Like father, like son
2 famous Nick Sabans
Matt Hayes of the Bleacher Report
wrote this article about Nick Saban that the nation didn’t know about although
it’s old news for Monongah High and Marion Countians.
Brother is far, far more than just the most successful coach alive in college football. But Lions know that. More and more, the rest of the country is learning about it.
Here it is:
MONONGAH, West Virginia —He found the five garages nearly
45 years ago, tucked behind old houses on a stretch of Miner's Row. Five
garages packed floor to ceiling with what appeared to be useless throwaways to
just about everyone else but would come to mean everything to the young
man who had just driven home to bury his father.
No one knew about the garages and what his father had stored in
them, Alabama coach Nick Saban says now. But
he was determined to find out.
Times were tough in the early 1970s in those small mining towns
up and down State Road 218. There were strikes at the mine, and when you're
trying to raise a family and there's no food on the table and nothing makes
sense anymore, there was always Nick Saban Sr.'s Gulf service station on the
corner of State Road 218 and U.S. 19.
It may as well have been a bank.
"I walk in those garages, and there's tags on junk
everywhere," Saban says. "An old bald tire had a tag that read, 'Bob
Moore, $5.' That thing wasn't worth a nickel. He was taking people's junk and
giving them money to survive."
And no one ever knew, Saban is asked. Not even his father’s
wife?
"He didn't want any attention," Saban says.
As Alabama begins yet another postseason in the College Football
Playoff, Saban doesn't like to talk about the millions he and his wife Terry
have raised for his charity, Nick's Kids, or the 17 houses he built for victims
of the Tuscaloosa tornado of 2011, or rehash the countless stories of helping
others and changing lives for the better. The story, he says, is those who need
help, not how they get it.
Just when you think you have the Death Star of college football
all figured out, that he's an obsessive, controlling, meticulous perfectionist,
along comes a refreshing reality to knock it all sideways.
"If I break down crying while I'm talking about Nick Saban
and his dad, well, I'm not a damn bit ashamed of it," says Tom Hulderman,
a childhood friend of Saban’s. "That's how much those two men have meant
to me and so many others."
Twice a year, Hulderman finds his way to Mount Calvary Cemetery.
Once there, in his mind's eye, he still sees the line out the church door for
the funeral mass 44 years ago and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd at the burial.
He still feels the pain of a community rocked to its core from a sudden,
sickening loss when a 46-year-old Nick Saban Sr. dropped dead of a heart attack
while jogging home one evening.
Right up on that small hillside and across the street from those
garages is the gravesite of Nick Sr. On each visit, Hulderman wipes the
headstone perfectly clean and places flowers in front of the black granite
stone that reads, No man stands as tall as when he stoops to help a child.
"Not a day goes by where I don't think of him," Saban
says of his father. "We were inseparable; we did everything together.
Sometimes I think, 'Would he be proud of what we've accomplished?'"
He stops mid-sentence, pursing his lips and tapping his finger
on the arm of his chair in his palatial office overlooking the football kingdom
he has built at Alabama. He swallows hard to continue, because no matter where
and how his life has evolved or how successful he has become as a football
coach, he's still a 22-year-old who lost his father way too young.
"I think he'd be more proud," Saban says, "by
what we've accomplished away from the game of football."
Nick Saban calls Willie Criado every June 11 to wish him happy
birthday, a fond connection releasing a flood of emotions. Most recently, Saban
went all 21st century for Willie's 90th birthday, using FaceTime to talk to his
dad's best friend.
"Bet you didn't think [Saban] would, what's it called, face
what? With a 90-year-old man," Criado says with a laugh. "He calls
all the time to see how I'm doing, and I'm sure a lot of that is because of the
connection to his dad. That boy loved his father like no one else."
Willie and Nick Sr. were born on the same day in 1927, grew up
and went to school together. And in 1962, with kids scattered all across those
small mining towns and little to do but wait for the fallout from the next mine
strike, Nick Sr. and Willie decided to start a local Pop Warner team. They were
called the Black Diamonds, a nod to the rich earth mined beneath their feet.
Nick Sr. bought an old school bus, fixed the carburetor, painted
it and drove it up and down 218 to pick up kids and take them to the field.
They'd practice all afternoon, and he would drive them back home at night,
sometimes pulling into his own driveway at 9 p.m.—with Nick Jr., who everyone
called Brother, always in the front seat.
Nick Sr. bought the equipment and uniforms, the cleats and
balls. He paid for travel and food.
They didn't win a game in year one, won half of their games in
year two. By the third season, they weren't scored upon and their opponents
didn't cross the 35-yard line. They eventually won two Pop Warner state titles
and had a 36-game winning streak.
"The happiest I have ever been playing football," says
Kerry Marbury, one of the all-time greats in college at West Virginia who
played with Nick Jr. and Hulderman on the Diamonds. "He taught you about
life, about the responsibility of becoming a man and doing the right thing. He
had slogans on the inside of the bus, and the one I remember the most was
'treat people kindly on the way up because you might need them on the way
down.'"
