Book - The Missing Ring (B)

Author: Keith Dunnavant

This book's subtitle is "How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize." The Tide were the defending back-to-back national champions in 1966. They were ranked first in both polls as the season began. They finished the season undefeated and untied - yet managed to finish third behind Notre Dame and Michigan State, who had played each other to a 10-10 tie in midseason. This book was intended to explore why that took place.

Dunnavant posits two reasons. The first is the most common argument: Notre Dame has been the most popular team in the country since the Jazz Age and routinely places higher in the polls than schools with superior records because they are the darlings of predominantly northern and eastern sportswriters. Irish head coach Ara Parseghian decided to play to preserve the tie against MSU - to sit on the ball with two minutes left to play - rather than fight for the win. His detractors claim this is because he knew they would treated well by the pollsters in spite of the decision. He was right.

The second argument is that the season occured during the height of the civil rights movement and there was a media bias against the still-segregated Crimson Tide team and against the entire state of Alabama, the bastion of Bull Connor and George Wallace. He believes the team fell from first place simply because of politics even before Parseghian's Machiavellian move.

Virtually no one who wears Crimson will argue with the first point. Many who were not alive at the time might not have considered the second but it makes sense given the climate of 1966. All that could have been covered in a book half this size.

But the 'The Missing Ring' also seeks to illustrate why the Alabama team deserved the title, not just why the other two schools didn't. It is filled with wonderful details about the players and coaches who comprised one of the best teams in college football history and the system Paul Bryant used to create it. Each chapter has a theme and spotlights players and games from the 1966 season that exemplify it. Dunnavant does a great job of setting the atmosphere of the times both on campus and in the state of Alabama and paints colorful portraits of many young men who have become mere names in the record books but are still alive to share anecdotes and attitudes.

My only misgivings about this book are Dunnavant's tendency to repeat himself, often verbatim (I lost count of how many times he used the phrase "Bryant used this tactic to great effect in molding a team into champions" - often on facing pages), his often clumsy attempts at foreshadowing, and his unabashed boosterism. I'm aware he's an alum but if he is going to build an effective case that Alabama was robbed of a threepeat he must try to at least feign objectivity. Dunnavant shows no such restraint when he arrives at the conclusion of the book. As he recounts Ara Parseghian's admittedly gutless decision to sit on the ball and trust his team's fortune to the pollsters' sycophantic relationship with Notre Dame, Dunnavant bursts into outright apoplexy, calling Parseghian everything but an Armenian. He sounds more like a blogger than a journalist.

There were plenty of people to quote if he wanted to include the labels gutless, cynical, cowardly, and shameful. Instead, he uses them himself. I kept wanting to reach through the book and grab Keith by the collar: "Don't do it! Hold off! Show some class. Let the facts speak for themselves. It'll just look like sour grapes if you go this route." But alas, the deed was done. It's like he had driven the ball the length of the field and into the edzone and then ruined it all with a penalty in the final seconds that negated the winning touchdown.

This was the only blemish on an otherwise fascinating book on Crimson Tide football history. I still recommend it, however, for the excellent player profiles.

Final score: B