The Loop

Nick Saban scheduled his hip surgery around a round of golf, missed just one day of work

April 25, 2019
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Jeff Gross

Nick Saban underwent hip surgery on Monday because, as he put it on Wednesday, "I don't want to coach for one more year — want to coach for a lot of more years." But he's also got his mind on playing golf for years to come. In fact, he mentioned his love of the links in his announcement of the procedure earlier this month.

"I’ve been struggling a little bit with one of my hips, and even though they don’t make them like they used to and most players would not to be able to perform in spring practice like I did if they had a similar situation, but nobody could even tell, but I might not be able to play golf for a few weeks," Saban said during his spring game press conference. "We’re going to do an evaluation of this at the end of spring, but they say even if it’s the worst case scenario, it may be six or eight weeks. But I can still cut a rug and cut them off, I can do whatever I need to do. I can still play golf. But this has a little bothersome, and I don’t want to go into the fall with this being a problem."

Nick Saban, ladies and gentlemen. Still out-recruiting, out-golfing, and out-dancing your alma mater's football coach. It's just not a fair fight!

And it turns out golf was even more tied to this surgery than previously thought. The 67-year-old Alabama head coach went as far as to schedule the procedure around a round of golf.

“I scheduled it in the afternoon because I wanted to play 18 holes (of golf) before I went in," Saban said on Wednesday. "So I played 18 in the morning, flew back from Florida and checked in."

Efficient! Even the post-surgery statement from Dr. Lyle Cain mentioned Saban's golf game.

"Coach Saban underwent successful robotic assisted right hip replacement surgery this afternoon with our hip specialist, Dr. Benton Emblom and the team at Andrews Sports Medicine. Coach is resting comfortably and we anticipate a full recovery. He should be able to return to work in the very near future, and we’ll have him back out on the golf course, with hopefully a few more yards off the tee, as soon as possible."

Good luck with that, Nick. Sounds like someone has been reading up on the importance of strokes gained: off-the-tee.

Oh, and by the way, Saban missed ONE day of work recovering before getting back to overseeing his Alabama dynasty.

"I did some rehab at home (on Tuesday) and threw away the walker after one day," Saban told ESPN. "I've got a cane, and I'm rolling now."

We assume he meant rolling putts on his office floor.