Time of Their Lives

In the recent pre-dawn promise of Arkansas' first ice storm of the season, sports author/journalist Jim Dent bundled himself, put his work on a new book aside and embarked on a six-mile walk. It was a solitary trek born of anxious waiting.

He was in the countdown days leading up to the December 14 airing of The Junction Boys, the much-ballyhooed ESPN movie based on his highly applauded book, and he admitted nervous concern over the reaction. So much so, that in recent days it had dramatically distracted him from his daily routine. His book-length tale of legendary '30s and '40s Chicago Bears star Bronko Nagurski would have to wait. He'd even allowed the deadline for the weekly sports column he now writes for ESPN.com to get closer than he's generally comfortable with.

"I'd like to be able to say that all this is no big deal and that it hasn't affected me," he says, "but the truth is, it is the biggest thing that's happened to me in my professional career. I'm excited, I'm pleased...and I'm nervous as hell."

All of which is light-years removed from a frustrating time when it appeared none of this--The New York Times best-selling book nor the made-for-TV movie--would happen. For years, while covering the Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Times Herald, the 49-year-old SMU grad had listened as former assistant coach Gene Stallings waxed nostalgically about his playing days at Texas A&M under the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant. "Gene," Dent says, "is one of the greatest storytellers I've ever known." The tale that most fascinated the award-winning journalist was the one Stallings told of a 1954 summer when Bryant, newly arrived at the Aggies coaching job, loaded his team into buses and took them to a brutal 10-day training camp on the drought-parched outskirts of little Junction, Texas. There, in brain-baking heat and under the ruthless direction of Bryant, a legend was born. "I never got tired of hearing Gene talk about it," Dent recalls, "but it was years before it finally dawned on me that there was a great book there." Successful sports books, he'd rightfully assumed, were generally restricted to cheering the accomplishments of champions, not a ragtag bunch of poor Texas farm boys preparing for another losing season. "The A&M football program was at a low ebb back then," Dent says, "and when Bryant moved there from Kentucky, he was determined to find out who among his players really wanted to succeed."

On one level, then, it is a story of a bygone time in collegiate sports when coaches made drill sergeants look passive; when players were required to practice with injury and pain, without a taste of water regardless of the fact the temperature was in triple digits; when it was shameful to complain or question the hellish rigors they were being put through. It was what was done in those days to "see who really wanted to play."

One youngster very nearly died of a heatstroke, many endured the twice-daily practices with injuries ranging from broken noses to separated shoulders and some simply slipped away in the dead of night, no longer able to take the punishment dealt by the Bear. Some hitchhiked back to College Station; others waited at the Junction bus station for rides home.

"Coach Bryant kept telling us that what he was putting us through was going to pay off down the road," says retired Richardson oilman Bobby Jack Lockett, a sophomore member of that '54 Aggie team. "But we were just kids. It took a little maturity before we could look back and have some idea of what he was trying to teach us that summer."

Did Lockett, who was among the Junction Boys attending Monday's previewing of the movie at the Angelika, ever consider walking away as so many others had done? "I was from lil' ol' Breckenridge," he says, laughing. "The only place I had to go was back home to work on some oil rig for the rest of my life. Nope, I was determined to stick it out."

Still, the only fond memory he has of those Junction days was that Bryant begrudgingly shortened them after seeing so many defectors and injuries. "We were supposed to be there for two weeks," Lockett says, "but after 10 days he decided it was time to go back to College Station."

Only one bus was required to return the survivors to the A&M campus, and it was not filled. In fact, of the 111 players who had traveled to Junction, only 35 returned.

Dent's book, however, is not a chronicle of a miracle transformation with the cliché immediate happy ending. The Junction Boys went 1-9 in 1954--the only losing season of Bryant's 38-year coaching career. Yet the foundation had been laid. Just two years later the Aggies reigned as unbeaten (9-0-1) Southwest Conference champions and were ranked No. 5 in the nation.

Before his death, the legendary molder of national champions at Alabama pointed to that oft-defeated '54 Aggie team as his favorite. "Something remarkable happened in Junction," reflects Dent, "something that forged a bond among the players that remains to this day. That 10 days also provided the foundation for the great A&M football success that was to come.