Nick Saban once caught former Alabama assistants Pete Golding and Steve Sarkisian playing hooky thanks to an unlikely hole-in-one
· Yahoo Sports
Nick Saban ran a tight ship at Alabama. If six national championships in 17 seasons as the head ball coach of the Crimson Tide doesn’t make that clear, perhaps this story will. In a SEC Network segment with Peter Burns and Chris Doering this weekend, Pete Golding—a former Saban assistant, now the head coach at Ole Miss—told a hilarious story about how he and a group of fellow Alabama assistant coaches used to sneak out to play golf in the offseason.
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The method was simple: When Saban himself disappeared to play an afternoon round, they’d find out which of the two courses in Tuscaloosa he was playing at and they’d go play the other. Of course, the inevitable eventually happened. Golding, then offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian and several others got some bad intel one spring afternoon and ended up at the same course as their boss.
A few groups behind, they managed to keep a low profile until they reached the par-3 10th hole at Indian Hills, which overlooked the 16th green where Saban was putting. Sarkisian stepped up and quietly tee’d off, and that’s when the unthinkable happened.
“We were deciding should we even hit or not. Sark’s like, ‘Alright, we’ll just be quiet and I’ll hit.’ I think it’s like 145 or whatever and he hits like 8-iron … it hits [gestures a bouncing ball] and it goes in. Hole-in-one.”
Of course, the natural human reaction is to go crazy. Whoopin’, hollerin’, carryin’ on. All that good stuff. But because Saban was just below and they were playing hooky, the group burst into a completely silent celebration of the ill-timed ace.
“It was like you’re watching a movie and you hit mute," Golding explained. "Nobody wantes to say anything because we can’t let coach know … We beelined straight to the carts, nobody else even hit.”
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Of course, there’s no pulling the wool over the ol’ ball coach’s eyes. Though Saban didn’t see the ace, the Indian Hill club pro who was playing with him did, and of course word made its way back to the boss man about what had happened. Golding says Saban would have never confronted them in the middle of their round—" He [Saban] ain’t gonna sit around and come over there and make it awkward or anything like that”—but that the GOAT let them "hear about it" the next day.
Of course, Sarkisian is now the head coach at Texas and Golding at Ole Miss, so obviously the incident didn’t impact their careers, but it’s a hilarious story that shows just how much Saban sway held in Tuscaloosa during Alabama’s heyday. On the bright side, however, getting chewed out by your boss is a small price to pay for a hole-in-one.