Alabama's Nick Saban: The Scariest Man in College Football

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/sports/201309/coach-nick-saban-alab...

Sports

Nick Saban: Sympathy for the Devil

Few men in sports make a better villain than the unsmiling, unsparing, unstoppable coach of the back-to-back national champion Alabama Crimson Tide. Warren St. John spent three weeks on Nick Saban's trailand a couple of days in his faceon a mission to find the soul of the scariest man in college football
B Y W A R R E N S T. J O H N P H O TO G R A P H S B Y J E F F R I ED EL

September 2013

1. I've been in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, all of twenty minutes when I hear my first Nick Saban-is-a-maniac story. I'm in the office of a man named Steven Rumsey, who rents apartments to students and runs a trash-hauling company. He's also an ace golfer. Tuscaloosa being a small town, Saban, a golf-addicted transplant, got hooked up with Rumsey, a golf-addicted local, and in the afternoons outside of football and recruiting seasons, the two men like to knock out eighteen holes before dark. Rumsey has likely spent more time with Saban than anyone besides family and assistant coaches since Saban came to Alabama and, I will learn during my time in Tuscaloosa, is one of the few people in town who isn't terrified of the man. The story is this: A few days after Alabama beat LSU to win the 2012 national championship, Rumsey and Saban were on the phone together. Most of their conversations take place precisely between 7:12 A.M. and 7:17 A.M., when Saban calls as he drives to work. But this call happened to be in the afternoon. The two men almost never discuss footballRumsey is the rare Tuscaloosan who doesn't know or care much about the game, which, he suspects, has something to do with why he and Saban have become friends. But given that his golf buddy had just won the national championship, Rumsey figured he ought to say a few words of congratulations. So he did, telling Saban his team had pulled off an impressive win. "That damn game cost me a week of recruiting," Saban grumbled into the phone.

Rumsey at first thought he'd misheard. He asked for clarification. Saban repeated himself. He just knew that while he was preparing for the title game, enduring all the banquets and media bullshit that came with it, some other coach was in the living room of one of his recruits, trying to flip the kid. The thought was making him crazy. Rumsey pointed out that Saban and his team had just been on national television before millions of peopleincluding, most likely, every high school recruit in the countryand reminded Saban that they had won the national championship. "I said, 'I'm not sure, but I think that helped you,'" Rumsey recalled. "And he said, 'I just don't know. Maybe. Maybe that was good.'" 2. Saban's pathological drive helps explain why he's both one of the most successful coaches in American sports and, simultaneously, one of the most polarizing. He has now won four national championshipsone at LSU and three over the past four years at Alabama, a coaching run unmatched in college football in more than half a centuryand his Crimson Tide

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Alabama's Nick Saban: The Scariest Man in College Football

