By Mark Schipper
Auburn's tribute to their old coach Pat Dye is austere and quietly powerful, and it is almost certain that Dye, the poor kid from Georgia who passed last summer aged 80, would appreciate the down-home simplicity of the homage. In this era of commercialized overhype and the selling back of local traditions to the very people who'd established them, the story of Dye's path through this life into whatever comes next is pure college football.
Auburn has created a decal for their helmets and a matching medallion has been spray painted onto the turf at Jordan-Hare Stadium, where Dye commanded the sidelines for eleven seasons. The initials PD adorn the center of the circle and the words “Sixty Minutes” are stenciled, one above and one below, within its navy-and-orange-striped ring.
Gus Malzahn, the school's current head coach, opened the season dressed after Dye’s memorable style, in a button up dress shirt and tie. He wore a baseball cap with the old-style high front and the classic block “A” sewn dead center. The look was a throwback to one of Auburn's greatest periods in the sport, and a different era of college football altogether, the one Dye had presided over on the plains of eastern Alabama.
The old ball coach had slipped away quietly on his farm in Notasulga, Alabama, in the glowing twilight of a warm, June day. He was laid to rest at the base of his favorite oak tree, a fifteen-foot specimen grown from a cutting extracted from one of the original trees that stood over Toomer’s Corner on campus.
That famous grove, a university rallying point for more than eighty years, had been fatally poisoned in 2010 by a deranged football fan of the Alabama Crimson Tide, Auburn's eternal rival for the state's affection and resources. The lunatic struck shortly after Auburn had slayed Alabama in the Iron Bowl game, and then went on to capture the national championship, the second in school history and the first in fifty-three seasons. While the original trees were destroyed by the poison, the school has planted a second generation that they say are coming in very nicely.
But Dye wanted his spirit bound up and alive within the mighty oak that had grown from its hallowed forebearers, its roots sunk into the earth not far from the university that in many ways had been who he was. The feelings of deep connection and primal identity embodied in the last wishes of Dye are what infuse college football with its special power. It is more than a sport, it is a culture tied up inextricably with the land, its people, and their traditions. As a kind of folk sport college football is organic and personal in a way that the cold-blooded business of professional sport never could be. It is what makes college football a spiritual pursuit as much as a spectator sport, and why it endures, despite its many issues, 151 years after it first appeared in the world.
From 1981 to 1992 Dye led the Tigers into the sound and fury of eleven campaigns in the Southeastern Conference, the Deep South’s flagship league. Through all the tumult, as the autumn weather came to cool the hot country and the shadows stretched long across the earth, Dye guided the War Eagle contingent to four SEC championships and nine bowl appearances. Along the way his teams made several serious but ultimately just-short runs for the national championship as well. During those years Auburn’s reputation broke out of the Southeast and puffed itself up nationally. The Tigers became a football program that had to be contended with. They had made their state and their university proud.
Following the 1983 season, Dye's third, an 11-1 run that ended with a victory over eighth-ranked Michigan in the final seconds of the Sugar Bowl, Auburn was passed over for the mythical national title in favor of 11-1 Miami. The Hurricanes, who were at the starting gate of one of the greatest decades in the sport's history, had held on to beat Nebraska in a thrilling Orange Bowl that frankly made for a little bit better story. It was an old fashioned college football popularity contest and Auburn had lost to the prettier painting, through no fault of its own.
But, perhaps more important in the long run to Auburn and its fans was that Dye knew how to beat the Alabama, and he had resurrected the state's Iron Bowl game as a competitive rivalry. When Dye had taken the job the elephantine specter of Paul "Bear" Bryant and the Crimson Tide had loomed menacingly over most of the south-east and blotted out Auburn almost completely. Bryant—at that point the fading Titan of college football—and his teams had dispatched Auburn over eight consecutive seasons, turning the annual trip to Birmingham for the big game into a pounding on the business-end of an anvil.
Dye had stepped into that wilderness of pain and provided his people with instant hope. A former All-American offensive lineman under coach Wally Butts at Georgia, and an assistant under Bryant himself in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dye began by de-mystifying the Herculean labor at hand. The question that everyone kept asking was how long it was going to take to beat Bama. Dye answered it once, and he kept it simple.
“Sixty minutes,” he said, exactly the length of a football game. And with that simple explanation the camp fires on the Plains began to glow again.
