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In the aftermath of the destructive and deadly tornado on April 27, 2011, the city was in its darkest hour as families were torn apart. Scores of businesses, homes and all those important possessions and precious memories they contained were reduced to scattered heaps of rubble and twisted metal for as far as the eye could see. My hometown had been hit by deadly tornadoes before, sure, but nothing on the same scale.

Maddox explained that the Sabans could have easily just written a big check and left it at that.

Instead, he reflected on receiving a call from Coach Saban, who told the mayor to let him know any way that he and Miss Terry could help. And after a couple of days, Maddox had an idea.

The cleanup, rescue and recovery efforts following the tornado were herculean and only made possible by those generous souls from outside the area who came to lend a helping hand — folks like the brave men and women of The Louisiana State Urban Search and Rescue Task Force.

As the task force prepared to wrap up operations and head home, the group held a crawfish boil outside of Sewell-Thomas Stadium and Maddox suggested to Saban that they would enjoy a visit from the coach — that same fiery coach who brought a national title to Baton Rouge not even a decade before.

“[Nick and Terry Saban] were there and spent three hours with them and the Louisiana Search and Rescue team were beyond excited, because all of them were LSU fans,” Maddox said. “Those were things that I don’t even think got any media attention that they did and it made all the difference in the world. I get emotional when I think about it. Those were such hard times. We were dealing with folks who couldn’t find their children and … when people who have lost their homes get a hug from Coach Saban or Miss Terry, their whole perspective changes.”

This is the unseen legacy of the football coach after his 17 years in Tuscaloosa, but the impact you can see with your eyes is what will last for those who could care less about sports.

Indeed, somebody could probably win a Nobel Prize if they found a way to accurately compute who’s had a bigger socioeconomic impact on my hometown of Tuscaloosa: the Mercedes plant in Vance or Nick Saban.

To this local yokel who struggled to stitch together the words for this longform piece that has very little to do with sports, it’s a fair comparison despite it being between a $74 billion German automaker and a 72-year-old football coach with an artificial hip from small-town West Virginia.

Apart from the devastating 2011 tornado that stole lives and forever altered much of the landscape in our small corner of the universe, I can’t think of two more formative, culturally significant events for Tuscaloosa in my lifetime.

I was in the first grade at Walker Elementary when the Mercedes plant opened in Vance in 1995 and, almost overnight, kids I knew suddenly went from living in remote trailer parks on dirt roads to running around in big green front yards in brand-new suburbs. The change was that swift, apparent even for a child to see, and the suburban sprawl is still expanding as a result.

Years later I was a senior at Northside High School in northern Tuscaloosa County when Mal Moore made the brilliant decision to hire Saban and, in a matter of a few short years, the nearby city I grew up in was a completely different place. This was thanks, in part, to former President Robert Witt reportedly using Disney World as a model for how to grow the school’s profile.

In the tumult of a time before Saban, the university didn’t have the local revenue in the form of qualified in-state students to get flush financially, so those at the highest levels of the institution opted to design the entire University of Alabama experience to appeal to a wider clientele.

To Witt’s credit, his approach achieved its goal and then some, with the methods paying serious dividends not just to the university, but the surrounding community. All of a sudden, everything had a new air of optimism. We suddenly had exciting new restaurants, the entire country knew our coach’s name again and our games were nationally televised with more regularity than ever before.

It also didn’t take long for our new coach to earn his own statue on the Walk of Champions in the shadow of Bryant-Denny Stadium, joining the likes of The Bear, Gene Stallings, Frank Thomas and Wallace Wade.

On Thursday, less than 24 hours after the news of his retirement hit the wire, dozens of people crowded around the Nick Saban statue like a wake. On one arm was tied a “Get Well Soon” balloon and a crown hanging from a string that I confirmed was once worn by a high school prom king.

Draped over the other arm was a stuffed monkey, with a sign hanging around its neck reading “TO THE GOAT: Thanks for getting the monkey off our back!! RTR.”

“I just can’t believe he’s gone,” I overheard one lady say as several TV cameras filmed interviews documenting the community’s reaction to such a major event.

“Yeah he’s gone,” I thought to myself. “Gone to Florida for a well-deserved vacation.”

As I meandered respectfully through the mourners, I couldn’t help but mutter the chorus of the Grateful Dead classic “He’s Gone” under my breath.

He’s gone, he’s gone and nothing’s gonna bring him back. He’s gone.

Still, despite the sorrowful crowd and the fact that Nick Saban is still alive, the mood was a somber and quiet one on a mild, sunny day that was far too beautiful for so many to be so sad.