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team is a preseason favorite to win it all again this year. In the insanely competitive SEC, Saban has been a career-wrecker for opposing coaches: Phillip Fulmer (of Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville and Gene Chizik (of Auburn) all lost their jobs after beatdowns by Saban's squad. His victory over Florida in the 2009 SEC Championship Game left quarterback Tim Tebow in tears and the Gators' then head coach Urban Meyer in the hospital, complaining of chest pains. "The thing that amazes me about him is that he doesn't let up," says retired Florida State coach Bobby Bowden. "People start winning, they slack off. But he just keeps jumping on 'complacency, complacency, complacency.' Most coaches don't think like that." Saban is also among the highest-paid men on a college sideline, raking in more than $5 million a year, and he has rejected attempts to lure him back to the NFL, where he spent two seasons as coach of the Miami Dolphins and where he could easily earn more. And yet something about Nick Saban bothers a lot of people. The rap is that he's grandiose and unfeeling, a robot set on "win," that he's a hired gun with no particular loyalty to any team or institution. His detractors have their case file. In Miami he once stepped over a convulsing player after practice without acknowledging his presence. Saban was also captured on film screaming at a 300-pound lineman until the poor guy walked away weeping. Saban then enraged Dolphins fans when he left for Alabama after saying he wouldn't. In the college ranks, he's been accused of flouting the rules limiting scholarship numbers by encouraging injured players to leave the team. In 2007, he likened a loss to 9/11. The iconic images of Nick Saban after his championship wins are not of a jubilant victor lifting a crystal football over his head but of a coach giving the death stare to players who dared to douse him with Gatorade. In SEC country, Saban bashing has become a particularly popular pastime. In January, Vanderbilt head coach James Franklin referred to Saban as "Nicky Satan" in front of a group of high school kids. In May, one of Saban's own former assistants, Tim Davis, now an offensive-line coach at Florida, called Saban "the devil himself" at a booster meeting. In an indication of the sort of loathing Saban inspires, one Orlando Sentinel writer penned a column taking Davis to task not for calling Saban the devil but for later apologizing for it. Even the Alabama fan baseof which, full disclosure, I'm a lifetime memberholds Saban in a kind of wary embrace. Don't get me wrong: Alabama fans worship Nick Sabanon campus they have literally rendered him in bronze on a larger-than-life scale, an honor afforded to Tide coaches who win national championships. But as quickly as theywemight defend him against accusations of actual ties to the underworld, few would ascribe to him the divine qualities projected onto Bear Bryant, a coach who, Alabama fans only half-joke, could walk on water. Bryant's appeal came not just from winning games but also from a winning personality. Saban has established himself as a great football coach, but even Alabama fans are still trying to figure him out as a personor determine if he is one. I mentioned to one Tide fan I know that I was back home on a quest to find anything that might prove Nick Saban was a human being. "Well, there's circumstantial evidence," he deadpanned. "But no proof." My first meeting with Sabanat a charity golf tournament he's hosting in Mobilesuggests I won't get much help from the man himself. I'm scheduled to spend the day with him on the twelfth tee, where Saban will play with each foursome as it rolls through. It's obvious he wants nothing to do with me. For four hours, we stand on the same golf tee with next to no interaction. I approach, he drifts away. I listen in, he stops talking. The situation is too fluidthere are too many "external factors," Saban's term for all the forces in the world out to trip you upfor him to feel comfortable. After watching Saban go through half a pouch of Red Man Golden Blend chewing tobacco and hit the same tee shot a couple dozen times, I close my notebook and sit on a bench. A moment later, he sits down next to me and flexes the corners of his mouth slightly, in what for Saban constitutes a smile. "Bored yet?" he asks. The next day, I visit his office in the University of Alabama football buildinga redbrick structure that abuts the Tide's new 37,000square-foot weight roomunsure of what to expect. Saban gravely invites me in and motions me toward the seating area where he meets with recruits and their families. On brass easels to my right are three framed photographs of his Alabama championship teams on the

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Alabama's Nick Saban: The Scariest Man in College Football

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White House steps with President Obama. "Want your son to meet the president?" the photos all but declare. "Let him play for me." Saban tucks into the corner of a wingback armchair and seems, if not relaxed, at least more at ease. He's in control now. He has limited external factors. I've been told that Saban enters every meeting, however trivial, with a sense of purpose, and in short order he makes clear that the purpose of our meeting is to set the record straight about Nick Saban the man. For one thing, Nick Saban doesn't enjoy being compared to the devil. He doesn't think it's funny, perhaps because it hits too close to home.

Fear the bug zapper: Saban's assistants keep a safe distance from their boss.