As a former assistant Dye knew how the Bear worked. Bryant would spend hours asking questions of his fellow coaches, getting them to reveal, in their quest to please him, everything they knew and believed about football, all of their best secrets and everything they had figured out. In his apparent graciousness and interest in the experiences and knowledge of others, Bryant made friends of competitive enemies and took the sharp edge off contests that he was, in reality, willing to cut throats to win.
“He’d wear you out,” said Dye. “And by the time you were done talking, you hadn’t learned a damn thing and he knew everything you knew.”
But Dye was under new orders from a fresh quarter. His charge was to beat the Bear in battle, not to add to the old man's store of football wisdom, or to supply him with that extra piece of intelligence he would use to win another game. Dye may have loved the Bear, but the circumstances had changed. On that final Saturday of the regular season he and his old boss would not be friends anymore.
Dye was bold enough to put Bryant on red alert during their first meeting at Birmingham in 1981. Standing around near midfield and conversing before the game, Bryant suddenly spoke to Dye as though an oracle had delivered him an ominous prophecy.
“You want to take that game to Auburn, don’t you?” said the Bear, whose voice at that stage sounded like gravel run through a bass speaker
The Bear's question had been uncanny and it may have even unnerved Dye for a moment. The young coach had resolved to do whatever it took to get the Iron Bowl away from Birmingham, where it had been played for the preceding 38 seasons. Legion Field, where the game took place, was an ostensibly neutral site that was in reality a home venue for the Crimson Tide, no matter which team occupied the visitor’s locker room every other season.
“We’re going to,” said Dye, and he meant it as an oath.
The coaches had a short exchange on the matter. The Bear swore the game would not move so long as he was in charge at Alabama. Dye fired back that a man could not be in charge forever. Bear grimaced and laughed with a generosity that he could afford to offer the younger man at that stage of his career. The contract at Birmingham ran through 1988, seven years down the road. Bryant, who was in his thirty-sixth season as head coach at a major program, had been ready to retire for several seasons, but when the moment came he could not get himself to walk away. But the old man knew he would not be there when the time came to renew the contract.
It will be 1989, then, and this game will go to Auburn every other year, Dye told Bryant. If Birmingham's where you want to play your half of the games, that will be your look out.
By the way: "We're going to get after your ass today," Dye said.
Bear peered over at Dye and asked in his deep, slow cadence if that was meant to scare him. No, Dye said—but we ain’t scared of you, either. The gauntlets that Dye felt had to be thrown down were being thrown down. Auburn was not going to attempt a sneak attack in the dead of night, the fight was going to be head on.
Bear's team had won that first Iron Bowl, the great coach's 315th career victory, sending him out beyond the ghostly legend of Amos Alonzo Stagg and into the starry darkness by himself. Bryant was the winningest coach in college football history, a record he had pursued with grim determination since he was a young man. It was Alabama's ninth straight victory over Auburn, leaving the War Eagle cadre frustrated and on the edge of a decade without satisfaction.
Dye had said the right things about a new sun rising in the east, but the reality often arrives with a certain brutality. Dye's team was forced to swallow its bitter pill. But what had appeared an ominous portend of things to come would turn out to be the beginning of a rapidly approaching end.
The very next year, with the stage once more set at Birmingham, and the Tigers were prepared to kill. Auburn brought with them a sensational freshman running back called Vincent ‘Bo’ Jackson, whom Dye had won in a recruiting battle with the Crimson Tide. Scoring Jackson had been a huge off-field triumph for the program. But as the local kid grew into one of the greatest college running backs of all time—eventually winning the 1985 Heisman Trophy following his senior campaign—he served as a waypoint between the what the program had been and what Dye had built it into.
That eighty-two Iron Bowl had been an extremely tight game, with the lead going back and forth as the early cool twilight of late November dropped down over the stadium. The Tigers set out on a final drive as the clock wound down, trailing the Crimson Tide, 22-16. Having slugged their way down to the edge of the goal line with just seconds remaining their freshman back, Jackson, had launched himself over a pile up of bodies and crashed down into the end zone. The scoreboard flickered, 23-22, Auburn, and the play became an instant Iron Bowl legend.
“Bo Over The Top.”