Earlier this summer, a day before Alabama would begin fall camp
in its quest for a fourth straight appearance in the College Football Playoff,
Saban was walking around the north end-zone suites at Bryant-Denny Stadium with
a smile as wide as the expectations in Tuscaloosa. The annual Nick's Kids
Foundation event was in full swing and later distributed more than $500,000 to
150 charities.
Since arriving at Alabama in 2007, Nick's Kids has raised more
than $7 million for charities in the state of Alabama and the Southeast. Saban
later said the event is "my favorite day of the year."
"This is who he is; it's who his dad was," says Sid
Popovich, Saban's uncle and a father figure of sorts for Saban since his father
died. "It was never about coaching for Nick's dad. He just wanted those
kids to have a better life. That's Brother, too."
Don't get Joe Manchin started. He knows the side of Nick Saban
few get to see. So when pressed about it, he opens up.
Years ago, before Manchin was governor of the state of West Virginia
or its U.S. senator, and long before Saban was synonymous with championship
football, they came home one summer and decided to go bale hay at a local farm.
The farmers needed help, and for two boys who grew up on the back roads of 218,
that's what you do when someone needs help.
It didn't take long to figure out why the farmers needed help.
The place was a mess, and those working the farm—"a couple of mountain
boys from our hills," Manchin says—were, too. Saban found empty liquor
bottles hidden in tree after tree, and soon enough, the workers were nowhere to
be found.
"Brother just laughed and said, 'Hey, we gotta help this
[farmer] out,'" Manchin says. "People say to me, 'Nick Saban? He
looks like he's never happy.' No, this is the Nick Saban I know: He is a
beautiful person with a beautiful heart.
"I can't tell you how many times I get a call from him and
he'll say, 'Go check on so and so; I hear he's having a tough time.' He still
cares about the people he grew up with, or the kid who never got the opportunity
he did."
Like the child in Fairmont, West Virginia, fighting brain
cancer, his family driving back and forth to Boston for treatment and running
out of money. Dave Fazio, equipment manager for the Diamonds and Saban's friend
from childhood, was part of a group raising funds for the child and did what
needed to be done: He called Saban.
"Two days later, a big package landed on my porch: an
autographed football helmet, pieces of expensive jewelry, a book about the
history of Alabama football, hats, shirts, everything," Fazio says, all of
which was sold to raise money for the family. "He doesn't just do it for
me, he does it for a lot of people around here, but you never hear about
it."
After Saban's best friend Marbury fell on hard times,
violated probation and served a brief stint in prison, Saban and his wife Terry
had a letter and a check waiting for him the day he walked out of prison.
"I went right back to school, got my degree and then got my
master's," Marbury says.
He later became a professor and worked for years at Fairmont
State but has been battling prostate cancer, off and on, for almost nine years.
"If the cancer doesn't get you, the worrying about the
bills will," Marbury says. "But anything I need, Nick is always there
for me. It gives me the will to want to live when someone wants you to."
A year from now, they'll celebrate the 50th anniversary of one
of the biggest sporting events to ever happen in this area. Saban, Hulderman
and Marbury were stars on Monongah High's 1968 state championship football
team, a group they still talk about here, a group that galvanized all of those
small mining towns and gave them something to cheer about. More than WVU up the
road. More than that then-terrible Steelers team in Pittsburgh.
This was their team, their love, their passion. Saban was the
quarterback and called his own plays. Of the 31 players on offense, Hulderman
says 28 either still live in West Virginia...or are buried here. So when the
mines lost jobs and families stopped settling and the four high schools in
Marion County consolidated into one, Monongah Lions history slipped away and
North Marion High School was born.
North Marion had been fundraising for more than a year to
complete a renovation of the football fieldhouse, construction that will bring
the facility up to date and as good or better than any other high school
facility in the state. When the fundraising hit a lull late last month, Saban
wrote a check for $13,000 to complete the effort—and the Nick Saban Sr. weight
room was born.
"Things like that mean everything to everyone in this
area," Hulderman says. "The weight room is terrific for those boys.
Brother will never turn his back on his home. You can't put a price on
that."
Alabama will play Clemson on Monday in a CFP semifinal, and the
Tide are two games from Saban's fifth national title since 2009. Early last
month, three more Saban assistant coaches accepted FBS head coaching jobs,
bringing the number to 10 for those who have made similar leaps since 2015.
After a big push in the early national signing period two weeks
ago, the Tide are poised to have another top-five recruiting class and possibly
another No. 1 class. The machine keeps churning and moving, and the wins keep
piling up—while what's truly important is never too far from reach.
"For my dad, it was always what kind of person are you?
What kind of compassion do you have for others?" Saban says. He leans back
and folds his arms and looks in the distance. The 22-year-old who lost his
father much too young is never too far away.
"Every son wants to fulfill his dad's hopes and dreams,''
Saban says. "I hope I have.''
