Alabama coach Nick Saban once put me in a headlock. Time to tell the story | Goodbread

Nick Saban put me in a loose headlock, stuck his right leg out in front of my knees, and began to pull me across him, initiating something akin to a hip toss without executing the wrestling move to completion. In the moment, I appreciated being released and not flipped onto my back.

The Alabama football coach, who retired Wednesday, might've been fully capable of it. After all, Saban was still in his 50s at the time, long before his hip replacement surgery, and I was a good 30 pounds lighter than I am today.

My first thought? What had I gotten myself into covering Alabama football, anyway?

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I had met the man for the first time about two minutes earlier, around the 10-yard line near Bryant-Denny Stadium's North end zone. It was Fan Day in August, 2007, ahead of Saban's first fall camp at Alabama, back when Fan Day included a 20-minute opportunity for media to interview almost any player on the BDS turf. But as the new face on the beat covering Alabama football, I made a beeline straight for Saban, having never met him before.

And what better way to crack an introduction to a coach than to bring up one of his former players? I had previously covered the high school careers of a couple Saban signees, and mentioned the name Amp Hill to him. Hill was a highly-recruited wide receiver from Jacksonville (Fla.) First Coast High who Saban signed as LSU's head coach in 2003. Saban and I had both seen the same thing in Hill − vast potential to be a fantastic college receiver − and agreed what a shame it was that Hill's football career was derailed by a knee injury suffered in an LSU preseason practice his freshman year.

That's when Saban grabbed hold of me to demonstrate precisely what happened on the tackle that wrecked Hill's knee − he as the tackler and me as Hill. I could tell it still bothered Saban that Hill's career finished so prematurely. For Saban, it was always about the players. It had been almost exactly four years since Hill was hurt, but mere mention of his name triggered in Saban a very clear memory of how the injury had happened.

Clear enough to show, not tell.

Not that I had any doubt to begin with, but here was a guy who was passionate about his job. His last job, as it turned out. And for me, it became a pretty good reference point for Saban's unpredictability in the press conference setting. As I would later learn, he used press conferences primarily to send a message to his players.

Always, the players.

So on occasions when too many of them had practiced poorly, behaved poorly or done anything that mattered to Saban poorly, a completely innocuous question from a reporter was liable to send the coach into a rant. And he was a master at turning a question about anything into whatever message he wanted to deliver.

Later that fall, on the Wednesday before Alabama's infamous loss to Louisiana-Monroe in his first season, I asked him about the challenge presented by ULM running back Calvin Dawson, who rushed for more than 1,400 yards that season. And while the transcript of his exact answer is lost to 17 years of history, suffice it to say he got off the subject of Dawson and began an explosive tirade about a general lack of respect for ULM by the end of his first sentence.

It had been a bad day of practice, clearly. And the rant was prescient, as Alabama, three days later, played the very worst of its 235 games under Saban in a 21-14 loss that served as rock bottom ahead of the program's rocket launch. Over time, Saban's unpredictability became a bit predictable. He would somewhat reliably rant about respect for opponent on the Wednesday before Alabama's 11th game, a regular mid-November hosting of a lightweight non-conference foe before the Iron Bowl.

Some were all-time great Saban eruptions.

The greatest Saban rant ever? For me, it was the postgame press conference after another of those mid-November non-conference games, a 45-21 win over Georgia Southern in 2011. The Eagles' triple-option offense confounded the nation's No. 1 run defense for 302 rushing yards, and Saban's post-game explanation for it, or lack thereof, was pure gold. Four years later, not surprisingly ahead of a mid-November game against Charleston Southern, Saban brought up the Georgia Southern game with what became known as the "Tin Horn Rant," perhaps the most viral of them all. For sheer entertainment, however, the GSU post-game presser in 2011 was tops for me. Not so much for any fit of anger but more for Saban's utter exasperation about dealing with what he described as "a moving point of attack." Unlike the 2015 Tin Horn rant, which Google can deliver in a blink, the GSU post-gamer seems to have dodged internet archiving.

Saban would never play a triple-option team again. Find me a link, and I'll send you $20.

I covered the coach's first six seasons at Alabama before a nine-year stretch at NFL.com, returning in the columnist role at The Tuscaloosa News for the last two seasons. Things were a little different upon my return. Saban, while still fully capable of getting himself fired up, had lightened up a fair bit. And how a "Nick Saban rant" was defined had changed, too, because after six national championships and the deification that went along with them, a video snippet of even a mildly annoyed Saban had the potential for viral popularity on social media.

But the coach had prepared me for anything.

Even a hip toss.

Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23 and the Talkin' Tide podcast. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Why Alabama coach Nick Saban once put me in a headlock