It is an iconic moment in the sport's long history, frozen in time, as Jackson takes flight over the goal-line obstruction. The War Eagle had landed, the losing streak had ended, and Dye had made good on a promise: Alabama had been toppled in sixty minutes of game time.
A cleansing rain had fallen on Birmingham that night, and the torch had passed from Bear's iron grip back to the collective fire at the center of the SEC. It was anyone's conference to win again. The Bear would retire a month later after the Crimson Tide’s victory at the Liberty Bowl, his 323rd and final win. Just sixty days after that loss at the 1982 Iron Bowl, the Bear was dead, aged 69-years but looking closer to 90.
As Ray Perkins succeeded Bryant at Alabama, and the Crimson Tide embarked on a decade-long run of irrelevance, the living memory of Crimson Tide football lived in Auburn. If you wanted to talk Bear Bryant and the old days in the SEC, Dye was the man whom you wanted to pour a glass of bourbon and to sit down on the porch with. He was the keeper of the secrets and the wisdom. The Crimson Tide would go through two coaches in less than ten years, furiously hunting the lost magic, before hiring an former Bryant assistant in an attempt to reassert the olde order.
Dye had been like Bryant in several ways. For one, he had grown up dirt poor in the rural South, a nothing man from nowhere, as Bryant had been. Also like Bryant, Dye had won his place in society through football and, like Bryant, he knew how to talk to athletes who came from rough places and how to earn their trust. Dye ran hard, physically intense practices, like Bryant had, and in many ways he coached in the image of his mentor.
But once Bear was gone there was a final oath for Dye to keep. Coincidentally, it had been one of Auburn’s greatest coaches, Shug Jordan, who gave out the maxim that Dye was about to execute.
“College football,” Shug had said, “is meant to be played on campus, and on grass.”
It was time to make the Iron Bowl—a rivalry game played off campus and on astro-turf—whole again. Dye’s effective politicking—and the strong backing of his university against the suddenly weakened citadel at Tuscaloosa—had been enough. The Iron Bowl contract was restructured into a home-and-home series between the schools.
Auburn's first true home game in forty-one seasons was scheduled for 1989, that fateful year that he and the Bear had picked out on the misty horizon seven years in the past. The Bear had kept his pledge, the game had not left Birmingham while he was alive. And Dye had been right, a man could not coach forever.
Alabama would continue to play its end of the home-and-home at the larger-capacity Legion Field all the way up until the year 2000, when the university began expanding and upgrading Bryant-Denny Stadium, its on-campus home. The fact that the Tide chose to remain settled in Birmingham for another decade confirmed what everyone already knew: The school considered the Gray Old Lady to be a home venue all along, and Auburn had been playing on the road.
That December 2nd Iron Bowl at Jordan-Hare Stadium turned out to be a different beast; a football Saturday on the Plains that had not been seen before or approached since.
"The yoke of oppression had been lifted," one Auburn historian said, not even half joking.
The crowd on campus that day would reach a pitch of emotional intensity far beyond what any outside observer would believe was possible at a college football game. It was like the Berlin Wall had been knocked down for the eastern bloc of the state of Alabama, and everyone there went through a catharsis. The currents of electricity that circulated through those crowds, which had assembled miles away and marched toward the stadium in spreading columns along the local roads, were discernible in the ceaseless buzz and drone of the rollicking assembly.
The throngs that gathered outside the ballpark and around the hundreds of tailgates thickened into a wilderness of humanity. The massing became so dense that Alabama's team busses were delayed getting to the stadium from trying to maneuver through it. The Crimson Tide's players looked out at those charged faces that stared up into the darkened windows as their ships crawled along, and out over the the navy-blue and orange waves of humanity that rolled off like a sea, and they heard the songs and the chants and the beating drums that broke into the quiet of the bus, and every bit of it was hostile. This was nothing like the warm, comfortable welcome they had known every autumn at Legion Field.
But the Auburn players were stunned, too. Like many college teams the Auburn players debarked from their own busses outside of the stadium and walked through an assembly of fans, including their parents and relatives, on their way into the stadium. Normally it was a relaxed walk, with players three and four abreast, and plenty of room for everyone to shake hands and hug their families before entering the arena.
On that Saturday the team could not get enough space to marshal together outside of the busses and begin their walk in. Instead the players were forced out of the door in a single file, squeezing through a path held open by security guards as exuberant, maniacal fans slapped their backs and bellowed. The team slowly worked its way through the massive crush and down into the stadium. Whatever they felt in those moments must have made their hair stand on end.
