The Junction Boys:

How Ten Days in Hell With Bear Bryant Forged a Championship Team

by Jim Dent

St. Martin’s, 290 pp., $24.95

Before he led Alabama to six national championships, Paul “Bear” Bryant made a stop in College Station for four years that Aggies are still talking about. For the first preseason practice, Bryant took the team deep into West Texas to the little town of Junction. There the coach put his players through a brutal two weeks that saw the roster shrink from over 100 to less than 30 players. As the story goes, they went in two buses and came back in one. Two years later, Bryant used this hardened group of players to win the Aggies a conference championship. What makes a man abuse people for the sake of winning football games? It’s more than sadism, Dent suggests. Bryant wasn’t content with anything short of success, and he believed the only way to achieve it was by developing players who would not quit under any circumstances. Though somewhat romanticized, The Junction Boys is nonetheless an evocative portrait of a man and his will to win.

This article appears in January 14 • 2000.

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