"It used to upset me," he says. "I would come and say to my wife, 'I'm not like that at all. Why do these guys say I'm that way?' And she would say, 'You ever watch yourself in a press conference?' You can blame the other guy for saying it, or you can look at yourself and say, 'I must have contributed to this.'" And yet Saban, now entering his seventh season at Alabama and soon to be a grandfather, insists that the caricature of him as Lucifer in a headset no longer applies. "I think I'm pretty misunderstood, because I'm not just about football," he tells me. "I'm kind of portrayed as this one-dimensional person whothis is everything to me." He gestures toward the football building around him. "I almost feel like I'm not that way at all." 3. On a 90-degree Tuscaloosa morning a few days later, Saban is prowling the practice field beneath his wide-brimmed straw hat. While the Crimson Tide players are back home or taking summer classes, Saban is hosting 1,000 football players under the age of 15 at Alabama's annual youth camp. Most big-time head coaches leave camp duty to assistantsthe daylong photo session with every last camper is considered exertion enoughbut in Saban's mind that wouldn't be right. He has a saying: Right is never wrong. It means, in essence, there is only one way to do things: the correct way. A Nick Saban Football Camp without a great deal of Nick Saban would be something short of entirely right and is therefore, to Saban, unthinkable. Saban applies this principle to all aspects of his life. Back before they had money, his wife, Terry, says, she was all set to buy a cheap piano when Saban objected. He was so appalled by the thought of shelling out for a poorly made instrument that he insisted they splurge for the quality model they could barely afford. They spent three years making $68 monthly payments until they owned it outright. Youth camp is the rare time you'll see Saban towering over the players around him. He's five feet eight but occupies more space than the average man of that size because of the funny way he barrels aroundchin down as if looking for a lost contact lens, arms straight and extended slightly away from his body, legs apart, as if he's got sand in his drawers. Saban is a fit 61, owing in part to regular pickup basketball games with staff, a frenetic pace on and off the field, and a peculiarly regimented diet. He doesn't drink. For breakfast, he eats two Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies; for lunch, a salad of iceberg lettuce, turkey, and tomatoes. The regular menu, he says, saves him the time of deciding what to eat each day, and speaks to a broader tendency to habituate his behaviors. Saban comes to this system by instinct rather than by adherence to some productivity guru's system. When I try to engage him in a discussion of the latest research on habit formation, he hits me with a look his assistants call the bug zapper, for its ability to fry all who encounter it; he has no idea what I'm talking about. Saban hasn't been completely spared the effects of age. His hair is thinning, and he needs reading glasses to decipher the torrent of text messages that rattle his cell phone. But he hasn't slowed down. As Saban blows through the halls of the football building, he has the appearance of a man being chasedby assistants, his secretary, his media team, and his aide, Cedric Burns, a loyal university employee who has worked as an assistant for head coaches for the past 33 years and keeps their secrets. "There's been two kind of coaches at Alabama," Burns says when I ask him how Saban compares with the others. "What are those?" "I'm not telling."

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Alabama's Nick Saban: The Scariest Man in College Football

