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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.
“Those who made it through that Junction camp not only helped bring A&M football out of the doldrums but went on to great successes in later life, and, to the man, they credited their accomplishments to the lessons learned from Coach Bryant.”
Jack Pardee, who grew into an All-American fullback at A&M and later a standout in the NFL as a player and coach, says the Junction experience was all about the refusal to give up. “Coach Bryant’s major theme was, ‘Don’t be a quitter,'” he says. “He taught us to depend on each other, to never quit on ourselves, our teammates, our families and friends.”
In 1979, the twilight time of his remarkable coaching career that earned him six national championships, Bryant was asked what remained that he would like to do. He would, he said, like to get together with his Junction Boys. It was no sooner said than done. They gathered, middle-aged bankers, CEOs, engineers and successful coaches themselves, for a weekend reunion on the site of those summer dog days a quarter century earlier. They swapped stories, sang the “Aggie War Hymn,” felt suddenly young and carefree again, and, as a gesture of their love for the man who had set them on their way, presented their old coach a custom-made ring “from the Junction Boys.”
Bryant wore the ring until his death in January 1983.
Yet for all its richness and human drama, it was a story Dent and his literary agent Jim Donovan had difficulty selling. In his Dallas office, Donovan pulls out a file folder filled with rejection notices. “The subject is too regional for our list,” one editor wrote. “That was the tenor of the response we kept receiving,” the agent recalls. “People in New York just couldn’t grasp what a remarkable story it was.”
Until St. Martin’s editor Pete Wolverton read the proposal. “I’m a native New Yorker and had never followed college football that closely,” he admits, “but when I married into an Alabama family, I learned quickly about the legend of Bear Bryant and the religious enthusiasm for the game in that part of the country. The minute I read Jim’s proposal, I knew he had something special.”
Though he insists he contracted for the book with “high expectations,” Wolverton admits that he’d never anticipated that it would find its way onto The New York Times best-seller list just seven weeks after its 1999 publication, or that current interest in the movie version would make it necessary for St. Martin’s to ship out 35,000 copies in the past six weeks. The Times, he says, is now tracking the book a second time, anticipating its return to best-sellerdom.
For Dent, who has authored three other sports books–King of the Cowboys, a controversial biography of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones; You’re Out and You’re Ugly, Too, with major league umpire Durwood Merrill; and The Undefeated, a chronicle of the University of Oklahoma’s 47-game winning streak in the ’50s–the praise heaped on The Junction Boys has been overwhelming. Famed TV sportscaster Pat Summerall calls it the “best book on sports I’ve ever read,” and critics have compared it to such classics of the genre as Friday Night Lights and Boys of Summer.
“It was important to me,” the author says, “that it be an honest portrayal of what took place that summer. I was convinced from the get-go that the only way it wouldn’t be a good book was for me to screw it up.”
The Junction Boys, who freely shared their memories with Dent, have given the book high marks. “Jim wrote a powerful account of a time that shaped all our lives,” says Stallings, a sophomore end for the Aggies in ’54 who, later in life, would follow in Bryant’s footsteps as head coach at both A&M and Alabama. “People are going to be reading his book for years to come.”
And now comes the movie, produced by a network that bombed royally with its debut effort, A Season on the Brink, detailing the tumultuous career of Indiana basketball legend Bobby Knight. That is the cause of Dent’s concern. The Junction Boys, which stars Tom Berenger in the role of Bryant, was filmed with a $3 million budget, not in Texas, but in Australia. Those are Aussie youngsters you’ll see playing members of the team. Some characters in Dent’s book have been combined. Names have been changed, and a bit of fiction has been woven in here and there. Such is the way of book-to-movie-making.
Still, says Mark Shapiro, senior vice president for ESPN programming, the powerful message delivered in Dent’s book remains: “It is a story that serves as a dramatic example of what the human body and spirit is capable of when there is a common goal.”
Having viewed the movie, Dent agrees. “I’m very pleased. Director and screenwriter Mike Robe has done a wonderful job telling the Junction Boys’ story. I just hope they like it. I know what an important time it was for them. And the movie, I think, does a good job explaining why.”
