Download PDF The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize, by Keith Dunnavant
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The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize, by Keith Dunnavant

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"Keith Dunnavant's triumph is that he takes us into the heart of Alabama, into the darkness and the light, and there we see Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler, Ray Perkins, and their band of brothers play football for Bear Bryant the way life should be lived, at full throttle, indomitably."
---Dave Kindred, author of Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship
The Missing Ring is more than a football book. It is both a story of a changing era and of an extraordinary team on a championship quest.
Very few institutions in American sports can match the enduring excellence of the University of Alabama football program. Across a wide swath of the last century, the tradition-rich Crimson Tide has claimed twelve national championships, captured twenty-five conference titles, finished thirty-four times among the country's top ten, and played in fifty-three bowl games.
Especially dominant during the era of the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, the larger-than-life figure who towered over the landscape like no man before or since, Alabama entered the 1966 season with the chance to become the first college football team to win three consecutive national championships. Every aspect of Bryant's grueling system was geared around competing for the big prize each and every year, and in 1966 the idea of the threepeat tantalized the players, pushing them toward greatness. Driven by Bryant's enthusiasm, dedication, and perseverance, players were made to believe in their team and themselves. Led by the electrifying force of quarterback Kenny "Snake" Stabler and one of the most punishing defenses in the storied annals of the Southeastern Conference, the Crimson Tide cruised to a magical season, finishing as the nation's only undefeated, untied team. But something happened on the way to the history books.
The Missing Ring is the story of the one that got away, the one that haunts Alabama fans still, and native Alabamian Keith Dunnavant takes readers deep inside the Crimson Tide program during a more innocent time, before widespread telecasting, before scholarship limitations, before end-zone dances. Meticulously revealing the strategies, tactics, and personal dramas that bring the overachieving boys of 1966 to life, Dunnavant's insightful, anecdotally rich narrative shows how Bryant molded a diverse group of young men into a powerful force that overcame various obstacles to achieve perfection in an imperfect world.
Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the still-escalating Vietnam War, and a world and a sport teetering on the brink of change in a variety of ways, The Missing Ring tells an important story about the collision between football and culture. Ultimately, it is this clash that produces the Crimson Tide's most implacable foe, enabling the greatest injustice in college football history.
"Keith Dunnavant has written yet another fabulous book about the fabled Alabama football program. You will be amazed at how one of the great injustices in the history of college football cost them their rightful place in history. And you just thought the system was screwed up now."
---Jim Dent, author of The Junction Boys
"Keith Dunnavant nails it: all the sacrifices the 1966 Alabama team made to win three national championships in a row, and how we were robbed at the ballot box."
---Jerry Duncan, one of the boys of 1966
"Dunnavant infuses reportage and passion into a tale that every Alabamian of a certain age knows: For all the crying about Penn State in 1969, Penn State in 1994, or Auburn in 2004, no team ever got shafted the way the 1966 Crimson Tide did. It's all here: the churning legs, the churning stomachs, and the dreaded gym classes where Bear Bryant's boys made the sacrifices he demanded in order to become champions. They conquered their opponents on the field, but proved to be no match for the politics of the day off the field. The '66 Tide is still waiting for the Missing Ring. Thanks to Dunnavant, we don't have to."
---Ivan Maisel, senior writer, ESPN.com, and co-author of A War in Dixie
"Absolutely stunning. The Missing Ring left me breathless. Keith Dunnavant has proven again why he is one of America's greatest sports authors and historians. With so much having been written about Bryant and Alabama, I had my doubts going into this book that there was something I didn't know or hadn't read. Yet Dunnavant has managed to strike gold with The Missing Ring in every way and shape imaginable. His quiet prose goes down as effortlessly as bourbon and branch water. Fans of college football will marvel at his painstaking research. Dunnavant turned the clock back forty years and it was 1966 all over again. The pain and the glory, the pride and the prejudice, all brought to life in the pages of this extraordinary book."
