Nick Saban, the retired football coach of the University of Alabama, has some amusing anecdotes.
He launched one on Thursday morning, when he was the featured speaker at the Irondale Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast at the Church of the Highlands.
“This has been very inspirational today, but I must admit to you that it’s not always been that way,” he remarked. “If you remember back the first year we were at Alabama, we lost to ULM.”
Saban had just taken his seat onstage with Irondale Mayor James W. Stewart, following a sequence of prayers from clerics, and he began with a story.
“You may not even know what that stands for – University of Louisiana-Monroe,” he continued. “It was the most humiliating defeat, maybe of my entire coaching career.”
Alabama fell 21-14 to Louisiana-Monroe on November 17, 2007 in Tuscaloosa’s Bryant-Denny Stadium in front of 92,138 fans.
“I think we had five guys suspended by the NCAA,” he said. “We had three additional people suspended for disciplinary reasons. We played poorly in the game. I felt almost ashamed of how we represented the university and the program. We fumbled it six times. So we ended up losing the game. Everybody is disappointed. Fans are disappointed.
“Coaches are disappointed. Players are disappointed. But when you’re the coach, you have to win the locker room after the game and try to inspire the guys when they didn’t perform very well. Then you have to go to the press conference and explain why you played so poorly. Then you have to go to the recruiting room and tell recruits that it’s not really going to be this way in the future.
“So, then, after all that, after all that humiliation, I get in my car to drive home, and I don’t have any gas in the car. So, now I’ve got to stop at a self-serve, put some gas in the car, and I used to wear my LSU National Championship ring.
“So, I go to pay the guy, and the guy says, ‘Wow, what’s that ring?’ And I say, that’s a National Championship ring. And we’re going to do the same thing here at Alabama.