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4. Saban's guiding vision is something he calls "the process," a philosophy that emphasizes preparation and hard work over consideration of outcomes or results. Barrett Jones, an offensive lineman on all three of Saban's national championship teams at Alabama and now a rookie with the St. Louis Rams, explains the process this way: "It's not what you do, it's how you do it." Taken to an extremewhich is where Saban takes itthe process has evolved into an exhausting quest to improve, to attain the ideal of "right is never wrong." At Alabama, Saban obsesses over every aspect of preparation, from how the players dress at practiceno hats, earrings, or tank tops are allowed in the football facilityto how they hold their upper bodies when they run sprints. "When you're running and you're exhausted you really want to bend over," Jones says. "They won't let you. 'You must resist the human need to bend over!'" Sometimes players learn about Saban's arcane preparation only when they encounter the external factor it is intended to control. During a lightning delay in the second quarter of the 2012 Alabama-Missouri game, Tide players jogged back to their locker room to find dry shoes, chairs arranged by position, and coaches ready with teaching material to keep them occupied during the break. A coach might go his entire career without experiencing a weather delay, but Saban was ready. His players dubbed it "the lightning audible." Jones says that while all the talk of "the process" can sometimes seem mysteriousthe cultic manifesto of that demonic head coachit's actually quite straightforward. "He pretty much tells everybody what our philosophy is, but not everyone has the discipline to actually live out that philosophy," Jones says. "The secret of Nick Saban is, there is no secret." 5. One thing you learn from spending time with Saban in the summer is that the process has no off-season. Even in June, he keeps the schedule of a man with a severe phobia of idleness. After coaching youth camp for two hours in the heat, he now has exactly ten minutes to hustle across campus for a speech to a few hundred attendees at the annual Boys State convention. He tugs at his crimson-and-white golf shirt, which is dark with sweat, and shrugs. "I guess I'll just go like this." Burns is at the wheel of Saban's black Mercedes S550, and because he knows Saban's musical taste veers toward the Eagles, Al Green, and the Rolling Stonesno countryhe's got "Gimme Shelter" cued up on the stereo. Saban sits shotgun, and I climb in the back. As Burns guides the sedan past columned fraternity houses on the arbored Alabama campus, Saban mentions he's seen the Stones twice. In an attempt at levity, I tell him I'd recently tried to turn my four-year-old daughter on to the Stones but that she had responded by earnestly asking me, "Dad, how come the man in these songs can't sing?" Saban spins around from the front seat and shoots me the bug zapper. "Mick Jagger can sing," he says, before turning back to face the windshield. "Mick Jagger is a great entertainer." A moment later the car pulls up to the lecture hall and Saban hops out, hurries through a door, and walks directly onstage. An auditorium full of boys leap to their feet and give him the sort of explosive welcome that typically greets presidential candidates at the height of a campaign. Saban's talk is a twenty-minute string of tough-love bromides delivered with no notes. There's nothing particularly earthshattering in his messagehe tells the boys they are "not entitled to anything," and that "if you don't have discipline, you're going to have problems in your life"but he speaks with such earnest conviction that his advice takes on the weight of ancient truth. When Saban talks, you hear your grandfather, the World War II veteran who milked a cow every morning, worked in the sun, never got fat, and never complained. By the time he's finished, the boys are on their feet cheering, ready to rip the auditorium doors off their hinges to accomplish somethinganything. Before the applause dies down, I'm chasing Saban out of the auditorium. He's late for a meeting with some recruits. Just before he reaches his Mercedes, Saban is approached by an Alabama fan who wants to thank the coach for signing a football for his son. It meant so much to the boy, the man says. Saban gives the man a confused look, as if not comprehending how this large animate object had suddenly appeared in his path, and gets in the car without saying a word. 6. If you poke around Alabama for a few weeks, you'll run into a lot of people who've had similarly awkward interactions with Sabanon the golf course, perhaps, or at booster banquets, where Saban often looks like a man held captive. Those close to him make excuses for the behavior. His wife, Terry, says he's shy and introverted. His golf buddy Rumsey says Saban has a kind of tunnel vision that short-circuits social niceties.

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Alabama's Nick Saban: The Scariest Man in College Football

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/sports/201309/coach-nick-saban-alab...