At the base of the Saban statue, like gifts for rain presented at the foot of some crude pagan effigy a thousand years ago, a mound of random love offerings slowly piled up.

A day-old slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza; a religious candle featuring Saban’s face; a duck decoy; a solitary Four Loko; loose dollar bills here and there; a bag of ice for some reason, possibly for the revelers and mourners; a few of those iconic yellow cups from Galettes and more than a half-dozen boxes of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies.

But let’s rewind to New Year’s Eve 2006. I was a semester away from graduating high school and the hottest story that day was a newspaper column by the late Cecil Hurt — a legendary sportswriter whose columns in part helped me learn how to read as a kid and whose wit many sorely missed with his absence Wednesday when the news broke that Saban was retiring.

It’s a sentiment I’ve written about before but one that bears repeating as we take stock of things at such a historic chapter in our local history.

After all, Cecil had been there when Bear Bryant retired and he was there when Ray Perkins tore down the tower. He was there when the old man died shortly thereafter at Druid City Hospital and when the funeral that followed shut down most of the city.

He was there for Cornelius Bennett, Derrick Thomas and then for the 1992 national championship.

And he was there for the regrettable menagerie of coaches with names like DuBose, Franchione, Price and Shula.

So it was only fitting for Cecil Hurt to be the one who so eloquently documented such a pivotal moment in the history of not just the Crimson Tide football program, but the entire state of Alabama.

Hurt wrote: “It’s one of the most rousing traditions of New Year’s Eve, with an expectant nation counting down as a giant clock ticks away the final seconds. No, I’m not talking about Times Square. The big clock that every University of Alabama football fan will be watching today is not in New York. Instead, it hovers high above the field at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis. That’s where the Miami Dolphins will play their final game of the NFL season today. When the digits on that clock reach 0:00 this evening, that’s when the University of Alabama coaching search, seemingly dormant for three weeks, roars back to life.”

With the benefit of hindsight and having read Cecil Hurt my entire literate life up until his death, I feel confident making the argument that this was one of his most prescient columns that came one day shy of 14 years since the Crimson Tide had won its last national championship.

“[T]he new keyword for the New Year is urgency,” Hurt penned. “Alabama’s aim when it decided that Mike Shula was not the coach to return UA to a championship level was to bring aboard a coach who can. That’s a high aim, but that was the point of making a change. The object is to leap back into the forefront of college football, not to keep wandering aimlessly or even to take baby steps in the right general direction.” Will it happen? Time will tell. And that telling time will begin today.”

That man sure could write and, like so many other times, would be proven right time and again.

Jan. 26 will have been 41 years since the death of Bear Bryant, with many still remembering the finest, most granular details of the day they heard the news.

Similarly, in 30 or so years, anyone who was around Wednesday is sure to recall where they were when they heard Nick Saban had abruptly decided to retire after growing tired of the rapidly changing nature of the game — everything from the complexities of the NIL to the nuances of the NCAA transfer portal.

At 72, Saban is a new grandfather and the game bears little resemblance to when he was introduced as the head coach at Toledo just a few months after I was born.

Keeping with the previous theme, however, Crimson Tide diehards are sure to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing on that January day in 2007 as Saban navigated the mob at the Tuscaloosa airport and received his first taste of Tuscaloosa hospitality by way of a big wet smooch on his cheek from the late Alana Colette Collins. The befuddled coach took it in stride, but the footage and pictures traveled fast and became, at least at that time, one of Tuscaloosa’s rare moments in the spotlight.

“I think we realized then this was going to be a different type of situation and thank goodness that the dominoes fell the way that they did,” Maddox recalled of the scene after mentioning the number of police it took to get Saban from the airport to the football offices.

Just a few years before, some of these same hyperventilating locals overcome with joy at the little municipal airport had likely flecked spit on the screens of their fatback Zenith televisions as they hollered at the angry little head coach of the LSU Tigers who couldn’t seem to do anything but win.

As life has a funny way of doing, though, when the Alabama faithful needed a new coach to right the ship after the Shula years, fans and administrators alike suddenly wanted that same fire in their coach’s belly and wanted it bad. In fact, this reporter and Tuscaloosa native would go so far as to say that the quest for college football immortality was emboldened further after Rich Rodriguez was all but locked in as the next coach, only to turn the job down after the news went public and he chose to stay at West Virginia.

Rodriguez has always been a good sport about it and years later told ESPN’s Chris Low in 2020: “I’m partly responsible for those five national championships because if I had said yes, you wouldn’t have had the greatest coach of all time, Nick Saban, winning all those championships.”

