Author Biography

Monte Burke is a staff writer at Forbes magazine and has also written for The New York Times, Outside, Men's Journal, Town & Country, and Garden & Gun, among many other publications. He is the author of the books Saban: The Making of a Coach, 4th and Goal, and Sowbelly, and is a recipient of Barnes & Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" award. He grew up in New Hampshire, Vermont, North Carolina, and Alabama and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three daughters.

Review

"Saban isn't an authorized biography, but Burke's array of sources--friends, colleagues, rivals, former players--makes it feel definitive." --The New York Times Book Review
"A comprehensive biography . . . Through interviews with more than 250 people in Saban's inner circle, including players, athletic directors, even golf buddies, Burke reveals the underpinnings of Saban's success--from his perfectionist father to his obsession with strategy to his West Virginia coal-mining hometown."
--Garden & Gun
"A no-holds-barred glimpse into the quest for perfection that has driven Saban to win four national titles in his nineteen years as a college head coach. . . . Burke has written a winning, definitive portrait of a fascinating character."
--Publishers Weekly
"An eye-opening book. Monte Burke has finally taken us behind the great big curtain and, for the first time, shown us who Nick Saban really is and what makes him tick. I couldn't put this book down. For all college football fans, this is a must-read."
--Paul Finebaum, ESPN college football analyst
"Burke takes readers into locker rooms, onto the field, and into recruits' living rooms, as friends, foes, and colleagues shed light on the life of one of today's most successful college football coaches. . . . Burke wisely focuses on the man rather than the play-by-play, and the result is a genuinely insightful look at a fierce competitor who nevertheless seems to care for his players both on and off the field."
--Booklist
"If you are a fan of college football--or sports in general--you must read this book. Monte Burke does a deep dive into the life and career of Nick Saban and surfaces with an honest and compelling portrait of one of the most complex, driven and successful coaches on the planet."
--Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump and The Crimson Tide: The Official Illustrated History of Alabama Football
"In this well-reported, engrossing tale, Monte Burke has captured the imperfect brilliance of Nick Saban. Read it, and you will emerge with a deeper understanding of the man, his zeal, his achievement, and the costs that have come with it all."
--Gay Talese
"Insidery, detailed, and absorbing. Come for the chapter titled 'Why Can't He Be Happy' and stay for the one called 'Miami Vice.'"
--Sports Illustrated
"Monte Burke has written the most comprehensive portrait yet of football's most enigmatic coach. Saban is as close as the average fan will ever get to watching film or riding in a golf cart with the man himself."
--Warren St. John, author of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer
"Smart and passionate, Saban combines the ardor of a fan with the eye of a journalist. Monte Burke has his finger on the pulse of the number one coach and the number one program in college football."
--Allen Barra, author of The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant

Review Quote

"Smart and passionate, Saban combines the ardor of a fan with the eye of a journalist. Monte Burke has his finger on the pulse of the number one coach and the number one program in college football." --Allen Barra, author of The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant

