Miss Terry to Nick: “Get back in your chair!”

When your name is Nick Saban, privacy is a mere fantasy, particularly when something like a hip replacement is on the schedule. As such, Chris Low, Alex Scarborough and Mark Schlabach of ESPN collaborated on a fine piece detailing the play-by-play of Saban’s surgery and recovery. Like most modern hip replacements it was an outpatient procedure, and poor Miss Terry was charged with the post-op nursing duties.

Miss Terry, as Alabama’s five-time national championship coach Nick Saban fondly refers to his wife of more than 40 years, returned home only to find, to her horror, her husband standing in the driveway.

”What are you doing out here?” she asked.

Saban shrugged and deadpanned, “You left me all alone, and there’s nothing to do.”

”You’re not supposed to do anything,” Terry shot back. “Get back in your chair!”

Welcome to the world of Nick Saban the patient, where getting the legendarily hard-charging coach to sit back and relax may just be the toughest job in sports.

Miss Terry is known as one of the strongest willed people most around her have ever known and she fought the good fight, but in the end even she had to relent.

“I get home at 8:30 in the morning (Tuesday), and by 3 o’clock in the afternoon, man, I was climbing the walls,” Saban told ESPN last Thursday. “I had film to watch, next year’s opponents and recruits. Miss Terry was there, and she was being a good nurse. That’s for sure. But I just can’t sit around.”

Or, as he later told Terry that Tuesday afternoon, “I can sit around with ice on my hip meeting with coaches as easily as I can sitting here and watching The Weather Channel all day.”

Terry finally relented and called Saban’s longtime administrative assistant, Linda Leoni, and said, “He’s all yours.”

Great stuff.

They also go into some detail about the procedure, expectations, etc. It’s a good read that is worth your time.

Roll Tide.