"He'll walk by people and they'll think he's rude," Rumsey says. "He's not an assholehe never saw 'em!" Indeed, Saban seems so consumed by thoughts of work that he projects a kind of loneliness. The duties of a head coach crowd out relationships and spill over, sometimes literally, into his living room. John Sisson, another golf buddy, once stopped by Saban's house to see if he wanted to play nine holes. Saban pointed to a ziggurat of boxes in the den and told him, "I'd love to, but I've got to sign 1,300 footballs by tomorrow afternoon." While Saban says he's come to view relationships as more important than football, he's at a loss about how he actually forms them. When I ask him how he makes friends given his obligations, he shrugs wearily. "I don't know." The role of helping Saban interact with the outside world falls to his wife, the outgoing daughter of a West Virginia coal miner who is known in Saban's world simply as "Ms. Terry," a down-home nickname that undersells her savvy. When it comes to her husband, she serves as both a protective gatekeeper and an all-knowing oracle. "Oftentimes I feel like I'm an interpreter," she tells me from her car, as she makes the five-hour drive from Tuscaloosa to Lake Burton in North Georgia, to get their vacation home ready for her husband's annual two-week break. "A friend will tell a joke and they'll elbow me and say, 'I don't think he got it.' I'll say, 'He thought it was funny! He did get it!' You don't see a lot of teeth, you misinterpret." Terry and Nick Saban come from the same hard-bitten corner of northern West Virginia, a place known, if at all, for its proximity to the Even among his adversaries, Saban is regarded as worst mine disaster in American history, the 1907 Monongah a master of X's and O's. explosion, which took the lives of 362 miners. When they were teenagers, an explosion at the mine where Saban's grandfather worked killed 78. (His grandfather was spared because he was off-shift.) It was a place where you knew not to complain; someone always had it worse. The Sabans met in seventh grade, were married by 21, and spent the next few decades movingat least fifteen timesas Saban worked his way through the ranks as an assistant. Along the way they adopted two children, now grown. They're devout Catholics who rarely miss Mass, and they talk constantly during the day. Whenever Saban flies, he calls her right before takeoff and just after landing. The key to understanding her husband, Terry says, is knowing about his father, Big Nick, the withholding owner of a gas station and a Dairy Queen who died when Saban was in his early twenties. Big Nick's passion was coaching a Pop Warner football team he founded, the Idamay Black Diamonds. Saban worked at his dad's gas station and quarterbacked the Black Diamondsand whether at the station or on the field, he took the brunt of his father's perfectionism. Terry still remembers how the neighbors came over to congratulate her future husband after a big win. As they patted him on the back, "I only heard comments from his dad about how he could have done better." Still, it was hard to argue with Big Nick's results. At one point his Black Diamonds won 36 games in a row. One year they allowed their opponents exactly zero points. Big Nick, the son of Croatian immigrants, also had a sense of fairness unusual for the place and the times. He took heat from some locals for treating black customers the same as whites at his Dairy Queen. And when he learned that an AfricanAmerican player on the Black Diamonds named Kerry Marbury didn't have a father around, Big Nick took him in. Marbury, who went on to become a star running back at West Virginia, says he was accepted so completely by the Sabans that he was effectively shielded from racism as a child. "I was very confused when I got out in the world and found out how much prejudice there really was," he tells me. Marbury and Saban became close friends as kids, and later, each served as the other's best man. In the '80s, after football, Marbury was busted for drugs, and went to prison for two and a half years for probation violation. The day he got out of jail, he said, Saban called and sent money to help him get a fresh start. Marbury went on to get his master's degree and now serves as an administrator of public safety at a small West Virginia university. "I got where I am all as a result of him caring about me when no one else did." Saban fully admits that his father's perfectionism informed the process, even if it took decades for him to codify it. Big Nick's

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Alabama's Nick Saban: The Scariest Man in College Football

