Here's an idea for a Bear Bryant movie script.

Fictional meeting with Bear Bryant and Howard Cosell at Bashinsky's Islamarado house. Bear tells Howard he's tired of coaching and doesn't want to ever go back to his office again but he's too tied to the job and he's concerning about all his employees who will be displaced by his retirement.The discussion between Bryant & Cosell in Islamarado will be highlighted by flashback reinactments of the key dramas that shaped Bear's life and produced his will to win.

All of this will be based upon John Underwood's book which is a COMPLETELY SANITIZED version of his interviews with Bear taped at Bashinsky's beach house. Underwood has the original recordings and as far as I know the public has never heard them and hearing them gives you some idea what a conversation would be like with a relaxed and trusting Bear Bryant.

Here's the part of my 2013 Crimson Magazine article that deals with the Underwood interviews.

Various authors have focused upon the forces which shaped Coach Bryant’s formative years and led him from his birthplace in Smith Chapel, Arkansas on the Cleveland County side of Morro Creek to the University of Alabama on the south bank of the Black Warrior River but no writer has ever discovered the secret to Coach Bryant’s winning formula and his charismatic mystique.

Of all the authors of Bear Bryant books, John Underwood has come the closest to giving us a blueprint of the man who would do so much to put Bama back on top of the college football world. By turning on his tape recorder and asking the right questions, Underwood preserved for us to this day the impressions Coach Bryant wanted to leave with those who would study him in the future. As he described growing up in Southeast Arkansas, Bryant measured the milestones in his early life by recalling major media events like the 1925 Floyd Collins’ Sand Cave disaster or Professor Snook’s Ohio State coed murder in the summer of 1929 or the radio broadcast of Alabama’ 24-0 shutout of Washington State in the 1931 Rose Bowl. How ironic that many of the conversations Underwood had with Bryant would be recorded while they were sitting beside the swimming pool of Golden Flake founder Sloan Bashinsky’s estate on Lower Matecumbe Key. As a sponsor of the Bear Bryant Show, Bashinsky was partly responsible at the time for producing Bryant’s “Sundays at 4” broadcast replay of each Bama game. The program became one of the most highly rated syndicated television shows in America where Coach Bryant established the powerful bond between himself and all those proud mamas and papas and hometowns across Alabama where most of his players and fans would be recruited. That big old Arkansas plowboy certainly left the mules and the piney woods behind for good and he sure did learn some city ways right quick and by the time he took over the Alabama program, Golden Flake and Coca-Cola allowed him to become a master at utilizing the most powerful mass media tool of his day: the television.