The kiss at the airport, though, that’s what so many of us remember from that day.

Many laughed, some applauded and others watching at home on television were downright mortified at the aggressive public display of affection in the no-nonsense coach’s very first moments in town.

Some even considered it a bad omen — a relationship getting off on the wrong foot almost immediately. This no doubt spurred thoughts that maybe this wasn’t gonna work and we were setting ourselves up for a colossal disappointment. Or, what if Saban landed only to realize he’d made a horrible mistake in taking on a job with grand expectations and such passionate fans?

And if folks only took into account the year that followed that fateful day at the Tuscaloosa Regional Airport, they might’ve even felt they were right to consider that sloppy interaction as a sign of things to come as Alabama went 6-6 in Saban’s single-worst season in Tuscaloosa.

From there, though, Saban inked his first massive recruiting class in 2008, one that included names like Julio Jones, Marcell Dareus, Dont’a Hightower, Courtney Upshaw, Mark Barron, Terrence Cody and Barrett Jones.

Oh yeah, almost forgot the shiniest gem from that recruiting class: Alabama’s first Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram.

Perhaps the best example I could find foreshadowing where we find ourselves today came from this class in a 2013 USA Today interview with Dareus.

“The thing that coach Saban and coach (Kevin) Steele told me, they told me three things to get me to come to ‘Bama,” the hulking defensive lineman told the newspaper in a retrospective piece about that pivotal recruiting class. “They said, ‘I promise you we’re going to win, I promise you you’ll get your degree, I promise you you will become a better man than when you came in.”

So with a full arsenal of young talent ready to make an immediate impact, Saban embarked on a wholly unprecedented, Napoleonic conquest of 16 straight seasons with 10 or more wins

It’s a record no one is likely to challenge any time soon. For Saban, though, his Waterloo wasn’t Jim Harbaugh at the Rose Bowl, but the changing tides of the game and the fact he had nothing left to prove.

It’s no secret that Bear Bryant won more games in his quarter of a century at Alabama than Saban, but he never had a stretch of success like that. And it terms of the streak of 10-win seasons, neither could other legends like Penn State’s Joe Paterno or Florida State’s Bobby Bowden.

In fact, Bowden could see plainly what set Saban apart and told my current boss, mentor and friend Warren St. John in a beautifully humanizing 2013 profile of Saban for GQ magazine that he was most impressed by Saban’s drive and tenacity. I’d read it before, but always seem to glean some new kernel of wisdom when I need inspiration for rare moments like these.

“The thing that amazes me about him is that he doesn’t let up,” Bowden said a decade ago. “People start winning, they slack off. But he just keeps jumping on ’complacency, complacency, complacency.’ Most coaches don’t think like that.”

As reporters, sportswriters and everyone else with a smartphone dig in to churn out mountains of copy about Saban’s time roaming the sidelines and hoisting national championship trophies, the story for me is much more about a sense of community and the good that one family can spread by noting more than success in a children’s game.

Indeed, a couple of years after that abysmal debut campaign for Saban, as the Tide truly began to roll under Saban, I sat in the sun along with several hundred associate’s degree graduates at Shelton State Community College as a woman Tuscaloosa was quickly getting to know, Terry Saban, delivered the commencement address. Even by that point, “The Process” had entered the Crimson Tide lexicon and Miss Terry had us wrapped around her finger.

Little did I know I would find myself standing around small talking with the First Lady of Crimson Tide football nearly a decade and a half later during an event to announce a major update for the Saban Discovery Center. Everyone seems to have a Miss Terry story like that and we’re each better for having floated through the orbit.

After bouncing around the southeast and following four years in the newspaper business in Mississippi, though, I felt the tugging need to come home during the height of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and I moved back to Tuscaloosa after the most tumultuous summer of my career — one dominated seven days a week by sickness, death, anxiety and general dread for what tragedy each new day might bring.

We’d not even finished unpacking from the move from Mississippi that August when I went to the UA campus for a planned demonstration by members of the Alabama football team following a summer of large protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Even though this is my hometown, I was still very much the new guy on the beat and felt lost among the throng of cameras and community members hoping to catch a glimpse of the coach and his team.

With Saban leading the march up Paul W. Bryant Drive, though, I managed to power walk alongside the large group and just feet away from the coach as they made their way through campus and to the entrance of Foster Auditorium — setting up in the very spot where Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood on June 11, 1963, and defied federal authorities by attempting to block the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood, who became the university’s first Black students.

