It has always been pretty amazing to me that this Georgia Tech thing could outlive other rivalries concerning Alabama, except maybe the Tennessee and Auburn rivalries.
Circumstances everywhere else seemed to make for reasonably peaceable relations. Johnny Vaught and Bear never had a whole lot of acrimony between them. I've seen where Vaught kept his competitive edge vis a vis Bryant and Alabama, but the biggest competitiveness with Alabama coming from Ole Miss has involved not Vaught himself, but Archie Manning and his sons.
My high school coach in Missisippi was not recruited by Alabama in the mid-fifties. He went to Mississippi State and played QB. He told me in the late fifties that Mississippi played better high school football than Alabama did. That is about the most acrimony I ever detected between Miss State and Alabama. Emory Bellard's team was thrilled to beat Alabama in about 1980 at Jackson, and then there was Sylvester Croom's stiff-lipped wins (and loss) against us, but Jackie Sherrill was a Bammer, through and through.
LSU was Bama all the way, really, when you consider that two of their most prominent coaches were Dietzel in the fifties and early sixties, and McClendon from the mid-sixties to the early eighties. Both were Bryant pupils at Kentucky. LSU still thought enough of their Bryant-Bama connection to hire Curley Hallman. When Hallman couldn't control his players and lost embarrassingly to Auburn, LSU pretty well closed the door on their Bama-Bryant connection. But still, when they talk about Bama, it is somehow like they are talking about a long lost uncle --like a love-hate thing. And then they lost Saban.
Vince Dooley coached valiently against Bryant at Georgia, and when Bryant was gone, Vince declared that the best coached teams he had ever coached against were Bryant's Alabama teams. He continues to send out friendly vibes to Alabama, coming on the Finebaum show (as does his [Dooley's] wife), and now there is the Saban family-Dooley family friendship.
Well, we all know how acrimonious things got between Fulmer's Tennessee program and Alabama. I have to wonder how much Peyton Manning had to do with that. I have great respect for the three Mannings. Archie Manning is the only SEC quarterback I ever saw that I would say was as athletic as Joe Namath was. Archie could run circles around his sons, and he was just about as good a passer.
The Georgia Tech thing got way out of hand, and I don't think that the peace has ever been made. The Granning incident -- Darwin Holt's forearm through Chick Granning's facemask -- aroused Furman Bisher who reacted by writing a piece for The Saturday Evening Post about "brutality" in college football. Next, Alabama beat Georgia 35-0 at Legion Field in September 1962, and then an Atlanta man, supposedly listening in right before that game, ust happened to "overhear" a phone conversation between Bear Bryant and his old friend, retired Georgia coach Wally Butts. This "eavesdropper" supposedly overheard Bryant ask Butts, "What have you got for me, Wally?" This "fix incident" was written up after the 1962 football season by a writer named Frank Graham, Jr., in an article for The Post: "The Story of a College Football Fix." This is all discussed (anti-Bryant and Alabama) in a Tennessee law professor's book: Fumble! Bryant and Butts both sued The Post, and both won settlements. The Post went out of business.
In the fifties Bobby Dodd -- at least in the eyes of Furman Bisher -- had been the king of Southern football. Vaught was just coming into his own at Ole Miss in the early fifties, when Dodd won a national championship and the Sugar Bowl, if I remember correctly. Bisher had just come to be sports editor of the Atlanta Journal, from South Carolina, I think. Bisher had the perfect set-up. He was head sports journalist in up and coming Atlanta, and Dodd at Georgia Tech were his meal ticket.
Then this Bryant guy arrived in Tuscaloosa in 1958. He started beating Georgia Tech when there was no way that he should have. There was that famous game in Atlanta when Alabama was behind 0-15 at the half, and Bryant came into a locker room full of scared Bama players and assistant coaches. Suddenly he was back-pattin' and saying, "We've got 'em just where we want 'em." Alabama went out and won it on a field goal, 16-15, by a lineman from Lincoln, Alabama, a guy who had never kicked a field goal in college. "What old Richard O'Dell kicked that day was a knuckleball," said Bryant. "It went this way and that."
The next thing I remember Bryant was on statewide TV talking about how he was going to challenge the article in The Post, "The Story of a College Football Fix," by Frank Graham, Jr. Then there was the court trial over in Atlanta. And then Bryant won two more national championships, in 1964 and 1965. You see, one has to wonder if Bisher would have ever taken the trouble to write the first Post ('brutality'') article if Bryant and Bama hadn't won the 1961 national championship, AND if Bryant and Bama hadn't been beating up on Georgia Tech.
There WAS a bump in that road, however. In 1962 Georgia Tech won in Atlanta, 7-6, I believe it was. I can still see the photograph of Lee Roy Jordan, flat on his stomach, besieged by GT blockers, with a grimace on his face and his arm outstretched, the scoring GT back just beyond his reach. It was the only game Alabama lost all year, I believe. Then they went down to Miami and beat Oklahoma handily in the Orange Bowl. Jordan made something like sixteen individual tackles in that game.
Dodd pulled Georgia Tech out of the SEC in about 1963. I think he retired in about 1966. GT went into the ACC later. Meanwhile Furman Bisher came over to see Bear Bryant's office at Tuscaloosa, as if to make amends. Bryant's secretary announced Bisher's presence, but Bryant never invited Bisher into his office. Bisher never got over this, of course.
In Bear, Bryant talked about healing up the old wounds between himself and Dodd. Dodd, he said, had taught him the Split-T, when he was at Kentucky, I believe -- just as Darrell Royal would help him learn the Wishbone in about 1971. But what Bryant neglected to do, unfortunately enough, was to heal the wounds between himself and Furman Bisher. Yes, Dodd left the SEC, and there was a finality about that, but I don't think Bryant held a grudge against Dodd. It was Bisher who Bryant never seemed to forgive. And vise-versa. And Bisher had a powerful typewriter. He was writing until his death a couple or three years ago.
I believe it was Steve Sloan who as AD hired Bill Curry as Alabama head coach. Curry was the old center for Dodd and in the pros, and then he was head coach at Georgia Tech when Tech beat Bama in the early eighties. Most Alabama partisans evidently never did buy into the hiring of Curry. If Curry could have won a national championship for Bama, then that MIGHT have done it. But he remained a Georgia Tech guy.
I was really surprised to read some forum on the Internet out of the state of Georgia some two or three years ago, and there it was, a discussion of all the bad stuff that Bear Bryant was supposed to have done to Georgia Tech and Bobby Dodd. And then I noticed how intense Georgia people were, particularly a friend of my wife and me, when they had Matt Stafford and the running back, Knowshon Moreno. I couldn't believe all this intensity, especially when Saban started making waves.
The effect of Bear Bryant was pretty much like a sledgehammer wherever he went, whether at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M, or Alabama. His Maryland team beat Guilford 66-0 his first game as head coach. The Kentucky experience was somehow mitigated in that he played second fiddle to Adolph Rupp, and he never beat Tennessee under Neyland (he tied him once). But Aggie fans are STILL bitter about his leaving A&M. And then there is this situation that lingers here in the Deep South.
