MONTGOMERY | There is the houndstooth hat and that iconic pose before football games.

But whether there’s a bear-wrestling scene in the new play about the life of legendary Alabama football Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, theatergoers will have to see for themselves.

“Bear Country” by Michael Vigilant opened Friday at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery and will run through Feb. 15.

The setting of the play on the ASF’s intimate Octagon Theater stage is a combination football stadium and office of the Crimson Tide coach, who died in January 1983 at age 69, just four weeks after retiring. Many continue to consider him the nation’s greatest college football coach.

The story line of the memory play is simple: Bryant is an old man cleaning out his office on his last day as coach, reminiscing about a life that began in poverty in Arkansas and the lessons he learned and imparted to his players.

“He gave us values in life,” said Dennis Homan of Florence, a receiver for Bryant at Alabama from 1965-67. “Hardly a day goes by I don’t think about him, what he taught us.”

Bryant’s character does not speak to the other three actors who move in and out of the two-act play as different persons in his life.

Rodney Clark plays the older Bryant. He’s always on stage, from the 1926 Rose Bowl on the radio that begins Bryant’s fascination with football to the play’s emotional ending.

“This is written from his point of view,” said Clark, who is 6 feet 4 inches, with Bryant’s craggy face and lanky movements. “There’s his philosophy and his integrity.”

Gregory Jones portrays Bryant as a young boy through his arrival at Alabama in 1958 to take over as head coach.

“I think what we uncovered here and what we try to do is really mine all the way underneath the skin and find how deeply complex this man was,” Jones said.

Jones praised Clark’s portrayal of Bryant. “What is fascinating about his portrayal of Bear is that it’s not just a retread of his iconic personality, it is his attempt to really find the soul of the man and all of his complexities,” he said.

Actors John Patrick Hayden and Yaegel T. Welch play other people in Bryant’s life.

Bryant was a poor sharecropper boy from Moro Bottom, Ark., who began to play football after hearing a radio broadcast of the 1926 Rose Bowl featuring Alabama. He got the moniker “Bear” for wrestling a carnival bear for small change, which he never collected.

Bryant played football at Alabama, could have died when his ship went down in World War II, coached at Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas A&M and returned to his alma mater “when Mama called” to win six national championships between 1958 and 1982.

There is the alleged game-fixing scandal involving Georgia coach Wally Butts and their successful lawsuit against the Saturday Evening Post, Bryant’s reputation for alleged brutality, his disdain for sportswriters and how Alabama recruited its first black players.

Bryant retired in December 1982 as the winningest college football coach, a record since broken. He died Jan. 26, 1983.

Ken Gaddy, director of the Paul W. Bryant Museum on the Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, said that even a quarter-century after Bryant’s death, he remains an awesome, revered figure.

“He means different things to different people,” said Gaddy. “Moments ago, I was talking to a gentleman who had a letter from coach Bryant, written near the end of Bryant’s life. He was discussing the value of the letter even to this day. He didn’t have a father and Bryant filled in as his father from a distance.”

Bryant was so well thought of that families still name their children after him, Gaddy said.

“There are a few ’Paul Williams’ in there,’ Gaddy said. “We do a Bryant namesake reunion every fall and usually have about 150 actual namesakes.”

“Bear Country” had dress rehearsals Thursday and Friday and premieres on Sunday with the final performance Feb. 15.

Shakespeare public relations director Meg Lewis said the production has nearly reached its financial goal.

Tim Rhoze of Detroit is a self-described “big football fan” and director of the play written by Vigilant, chief operating officer of the ASF, who researched available books, articles and first-hand stories from players.

“We knew of Bear Bryant, of course, seeing and hearing about him on Wide World of Sports, which was our ESPN at the time, what he meant to the culture down here, and he became more interesting as time went by,” Rhoze said.

Vigilant said that, like Bryant, he actually wrestled a bear as a youth at a carnival, and lived to tell about it.

“A call went out in the newspaper for local sports celebrities to wrestle ’Victor the Wrestling Bear’,” Vigilant said. “I like to think it was a draw.”

There were script readings for a small audience, including former players. The challenge was to portray Bryant in a believable way.

“The approach to how you do him is very delicate,” Rhoze said. “We don’t want to mimic him in every move. What you do is take important elements of him, his physical presence, his characteristics and incorporate that so we have the essence of Bear Bryant.

“His story is he’s nothing but a winner,” Rhoze said, quoting Bryant, who feared failure because it could send him back to rural Arkansas.

“His determination to be a winner spilled over to other people as well,” said Rhoze.

Homan agreed.

“The thing coach Bryant instilled in all his players was to be successful not only in the game of football, but life, too,” Homan said. “He always stayed in touch with us and made sure everything was all right. He knew football wasn’t going to last that long and when you left you were going to do something later in life.”