---Paul Finebaum, Paul Finebaum Radio Network
- Sales Rank: #765570 in Books
- Published on: 2007-08-21
- Released on: 2007-08-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .79" w x 6.00" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Publishers Weekly
During the turbulent battles over issues such as civil rights and Vietnam in the mid-1960s, the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide football team, led by legendary coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, had its own cause—becoming the first team in modern college history to win the national championship for three straight years. In this solid if somewhat overlong study of the Tide's quest, Dunnavant expands upon his earlier Bryant biography, Coach, to explore how national politics and collegiate sports inevitably collided. While the bulk of the book delivers insightful profiles of the team's working-class players and fast-paced looks at the team's unbeaten season, it also convincingly argues that Alabama's image as reflecting "establishment America" was skewed by "the poisonous climate" of Gov. George Wallace's segregationist policies. But in a provocative account of a late-season meeting with Notre Dame, Dunnavant names his story's true villains: Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian, who, as Dunnavant sees it, played for a tie, sitting "on the ball to avoid a turnover" instead of playing to win—"the most cynical act in college football history"—and the sportswriters who voted "media darling" Notre Dame the national champion over a team from "a state seen by many Americans as a national pariah." (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
This book fortunately is more than its title would imply, being a deeper, broader portrait of the celebrated but flawed University of Alabama football teams coached by Bear Bryant in the mid-1960s. While author Dunnavant, who has already written a full biography of Bryant (Coach, 1996), ostensibly focuses on that 1967 team--a group that was undefeated but was, controversially, segregated--he reveals the sheer willfulness that marked Bryant's teams over the coach's 25-season tenure. The author also places that 1967 season into rich historical context, which saw the state of Alabama and its governor, George Wallace, vainly leading the fight nationwide against civil rights. Dunnavant too readily excuses Bryant, who abided the segregation, for his role in that system. But he makes clear that segregation probably cost the undefeated Tide the 1967 championship to Notre Dame, which tied one game that season by letting the clock run out rather than having the valor to go for the win. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Keith Dunnavant has written yet another fabulous book about the fabled Alabama football program. You will be amazed at how one of the great injustices in the history of college football cost them their rightful place in history. And you just thought the system was screwed up now.” ―Jim Dent, author of The Junction Boys
“Keith Dunnavant nails it: all the sacrifices the 1966 Alabama team made to win three national championships in a row, and how we were robbed at the ballot box.” ―Jerry Duncan, one of the boys of 1966
“Dunnavant infuses reportage and passion into a tale that every Alabamian of a certain age knows: For all the crying about Penn State in 1969, Penn State in 1994, or Auburn in 2004, no team ever got shafted the way the 1966 Crimson Tide did. It's all here: the churning legs, the churning stomachs, and the dreaded gym classes where Bear Bryant's boys made the sacrifices he demanded in order to become champions. They conquered their opponents on the field, but proved to be no match for the politics of the day off the field. The '66 Tide is still waiting for the Missing Ring. Thanks to Dunnavant, we don't have to.” ―Ivan Maisel, senior writer, ESPN.com, and co-author of A War in Dixie
“Absolutely stunning. The Missing Ring left me breathless. Keith Dunnavant has proven again why he is one of America's greatest sports authors and historians. With so much having been written about Bryant and Alabama, I had my doubts going into this book that there was something I didn't know or hadn't read. Yet Dunnavant has managed to strike gold with The Missing Ring in every way and shape imaginable. His quiet prose goes down as effortlessly as bourbon and branch water. Fans of college football will marvel at his painstaking research. Dunnavant turned the clock back forty years and it was 1966 all over again. The pain and the glory, the pride and the prejudice, all brought to life in the pages of this extraordinary book.” ―Paul Finebaum, Paul Finebaum Radio Network
Most helpful customer reviews
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
I Played On This Team
By Mike Hall
I am a member of the 1966 Alabama football team.
I strongly recommend reading this book. The author is to be commended for his accurate account of the factual information presented. For me, the book iterated 40 year old memories of the '66 season in a manner that seemed as though they happened yesterday. Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down.
Keith Dunnavant's research and presentation of the story is complete and impeccable. He brought a ball club from a FOOTNOTE to the SPOTLIGHT!!
Mike Hall
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Required reading for player vignettes
By J. SHARP
This book's subtitle is "How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize." The Tide were the defending back-to-back national champions in 1966. They were ranked first in both polls as the season began. They finished the season undefeated and untied - yet managed to end up ranked third behind Notre Dame and Michigan State, who had played each other to a 10-10 tie in the regular season. This book was intended to explore why that took place.
Dunnavant posits two reasons. The first is the most common argument: Notre Dame has been the most popular team in the country since the Jazz Age and routinely places higher in the polls than schools with superior records because they are the darlings of predominantly northern and eastern sportswriters. Irish head coach Ara Parseghian decided to play to preserve the tie against MSU - to sit on the ball with two minutes left to play - rather than fight for the win. His detractors claim this is because he knew they would be treated well by the pollsters in spite of the decision. He was right.
The second argument is that the season occured during the height of the civil rights movement and there was a media bias against the still-segregated Crimson Tide team and against the entire state of Alabama, the bastion of Bull Connor and George Wallace. He believes the team fell from first place simply because of politics even before Parseghian's Machiavellian move.
Virtually no one who wears Crimson will argue with the first point. Many who were not alive at the time might not have considered the second but it makes sense given the climate of 1966. All that could have been covered in a book half this size.
But the 'The Missing Ring' also seeks to illustrate why the Alabama team deserved the title, not just why the other two schools didn't. It is filled with wonderful details about the players and coaches who comprised one of the best teams in college football history and the system Paul Bryant used to create it. Each chapter has a theme and spotlights players and games from the 1966 season that exemplify it. Dunnavant does a great job of setting the atmosphere of the times both on campus and in the state of Alabama and paints colorful portraits of many young men who have become mere names in the record books but are still alive to share anecdotes and attitudes.
My only misgivings about this book are Dunnavant's tendency to repeat himself, often verbatim (I lost count of how many times he used the phrase "Bryant used this tactic to great effect in molding a team into champions" - often on facing pages), his often clumsy attempts at foreshadowing, and his unabashed boosterism. I'm aware he's an alum (although that fact is mentioned nowhere in the book or on it's dustjacket) but if he is going to build an effective case that Alabama was robbed of a threepeat he must try to at least feign objectivity. Dunnavant shows no such restraint when he arrives at the conclusion of the book. As he recounts Ara Parseghian's admittedly gutless decision to sit on the ball and trust his team's fortune to the pollsters' sycophantic relationship with Notre Dame, Dunnavant bursts into outright apoplexy, calling Parseghian everything but an Armenian-American football coach. He sounds more like a blogger than a journalist.
There were plenty of people to quote if he wanted to include the (accurate) labels gutless, cynical, cowardly, and shameful. Instead, he uses them himself. I kept wanting to reach through the book and grab Keith by the collar: "Don't do it! Hold off! Show some class. Let the facts speak for themselves. It'll just look like sour grapes if you go this route." But alas, the deed was done. It's like he had driven the ball the length of the field and into the edzone and then ruined it all with a penalty in the final seconds that negated the winning touchdown.
This was the only blemish on an otherwise fascinating book on Crimson Tide football history. I still recommend it, however, for the excellent player profiles.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A Different and Fascinating View of a Difficult Time
By John Matlock
We like to think of sports as being something pure and simple, but of course it isn't. From Hitler determined to show the world the superiority of the Aryan race (and being foiled by Jessee Owens) to the boycotts of the Summer Olympics by the United States in 1980 and by the Soviet Union in 1984, real world politics has intruded into the sports arena.
In this book Mr. Dunnavant writes about the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide coached by Bear Bryant and having arguably the best football team in the country. Despite having an undefeated season, they were not awarded the national championship.
The reason, according to Mr. Dunnavant was that the university got caught up in the integration battles of the time. Alabama had an all-white segregated team. And they were denied the championship. True? Quite possibly. Fair? Depends upon your point of view. You have to ask, if you were an African-American how would you have voted. And I note that in the pictures in the middle of the book there is not one of George Wallace refusing to admit negro (the word at the time) students to the university.
A fascinating book looking at that time in our history through a different set of glasses.
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