers for the first time since 1970 — that Kausler started to sense the Crimson Tide was in a downward spiral.

Kausler was one of three Birmingham News staffers who covered Alabama-LSU that day, along with executive sports editor Neal Sims and sports editor/columnist Alf Van Hoose, a close friend of Bryant’s and arguably the most-trusted journalism voice in the state at the time. Sims’ Sunday column was headlined “Bear quit? Don’t bet on it yet” but included comments from Bryant including “we need to make some changes, need to start at the top.” (Van Hoose’s column focused on LSU quarterback Alan Risher, and made no mention of Bryant’s retirement talk.)

Kausler, however, read Bryant’s comments differently than his co-workers. After speaking with Bryant one-on-one outside a Birmingham TV station on Sunday morning, he decided to devote his Monday column to the coach’s future.

Keith Dunnavant, then a senior in high school and a part-time sports writer for his hometown Decatur Daily, viewed the whole scene from a distance and was a bit in awe. Now a well-respected author who wrote a 1996 biography on Bryant among several other books on sports history, Dunnavant said that Kausler’s column was not only shocking but “incredibly gutsy.”

“We were evolving in sports journalism, from the fawning coverage of Bryant and others like him, to something different,” Dunnavant said. “It’s not like people weren’t questioning; we had started down that road. But Don came in as an outsider. His mandate was to come in and treat Bryant like just another coach. And to his credit, that’s what he did.”

Finebaum had his own problems at the time. He and his paper had been sued over stories alleging improprieties in the recruitment of Alabama basketball star Bobby Lee Hurt, and the trial was taking place in November 1982.

Still, he took notice of what Kausler wrote, he said.

“It was very ostracizing to be on the Alabama beat at that point,” Finebaum said. “Certainly the older guys weren’t going to write anything critical of Bryant. I’d go to Bryant Hall to interview players and none of the other writers would talk to me. But when I saw Don’s column, I was pretty impressed with what he had done. To use the NASCAR term, I felt like I finally had a ‘drafting partner’ here.”

Less enamored was Birmingham News publisher Victor Hanson, who called Kausler in for a one-on-one meeting the following day. Hanson asked that Kausler write another column “clarifying” the idea behind his previous one, which he did.

On Wednesday, Nov. 10, 1982, a Kausler column with the headline “On Bryant: What was said and what wasn’t” ran on Page 5E of The News. It began “Let’s set the record straight. To all those Alabama fans — and our readers — who think we’ve called for the retirement of Coach Paul Bryant, it’s simply not so.”

The column went on to cite several examples of Bryant hemming and hawing about his future, often contradicting himself. The second column seemed to placate most of those angered by the first, but not all.

Kausler said the mailbox outside his home in Birmingham’s Huffman neighborhood was knocked down on three consecutive days, and he received at least one threatening phone call. Kausler said he never got any blowback from Bryant, however.

“Bryant, that whole season, was cordial to me,” Kausler said. “… About two games into the season, I discovered that everyone else in the state was using leftover quotes from Saturday in their Monday stories. So I started going down to where he taped his TV show and waiting outside and then got about five minutes with him for some fresh quotes. … Once things started getting ugly (on the field) and some of my reporting was viewed as negative, others around Bryant started coming down on me, but he never did.”

What likely brought an end to the controversy was that Alabama lost again the following week to Southern Miss, a 38-29 defeat that ended the Crimson Tide’s 57-game winning streak at Bryant-Denny Stadium, which dated back to 1963. Two weeks after that, Alabama lost to Auburn 23-22 in the famed “Bo Over the Top” Iron Bowl, snapping a nine-game winning streak over the Tigers.

Following the Southern Miss loss, veteran Birmingham News columnist Clyde Bolton wrote that “Alabama’s reign of terror over college football is over.” However, Bolton laid the blame for the Crimson Tide’s slippage largely at the NCAA’s recent scholarship cuts (from 45 initial grant-in-aids per year to 30), and not as a sign that Bryant needed to retire.

(For what it’s worth, Finebaum also said it’s too early to draw any serious parallels between Alabama’s 1982 season under Bryant and the current one under Saban, in which the Crimson Tide has also lost unexpectedly to Tennessee and LSU and fallen out of the national championship race. Any slippage in Saban’s program has been only “fractional” compared to the utter collapse of Bryant’s team 40 years ago, he said.)

After playing in a New Year’s Day Bowl for five consecutive years, Alabama accepted an invitation to play in the Liberty Bowl Dec. 29, 1982, in Memphis. Two weeks prior to the game, The Associated Press’ Herschel Nissenson broke the story that the game vs. Illinois would be Bryant’s last.

Bryant announced his retirement the following day, with former Alabama star Ray Perkins (then head coach of the NFL’s New York Giants) set to take over. Bryant stayed on as athletics director, though he died some five weeks later following a heart attack.

Kausler, ironically, wasn’t in Alabama to cover Bryant’s retirement or death. He was in Colorado working on an advance story on Air Force (which was playing in that year’s Hall of Fame Bowl in Birmingham), when news broke that Bryant was stepping down, and in California covering Super Bowl XVII between the Miami Dolphins (which had numerous former Alabama players on its roster) and Washington Redskins along with Alabama’s basketball game at UCLA in late January when he heard Bryant had checked himself into DCH Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa and died shortly thereafter.

“By then, they had already mobilized the entire newsroom, not just sports,” Kausler said. “And (Sims) said, ‘Don, we’ve got it covered here, you’re out there among all those former Alabama players. You’ve got the basketball team there. Just stay put and give us some reaction stories from there.’

“So I did, but at the same time I’m thinking ‘well this is karma.’ No. 1, people are going to try and tell me that I killed Bryant. And No. 2, they’re going to tell me I missed the big story because I was being such a jackass.”

Kausler left the Alabama beat after the 1983 season, taking a job as sports editor of the newspaper in Columbia, Mo., where he’d attended college. He returned to Birmingham two years later as executive sports editor of the Post-Herald — where he was Finebaum’s boss — and held that job for 15 years until moving to the Anderson Independent-Mail in South Carolina in 2001.

During the nationwide economic downturn in late 2008, Kausler was laid off by the Anderson paper and looking for a job. More than a quarter-century after covering the end of Bryant, he returned to The Birmingham News under sports editor Tom Arenberg to chronicle the early years of the Nick Saban dynasty.

“Saban was the second coming of Bear Bryant,” said Kausler, who moved back to South Carolina in 2013 to become editor of the Florence Morning News and is still working part-time as interim editor of the Kingstree News. “Here again with Arenberg, we had a talk and he told me ‘Don, we need a hardnose on this beat who will treat him like he’s any other coach.’ I said, ‘Been there, done that.”

Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has covered college football for a variety of publications since 1994. Contact him at cstephenson@al.com or follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.