The Crimson Tide, coached by a former Georgia Tech player named Bill Curry, had arrived in Auburn with their best team since Bryant had passed in the winter of eighty-two. Alabama was undefeated, 10-0, and ranked second nationally. The Iron Bowl presented an opportunity for both an outright SEC championship and an invitation to a bowl game that would put yet another national title on the line for the Crimson Tide.
Auburn was an impressive 8-2, ranked eleventh nationally, and had a shot at both a share of their third consecutive SEC championship and, maybe more importantly, a fourth straight Iron Bowl victory.
It may have felt, for a minute, like the old days, and had the game been in Birmingham it may have been. But the crowd inside Jordan-Hare was like a storm that had settled into place, pushing out a ceaseless, furious roar that cascaded down over the field for the entire afternoon and into the gloaming finish.
Alabama, apparently sensing trouble ahead—affected by the intensity of the moment and feeling that they had to punch a hole in it—had attempted a fake field goal instead of taking certain points and the early lead. The Tigers had stuffed the attempt before it could get started while the crowd thundered a deafening approval. And from that moment forward everything seemed to break Auburn’s way. The Tigers did not trail once during the game and won it decisively, 30-20. They had clinched a share of the conference crown, snatching away the Crimson Tide’s outright title, and spoiled Alabama’s shot at another national championship.
It was a perfect moment in the history of one college football program, and an ugly blight on the story of another. And these are the things that make rivalries seethe and boil over the course of a year before they can be renewed. In the locker room after the game an emotional Dye broke down in front of his players. The deep-feelings, built up over decades and released in a single afternoon, had hit him. There was too much to say, so he simply told his players he had watched them grow into men.
Everyone knew the rivalry had been changed forever. Auburn had won back an identity of its own—a sense of dignity that had been overshadowed by its biggest rival—and the school would shift for itself, come what may. Dye had completed his mission.
For decades after stepping away from the chaos of the college football calendar, Dye was up at four in the morning to work the land on his acreage west of campus. He was never far from his old program and everything else—the colors, the land, the history—that connected them.
Apart from the rows of Japanese Maples that Dye grew for commercial sale, there was that special tree growing tall and strong out of the earth near the farmhouse. Its DNA was intact from the semi-sacred grove at the intersections of College Street and Magnolia Avenue, where the university and town blended together as one. That corner, named after Toomer’s Drug store, had been founded by a state senator named Shel Toomer, who had also been a fullback on Auburn’s first football team back in 1892.
In those very old days, when there was a single telegraph wire running into the shop to bring news from the hinterlands, the operator used to throw ticker tape up into the trees after the cable brought news of an Auburn victory. A hundred years and more later the War Eagle community continued to gether there in ritualistic celebration, firing long, white-streaming cylinders of toilet paper into the branches of the mighty oaks, in homage to the ticker tape of old. The leavings hung like Spanish Moss for days afterward, a talisman of victory for the tribe.
Those ancient trees, which had borne witness to traditions passed down from grandfathers, to fathers, to sons, succumbed in 2013 to the Spike 80DF poison poured in their roots, which the killer had used at five-hundred times the strength needed to destroy a single tree. It was a minor tragedy and an ugly incident in a rivalry that did not need any more personal vitriol added to the mixture.
In a living testament to the primal feelings generated by the rivalry, and a confession that could justify a century of the colleges swearing that these big games needed to be tamped down, the unstable killer’s motivation had been simple: “I wanted Auburn fans to hate me as much as I hate them.”
But Dyes’ sapling had grown to fifteen feet in the six years he’d cared for it under the hot Alabama sun. He had told his friends again and again that when he went he wanted his spirit to live in the tree, and hover around it, for as long as it still grew there.
And so it was done.
In a simple service attended by an intimate group—the Covid-19 pandemic had destroyed the possibility of a larger gathering —Dye was wrapped in a shroud and buried in the good soil at the base of his tree. The big oak on the farm in Notasulga, brought from Toomer’s Corner, the place where Auburn’s sacred trees grow, is filled with the spirit of its old ball coach, with the land, the history, and everything that means, surrounding them as far as the eye can see.
This is a college football story to its core.
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