Excerpt from Book

Saban 1 The Diamond NICK SABAN started recruiting in 1962. He was ten years old. He was acting on behalf of his father, "Big" Nick Saban, who was the founder, general manager, head coach, and director of transportation of the Idamay Black Diamonds, a Pop Warner football team in West Virginia.I The father-son duo canvassed the elementary and middle schools that served Monongah (where the Sabans lived), Idamay, Farmington, Carolina, Worthington, and Hutchinson--the tiny coal-mining satellite towns surrounding the "big city" of Fairmont, which was the area''s commercial hub. Big Nick''s recruiting pitch to the ten- to fifteen-year-old boys was straightforward: I''m forming a Pop Warner football team. I can teach you to play the game of football and get you prepared for your high school team. Saban, working his way through the schools grade by grade, appealed more to the hearts and minds of his peers: We''ve got football, cheerleaders, and ice cream. Both approaches worked. In the next decade, hundreds of boys would play for the Black Diamonds and the team''s exceedingly demanding and intense coach. Those boys would earn countless victories but draw very little praise for those achievements. Even years later, opinions about Big Nick are complicated and varied. "He was, frankly, a total dick," says one former Black Diamond. Others, like Kerry Marbury, who played for Big Nick in the mid-1960s, view him differently. "It was just tough love. We always knew he cared for us." Regardless of how they felt about him, Big Nick''s former players all agree on one thing: The man played an unusually significant role in their young lives. His biggest impact, though, would be on his only son. Nick Saban''s hometown is located right on top of a band of coal-rich earth that extends from Pennsylvania to Alabama. By the late nineteenth century, with the steel industry, steamships, and electrical grids in cities all needing coal for fuel--and with newly laid railroad tracks enabling coal producers to meet that demand--this small nook in West Virginia became one of the country''s top coal producers. It also became the site of a tragedy. At 10:20 a.m. on December 6, 1907--the Catholic calendar''s Feast of St. Nicholas--two massive explosions destroyed the Fairmont Coal Company''s Nos. 6 and 8 mines in Monongah. Officially, 362 men were killed, though the number was likely higher since many of the bodies within the mines were never recovered. The blasts are believed to have been set off by a string of coal cars that broke loose and rolled back into the mouth of the No. 6 mine. The Monongah Mining Disaster, as it became known, remains one of the biggest industrial accidents in American history. Accidents--and there were many--were merely an unfortunate part of coal-mining life. Most of the miners in the early twentieth century were recent immigrants or sons of immigrants who had come primarily from eastern and central Europe. They absorbed these tragedies, dusted themselves off (literally), and moved on. They had no other choice. There was little--if any--socioeconomic mobility for these miners at that time. Daily wages were counted in pennies. Unions were only in an infancy stage. The mining companies "owned your soul," as the old coal miner saying went. They built--and owned--the towns, houses, stores, and baseball fields that surrounded the mines. Thirteen years after the Monongah Disaster, Nick Saban''s paternal grandfather, Stanko Saban, a Croat, immigrated to the United States from what would later become known as Yugoslavia. Stanko (who would change his name to the more Anglican "Stanley") first moved to Oregon, but came back east to the Fairmont area. He worked in a coal mine in Carolina, a town located between Idamay and Monongah. He married a woman named Anna. They had four children, one of whom was Big Nick, who was born on June 11, 1927. Big Nick was a deeply serious boy who decided early on that his primary goal was to stay out of the mines. He was darkly handsome, with thick hair he always kept neatly trimmed. In high school, the 5''11", 200-pounder became a standout athlete in football and baseball, and later played some minor-league baseball. He enlisted in the navy after graduating from high school but decided against a career in the military and returned home, where he devised his strategy to stay aboveground: He started his own business. Saban''s Service Station was located at the intersection of Route 218, which led to Idamay, and U.S. 19, the main road to Fairmont. Big Nick, with the help of some neighbors, built a small, redbrick, split-level house behind his filling station, right next to a stream named Helen''s Run, which emptied into the sluggish West Fork River, a tributary of the Monongahela River. He later opened another business in a building across the street, trying his hand at running first a restaurant and then a Dairy Queen. Big Nick married a woman named Mary Conaway, who was from nearby Farmington. Her father, "Pap," was a coal miner. Big Nick and Mary had a daughter, Dianna (who sometimes goes by "Dene"), in 1950. When Mary became pregnant again soon afterward, the family was convinced she was carrying a boy. Dianna took to calling the unborn baby "Brother." Nicholas Lou Saban Jr. was born on Halloween in 1951. To this day his childhood friends still refer to him by the nickname his sister gave him. "When you grew up here, you expected that you would work in the mines, own a four-wheel-drive truck, get married, and have kids," says Donnie Evans, a childhood friend and former high school football teammate of Nick Saban. Big Nick succeeded in carving out a different life for himself. He ran two full-time businesses, an adult baseball team, and, eventually, the Black Diamonds. He was constantly in motion because he had to be. Life in the mines was only one business mistake away. The Sabans weren''t as poor as a few of their neighbors, some of whom survived on welfare, but they had to work nearly constantly to stay above that line--the station was open from 7 a.m. until midnight six days a week, manned by Big Nick, his son, and one or two local boys who were paid $1.25 an hour. Mary and Dianna worked at the Dairy Queen (Mary also worked for a time at a bank). Margins were hair-thin, and there was no safety net in place. When the Saban home flooded--which happened with some frequency in the spring when the snowmelt-swollen West Fork would back up Helen''s Run--they didn''t wait around for insurance. The family simply went to work and cleaned out the silt and garbage, then went on with life. As determined as he was about his own life, Big Nick wanted even more for his children and, in particular, his son. And that came with a price. Big Nick, to some, might fit neatly into the stereotype of the stern, no-nonsense, tough-love father of the 1950s and ''60s, a male-dominated era of true patriarchy that has been in a long, slow fade ever since. But to those who knew him, he surpassed that stereotype in spades. His temper was enormous and easy to arouse. He didn''t hesitate to make a move for his belt. Things went the way he wanted in his house, and that was that. He also either lacked the time or the desire to engage in some of the simplest of human pleasantries. When the Sabans had guests over, they usually gathered in the living room and talked over glasses of wine. Everyone, that is, except for Big Nick, who would hole up alone in another room and watch television. On the street or at home, he frequently walked by people without saying hello or even looking at them. His lack of social grace was magnified by his physical presence. "He was a big man," says Evans. "When he walked, there was this boom, boom, boom. You were afraid to be in his way." The women who knew him have resorted to comparative math to describe his personality. Dianna once told a reporter that her brother wasn''t "50-percent as intense as Daddy was." Saban''s wife, Terry, once told a Miami newspaper: "People think Nick is so tough, even to the point that they think he doesn''t have social skills and can''t tell a joke. Well, multiply that by 100, and you''ll understand his dad." Big Nick sometimes wouldn''t even acknowledge Terry''s presence after she and his son started dating in high school. Though Big Nick desired a better life for his children, they had to earn it. Saban started working at the filling station as soon as he was old enough to handle a gas pump. It was a true full-service station--he also wiped windshields, changed oil, rotated tires, and washed cars. "I can still see Brother walking out of the gas station with a blue towel in his back pocket as a car pulled up," says Evans, who worked part-time at the station. "He''d say, ''Fill her up? How''s that oil doing?'' The thing is, it was never menial to Brother. It was important to do it right." The reason for that was Big Nick and his demands. Saban often tells the story about washing cars at the station, that if he left so much as a tiny spot on a car, his father would make him rewash it entirely. (Saban hated dark-colored cars for that reason.) Occasionally, when he was dissatisfied with his son''s work or effort, Big Nick would fire Saban for a few days and suspend his pay. Evans remembers a cold, rainy day when Big Nick asked him, Saban, and another boy to clean out a drain that was down a hole by the station. There wasn''t much debris in t

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