Another Great One Dies

Growing up I had the honor of playing against some great athletes on the basketball court. We lost another great one on Saturday night when Rick Bryan from Coweta, Oklahoma, passed away from a heart attack. We were rivals playing 5 miles away from each other. He was one of the strongest athletes I ever played against in high school.

Sports Editor Mike Strain’s blog: Bryan was a great player who had his coach’s respect.
All-American. Hard worker. Country boy. Warrior. Coweta’s favorite son.All of those things described Rick Bryan, a former NFL player and two-time University of Oklahoma All-American who suffered a fatal heart attack at his home Saturday night. Bryan was 47.Former OU coach Barry Switzer, who drove Sunday to Coweta in order to be with Bryan’s family, said Bryan was a “great, great player.” Bryan was a three-time All-Big Eight player at OU and was an All-American in 1982 and 1983. He owns the school record for career tackles (365) by a defensive lineman, ranking ahead of Kevin Murphy and Lee Roy Selmon, and is OU’s eighth-leading career tackler regardless of position.“No one outworked him,” Switzer said of Bryan. “I just wish he had played on a national championship team. He had it all.”Bryan’s memorial service will be 10 a.m. Thursday at Coweta High School. Among survivors are his wife, Shelby; son Mike, who is an All-Conference USA linebacker at the University of Tulsa; and two daughters, Jenni and Kristin.Bryan’s youngest daughter, Jenni, is a basketball standout who will be a senior at Coweta High School. In the summer of 2007, a bale of hay weighing more than 1,000 pounds fell on her and dad’s old football skills came in handy.

“He hit the round bale so hard that it came off the ground by half a foot,” Jenni told the Tulsa World in 2008. “It came right off me.”Imagine how college kids and NFL linemen felt when Bryan delivered a blow.Bryan was the ninth overall pick in the 1984 NFL Draft. He was selected by the Atlanta Falcons and spent all nine years of his pro career with the team. The Falcons learned what OU already knew: Bryan was flat-out tough.“It’s amazing to see how one person can withstand and endure so much pain and discomfort and still perform the way Rick Bryan does,” then-OU trainer Dan Pickett told the Oklahoman in 1983.“I’ve never seen anyone else like him. I really haven’t... As trainers, we’ve scratched our heads a time or two.”A compilation of injuries (including back and neck pain — and a popped Achilles tendon) eventually drove Bryan into retirement.Falcons team doctors advised Bryan to quit after he was diagnosed with a spinal nerve injury in 1989. He kept playing and started 16 games each of the next two seasons, producing a career-best 131 tackles in 1991. He once said his back pain was so severe he couldn’t tie his own shoes.“Rick was a warrior,” Falcons All-Pro tackle Mike Kenn said when Bryan retired. “That’s what made him such a good football player.”Switzer was once told by a Falcons defensive line coach “that he would take a truckload of Ricky Bryans and go play against anybody.” Bryan became a part-time assistant coach at Coweta after his playing career ended and he told the Tulsa World he was doing exactly what he wanted to do.“This is my hometown, and football has given me everything I wanted,” he said. “I’m giving back as much as I can. I’m just a guy who grew up out on a farm, and got lucky and got 10 years of pro football. The Lord has taken care of me, and He has let me do what I want with my life.”Bryan was chosen to the Tulsa World’s all-century high school football team in 1999 because of what he accomplished at Coweta.“Just a great kid,” Switzer said. “A great ol’ country boy. He was a hard recruit (to get). He wanted to go to Oklahoma State. We worked very hard to get him signed at Oklahoma.”Bryan was a linebacker and tight end at Coweta.“I knew nothing about the defensive line,” Bryan once told the Tulsa World. “But (then-OU defensive assistant) Rex Norris told me during freshman two-a-days I could be a two-time All-American. That made me feel good, that a coach of that caliber had that much confidence in me.”Bryan’s brothers, Mitch and Steve, also played at OU. Tulsa World sports writer Bill Haisten once wrote that the Bryan brothers are to Coweta what the Selmon brothers are to Eufaula. All you need to know about how much Rick Bryan loved his hometown is he returned there to raise a family when his playing career ended. He told the Oklahoman in 2008 that he owns more than 1,000 acres in the Coweta area.“It’s a cattle farm and I have some soybeans and wheat, too,” he said. “It’s all I’ve ever done my whole life, ever since I was a kid. I enjoy it. It’s a hard way to make a living. But that’s just the way I was raised.”Bryan once said his first year away from Coweta was “tough” because he was homesick all the time. But Bryan grew to love playing on big stages. Asked to recall his first OU-Texas game, he once said, “For a country boy like me to be involved in something like that, it’s just like you are in a dream. It’s like you are really not there. You are just walking down that (ramp) and thinking what in the world am I doing in something like this?”