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Former Florida coach Charley Pell dead at 60
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Friday, June 1, 2001
Pell faced his demons
By Bill Curry
Special to ESPN.com
"My lil' ole boys," Bear Bryant called them in his unforgettable Arkansas drawl. Those wiry, swarming dervishes that refused to lose. Bryant was laying the foundation for his legend when Charley Pell joined the likes of Bill Battle, Lee Roy Jordan, Gaylon McCollough, Steve Sloan and Joe Namath in the early '60s. I played at Georgia Tech, and while our team was in their league and on their schedule, we were not in their class when it came to grit.
|  | | Charley Pell went 33-26-3 at Florida, including 2-2 in bowl games. |
I was awed and mesmerized, even when we managed to beat them once in five tries. Nobody was beating those guys. Hell, nobody even had uniforms like them -- crimson shirts, white pants, numbers on the helmets. Their mystique dominates the state of Alabama to this day, and dominated the South for a quarter of a century. The impact they made on the region is not likely to ever be duplicated.
To be one of "Bear's Boys" was to be made of extraordinary stuff. The descriptions of their off-seasons and practices took on Biblical proportions, adding to opponents' anxiety during their patented fourth quarter goal line stands. I asked Coach Bryant once in the early '80s whether he thought his team would be national contenders again. I will never forget his cryptic answer. "If we could bleed 'em and gut 'em like we used to, we might be fairly good," the coach growled. Suffice it to say that one had to possess a passionate desire to wear the crimson and white. Charley Pell wore the crimson and white.
If asked to describe the individuals who helped Bryant build his aura of invincibility, I would call them "arresting." To a man, each leaves a lasting impression. Charley and I might have disagreed on how to do some things, but I never saw him when he didn't do or say something meaningful to me.
Even Ward, his lovely wife, got in on the act the first time we met. They had been at Florida one year, and I was yet to coach my first game at Georgia Tech. She said, "Oh my, I sure hope you don't go winless like we did last year! It was a nightmare."
We didn't. We were 1-9-1, and one of the losses was to Florida, where Pell had hired a radical young offensive assistant named Mike Shanahan.
When I became the controversial new coach at his alma mater, Charley made a point of lingering at a social function of former players until the crowd had thinned. Over very late drinks, with both of us exhausted, Charley fixed me with a Bryant-like stare. "Let's see, you coached against Herschel Walker, had him handle the ball fifty times, and got your butt whipped by those guys when they were national champs?" I nodded. "You hung in there, and built those Tech teams to be respectable?" I nodded again. "You've got a chance," he said. "You just might get it done." He didn't have to say that, and I have always appreciated him for it. It helped in some of the tough times.
Like most former coaches, Pell seems to have spent much of his last years pondering how things might have gone better for him. Our mutual good friend Steve Sloan, now the athletic director at the University of Central Florida, told me that in his last months Pell had come to peace with all of the moral and spiritual crises he faced in his life.
Pell summoned the courage to take that final journey, which can be a sad and painful process. The enduring thing that is not sad, which will be his primary legacy for those who competed against him at every stage, is the fact that he was one of "Bear's Boys."
And his arresting personality made us all try a little harder.
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