All things considered, it was a pretty big risk for the iconic coach during a turbulent time in America and in such a deeply conservative state. I knew it was an important moment I would want to remember for decades to come and was fortunate enough to have snapped several photos to preserve the memories for posterity.

“This is what helped me in my role as a leader,” Saban said from the podium to those gathered that sweltering August afternoon, while current Pittsburgh Steelers running back Najee Harris stood nearby. “To listen to the players, learn from the players, and give them the opportunity to do things that could impact social change today.”

Saban has achieved just about every measure of success on the football field and in life one could ask for, but this moment shined as a very human example of his approach to leadership and willingness to let his players express themselves.

It’s an approach founded on lofty ideals like commitment and character — both traits forged in Saban during his blue-collar upbringing in West Virginia.

Indeed, I stood with a group of reporters, elected officials and dignitaries last March at the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater for the latest announcement about the Saban Discovery Center as the Coach Saban told us about the time he received a “D” in music because he was shy and had refused to get up and sing in front of the entire class.

He told the story so effortlessly that it was clear he had it memorized and carefully constructed the yarn in just the right way to drive his point home. Nick Saban Sr. — “Big Nick” — was a towering figure in his life who made it a point to instill in his son the importance of a solid work ethic and getting an education.

Few may realize that Big Nick — not Coach Saban — is the “Nick” in the Nick’s Kids Foundation, the official charity of the Saban family founded in 1998 during Coach Saban’s time at Michigan State.

“When that report card came home my Dad immediately told me, ‘Go get your basketball uniform, we’re taking you to the coach and turning in your uniform,'” Saban recalled. “So, we turned in the uniform and I had to quit the eighth-grade basketball team until I got my grades straight. Then he took me to the coal mines and we went 527 feet deep and he said ‘This is where you’re going to end up if you don’t get an education.’ So, that was my lesson. That was my inspiration to make sure I did everything I could do to get a quality education so I would create opportunities for the future and that is exactly what we are trying to do for children [with the Saban Center].”

Legacy — that’s the point in this 17-year conversation where we find ourselves today. A successor has yet to be hired as of the publication of this column and many think-pieces are sure to be written in the days and months to come as many try to make sense of the big-picture impact had by Saban over nearly two decades in Tuscaloosa.

I’m not a sportswriter and spend most of my time focusing on things like politics and crime. I’ve never spent exclusive time with Coach Saban and our interactions have been limited to a half-dozen or so instances at community events that had little to nothing to do with football.

But perhaps my biggest regret is never having made the time to attend an actual Nick Saban football press conference. What would be the point? We have a slew of talented beat writers who spend every single day focusing on the athletic department, so what could a general interest reporter like me offer that they couldn’t in much more relevant terms?

“Aw, there will be plenty more opportunities,” I’d thought to myself more times than I can count. But on Thursday, I realized I’d never get the chance to cower in fear of asking that man a stupid question as he loomed with crossed arms at the lectern like the Colossus of Rhodes.

No, those days are gone now and my heart dropped in a free fall to my ankles when I learned that there would be no final goodbyes in front of the local media. Instead, he gave an exclusive interview with ESPN and Alabama alum Rece Davis Thursday night.

Regret knotted up in the pit of my stomach as the full interview hit the airwaves, a moment painfully reminiscent of how I felt on an April day in 2016 as a reporter working for the Associated Press in Atlanta.

Until my dying day, I’ll carry with me the knowledge that I had been offered a ticket to see Prince perform at the Fox Theatre that night. I had to work the next morning, though, and, as I did with Saban over the last three and half years since I’ve been back in Tuscaloosa, I made an easy excuse and reckoned there would be other chances.

Two days later, Prince Rogers Nelson was dead. I’d never get another chance.

While the good news is that Nick Saban is still very much alive and kicking, the feeling is eerily similar to the realization that I simply didn’t appreciate what was in front of me until it was far too late to do anything about it. So that’s the moral of this chaotic and long-winded story.

It was like a sudden fever dream that came on faster than anyone could have anticipated, chaotic and blistering — enough to make a sane mind delusional as one tries to reason with the inevitable.

Funny enough, though, on a strange Thursday night in Tuscaloosa, I’m left pondering the wisdom of a quote from Ed Helms as the character Andy Bernard on the hit sitcom “The Office” …

“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

Ryan Phillips is an award-winning journalist, editor and opinion columnist. He is also the founder and field editor of Tuscaloosa Patch. The opinions expressed in this column are in no way a reflection of our parent company or sponsors. Email news tips to [email protected].

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