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influence also has something to do with why, even after a big victory, Saban feels less joy than relief. Saban is reaching for a standard, so there are only two possibilities: Either you did what you were supposed to do, or you fell short. If you fell short, you go work harder and better to try to meet the standard next time. And if you met the standard, you go work doubly hard to fight off complacencya fatal disease transmitted by pats on the back and post-game confettiso you have a shot at meeting it again. The process, then, is never over. Wins are not ends but merely data points that help Saban assess the state of the process at a given moment. "I don't want people to think I'm not happy when we winI am," Saban says. "But there's a difference between being happy for the feeling of accomplishing something and being overjoyed and feeling 'This is itwe conquered the world.' We didn't. We just won a game." 7. In Alabama, football has never been just a game. The stock explanation for the state's football mania is that winning gave Alabamans something to feel proud about when the state was a laughingstock. That was true at one time. Bear Bryant, who played at Bama and famously said he went back to take the job as head coach in 1958 because "mamma called," gained something like saintliness for delivering his people into emotional salvation. Saban, the high-achieving outsider, is a coach for the modern Alabama. Driving around the state today you'll see factories for Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Airbus. Even the University of Alabama, once a backwater, now pulls in more than half its students from out of state. You lose something in the process of corporatizing and globalizinga sense of individuality, familiarity, perhaps even a sense of controlbut you gain something, too: energy, resources, recognition, access to expertise. The big question in Alabama, and in college football, is how long Saban will stick around. Everyone has a theory. Steven Rumsey remembers asking him once about the possibility of his leaving. Saban's response: "Terry likes it here." "I remember getting my feelings hurt," Rumsey tells me. "I thought, It'd mean the world to me, Nick, if you said, 'I like it here.' But after thinking about it, a practice field looks the same if you're at Baltimore, U.S.C., Texas, Tampa. The grass is the grass, the goalposts are the goalposts, and if you work sixteen-hour days it's all the same to you. So really when he said, 'Terry likes it here,' what he was saying was, 'That's the most important thing to me, because she's the one who's got to experience the life here.'" Saban himself has been transparent on the issue. He's said he'll stay until the fans, administrators, or players lose faith in the process, though his measures for such a loss of faith might be a bit vague or even self-serving: a drop in attendance at the spring practice game, or perhaps the failure to match another school's big-money offer. You can glean a lot about Saban's view of his employers and perhaps his future from the way he uses the word "we." The more you hear him say it, the more you realize that "we" to Saban isn't Alabama or any other particular team. "We" is all those around him who have bought into his worldview. Saban's loyalty is not to a fight song or the color of a jersey but to an ideal: the nobility of hard work, the process. And the thing about ideals is, you can take them anywhere. Wherever Saban spends the final years of his coaching career, football fanssometimes the ones pulling for Saban's own teamwill continue to puzzle over the man. Many will continue to see him as an evil genius, unknowable because he is exceedingly complex. His utterances must be parsed for their true meaning, if they have any. His gruffness is a strategy for manipulating players, the media, and university trustees. Saban, in this view, is not just a master of the game but a man with a carefully cultivated Machiavellian worldview. But anyone searching for a grand unified theory of Nick Saban should consider another view: Saban is not a complex man but an incredibly simple one. He means what he says, though he might change his mind. His gruffness is not a faade but a form of mild social dysfunction he copes with and tries to manage. In theory he'd like to have more friends, but he wouldn't have time for them if he did. His drivethe engine behind the processis not something he willed into being but a kind of fatherhaunted compulsion that he has managed to corral and direct into a successful career. There's no guy behind the guy, just the one you see, the one trying like hell to smile after a big win and just not quite feeling it. That's at least in part how Saban sees himself. "I don't think I'm complicated at all," he says. "I'm not political, and I'm not trying to be diplomatic. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, and I don't say bad things about people. There is no agenda. There's no trying to fool somebody. "It is," Saban says of himself, as he does about so many other things he finds self-evident, "what it is." Maybe that's something all the great coaches have in common. They are who they are, for better or worse. They're not phonies. I ask, cajole, and eventually beg Cedric Burns, Saban's right-hand man, to reveal his insight on the two types of Alabama coaches. Eventually, he relents.

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Alabama's Nick Saban: The Scariest Man in College Football

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"There's the ones with statues and there's the ones without," Burns says. "And the thing is, the ones without statues are all different. But the ones with statues are all the same." 8. It's midafternoon on campus, and Saban is in his car heading back to the football building. He's got a final push of obligations before he heads off for his vacation on Lake Burton: another round of coaching kids at youth camp and, later in the afternoon, a flight to Athens, Tennessee, for a speech to 1,500 people at a chamber of commerce event. There's going to be extra security. Angry that Saban will be speaking on their home turf, some Tennessee Vols fans have left threatening voice mails for the event's organizers. "One speech closer to vacation," Saban says in the car. "They're threatening to kill me. If they want to assassinate my ass, they need to go ahead and do it." Burns has the stereo on "Tumbling Dice." Saban listens for a few bars, then hits a button to cue up another Stones tune that seems to better suit his mood: "Sympathy for the Devil." He gazes out the passenger-side window at the Alabama campus. The place is quiet, the velvety green quad nearly empty. Pretty soon players will show up for practice. Students will arrive for the fall semester. A new football season will begin. Saban nods his head as his man Jagger sings: Pleased to meet you Hope you guess my name Ah, what's puzzling you Is the nature of my game.
WARREN ST. JOHN, a

former reporter for The New York Times, is the author of Outcasts United and Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer. He tweets @warrenstjohn and is working on his third book.
TAGS

Football, Nick Saban, Alabama Crimson Tide, Newsmakers, College, Sports

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