Balm for a Gloomy Bear

Ever since last spring, said University of Alabama Football Coach Paul Bryant, he has been unable to keep his mind on his work. Instead, his thoughts kept turning darkly to a March 1963 Saturday Evening Post article that accused him and Wally Butts, former football coach at the University of Georgia, of trying to fix a football game. Bryant also remembered an earlier Post article claiming that he taught "excessively rough football." Last week the Post's parent Curtis Publishing Co. took a long step toward relieving "Bear" Bryant's gloom. It handed him $300,000 in settlement of two libel actions against the Post.

Although the settlement represented less than 3% of the $10,500,000 that Bryant was asking, the $300,000 is taxfree. It will come to him as compensatory damages--direct payment for the anguish, the loss of salary and the loss of face in the football community that he may have suffered because of the Post's accusations. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service does not consider such payments taxable, although punitive damages in libel cases--damages assessed as fines against the libeler but paid to the libeled person--are taxed as regular income.

Thus Bear Bryant will probably wind up with more spending money than Wally Butts, who also sued the Post. An Atlanta federal jury awarded Butts $3,060,000, but last month the trial judge held the sum "grossly excessive" and reduced it to $460,000, which Butts accepted. Even so, Butts will keep only a small portion of his award: $60,000 in tax-free compensatory damages and, after income tax deductions, only about $76,000 of the $400,000 in punitive damages levied against the Post.

In coming to terms with Bear Bryant,

Curtis said it saw no chance of getting "an impartial jury" in Birmingham, where the case would have come to trial this week. Curtis also plans to go on fighting the Butts case "until a judgment is finally entered in our favor."

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