Alan Gribben's Book Review of "All Guts and No Glory"

Surely most college coaches contemplate the idea of writing a book about their sports world experiences after they retire, but Bill Elder, who spent forty years as a coach and athletic director on various Alabama campuses, managed to accomplish this feat.

Elder confines his first memoir to his days as a student-athlete in the 1950s and 1960s and his first job at the age of twenty-three as basketball coach and athletic director at the fledgling Northeast State Junior College. The school was located close to Sand Mountain, an Appalachian ridge of insular communities known for its tasty tomatoes but in 1965 deserving its reputation as a Klan-dominated hotbed of resistance to the Civil Rights movement. In the nearby town of Scottsboro, to Elder's disgust, the movie theater still enforced a "Clored Only" balcony.

Initially Elder abided by stipulated racial restrictions in recruiting his players, but in his fourth season the college president gave Elder the green light to racially integrate his basketball team. Elder began rounding up prospective African American players, hoping to emulate Vanderbilt's decision three years earlier to abandon athletic segregation. However, he soon found that while "Scottsboro was only a hundred and fifty miles from Nashville," in terms of the citizens' willingness to accept change "it might as well have been in another country."

Two of Elder's black signees and their white teammates were immediately tauted and assaulted with fists outside a campus-area restaurant, and a mob stormed the school looking for the basketball players. Intruders broke into the house and turned on the gas stove. Members of the Klan became increasingly bold in their attacks that the school's registrar suggested, "as a friend" that Elder tell the black athletes "it would be better for them to go home before someone gets seriously hurt."

Elder's prose style in succinct and unequivocal. "The best thing that I did after practice that day was to go into Scottsboro and apply of a permit to carry a pistol. Since the ...local thugs were all armed, I might as well be, too." When the team played Brewer State Junior College in Fayette, Elder had his team picked up at another location, which proved to be a prudent decision, since the empty bus was blocked on Highway 35 by a group of men with guns looking for the black players. After a local attorney named Loy Campbell was critically injured by a car bomb in 1972 for defending black clients, Elder was warned in a telephone call that "you might be the next." Shunned by that faculty table in the school cafeteria, Elder found that his applications for other coaching jobs brought no responses. Reluctantly he gave up his coaching job and left for Tuscaloosa to study for a doctorate to qualify him for athletic administration. Nevertheless, "I am convinced now" writes Elder, "that one reason God placed me on Earth was to coach at Northeast State Junior Collge and provide the opportunity for black athletes to get a college education.

Elder's All Guts and No Glory deserves a place on the short shelf of highly readable coaches' memoirs as well as (on a higher shelf) inclusion in the stack of titles recording the toll of breaking down color barriers to create the New South

Dr. Alan Gribben is a professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery