VoxVlog

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Just down the road from the Target and Home Depot in East Tuscaloosa sits a modest, well-hidden landmark in a town with its fair share of history. On a quiet stretch of blacktop just off 15th Street, there’s a nondescript home in a quiet neighborhood that once helped write the history of Crimson Tide football.

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After taking the Alabama head coaching job in 1958, Paul Bryant moved into his first home in town with his wife, Mary Harmon Bryant. The more than 3,000-square-foot ranch-style abode was built just four years prior in 1954. The Bryants called it home for more than a decade before moving to a house on the golf course in the Indian Hills community a few miles away.

Both of Bryant’s homes still stand today, the first under the preservation and care of Roger Myers, who moved into it in 1992. He grew up just across from 15th Street and remembers when the first family of Alabama was just a short bicycle ride away.

“I grew up in Claymont, and the road right out here was called ‘Bear Bryant Hill,’” Myers said.

It was a different time, a time when coaches were still a big deal but not quite the inaccessible rockstars they are today. That’s made clear by the fact that on the family’s mailbox read the name “Paul Bryant.” It’s hard to envision a coach doing that now. A lot of coaches today are tucked away in gated neighborhoods.

But not the Bryants. Kids were welcome to trick-or-treat at the house and Mary Harmon Bryant would hand out candy.

Myers purchased the home almost by accident. One afternoon, he looked at a home around the corner and came away unimpressed when the enterprising realtor said she had another home coming on the market soon.

“She said, ‘If you like this area, I’ve got a home that’s not on the market,’ and I said, ‘Ehhh,’” Myers said. “Then she said, ‘I think it was Coach Bryant’s house,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll go look at that.’”

It wasn’t a hard sell after that.

Myers purchased the house for $149,090 in June of 1992. Despite his wife Sherry’s best efforts to get him to move, he remains.

The house looks about like every other house on the street, well kept and a byproduct of mid-century architecture. The jewel of the home, especially to Myers, is the sprawling basement that has hosted its fair share of parties. It once hosted coveted recruits for Bryant, too.

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“When she was showing us the house, I liked it,” Myers said, “but then when we went downstairs, I said, ‘We have to find a way to make this happen.’”

It’s a famous basement in a way. It’s rumored to be the spot Mary Harmon hid Joe Namath from her husband after he got kicked out of the dorms.

“That’s the legend,” Myers said.

Myers has made good use of the space, holding his Super Bowl parties down there and housing his enormous Crimson Tide memorabilia collection. The basement where Bryant once held court with recruits still is home to his pool table and bar. Go out back and you’ll see an unusual feature in a fire escape.

“The story is that Coach Bryant was scared of fires, so he had the fire escape built,” Myers said. “I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what I’ve heard.”

Over the years, he’s seen cars slow down in front of the house, and he knows what’s happening. People are looking at Bear Bryant’s house. But that doesn’t happen as much as it used to, not with the slow creep of time marching on.

He’s kicked around the idea of giving in and moving to the lake, but parting with the home is something he just isn’t ready to do. Even if he were to build a new home — and he and his wife have gone as far as having plans drawn and purchasing a lot for a new build — he doesn’t think he will part with the Bryants’ former home.

“I’d probably Airbnb it for football season and stuff,” he said.

Bryant’s second home shares just as many memories for those who’ve called it home too. Spencer Burchfield bought it in 2004 and lived there until 2018, when his wife persuaded him to move to the lake.

“It was something special living there,” Burchfield said.

After Bryant died in 1983, the second home stayed in the family when his son Paul Bryant Jr. took up residence there and kept it until he sold it to Burchfield.

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“My sense is that he wanted to sell it to someone he knew wouldn’t tear it down,” Burchfield said. “He wanted to make sure I didn’t rip the toilets out and try to sell them as Coach Bryant’s toilets. We did some work to it and the kitchen was pretty antiquated, so we updated it. But the one thing we didn’t touch was the foyer closet.”

That’s where Mary Harmon marked the heights of the grand children. The rumor is, those marks still remain.

The pool out back was surrounded by Astroturf, which was believed to be a gift from the turf company to the famous coach.

“We loved living there,” Burchfield said. “He’s the greatest, or the second greatest, depending on how you judge, college football coach of all time. People wanted to be around that. Just about every game day when we lived there, there’d be cars that drove by slow and two or three people ring the doorbell and say, ‘Excuse me, is this Coach Bryant’s house?’”

The homes of coaches today are vastly different from those Bryant called home. New USC coach Lincoln Riley turned heads when he purchased a home fit for a bonafide movie star. The days of living on or right off campus like Bryant and Penn State coach Joe Paterno did are likely over for good.

When Mike Shula coached Alabama, the family commissioned a custom-built house right off the North River Yacht Club golf course. The Sabans live in a multi-million estate on the lake on a magnolia-lined street that helps keep it hidden from prying eyes.

The times have changed, but the history of Coach Bryant remains. His name still rings out in Tuscaloosa. And his homes remain too.

(Top photo: Rich Clarkson / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

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