USC - Hollywood sees ✨ stars

CHAPTER 5 PAYING THE PRICE (pp. 119-142)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469690674_oriard.10

On the last day of August 1954, newly hired Texas A&M coach Paul (Bear) Bryant loaded 111 players onto two buses for the ten-hour drive to the drought-stricken little town of Junction in the Texas Hill Country. After ten days of brutal two-a-day practices on dirt fields under a blazing sun, the team returned in a single bus with just 35 players, the remaining 76 having fled by then, most of them silently in the dark. Two years later, the remnant of those survivors, now seniors, won the Aggies’ first conference championship in fifteen years and entered Texas football lore...