Curtis and Saban make 70 look young and winning look easy

Two Alabama coaching legends who had septuagenarian birthdays last week are showing no signs of slowing down.

UMS-Wright oach Terry Curtis turned 71, then watched his Bulldogs execute a perfect gameplan in whipping previously undefeated Helena 31-0. The Bulldogs finished the regular season on a nine-game winning streak after losing the season-opener at Baker.

If UMS-Wright wins a state championship this year, it will mark the ninth in Curtis’s 22 years at the school. They first won in 2001, when the Bulldogs beat Tyrone Prothro and Cleburne County. Nine wins in the last 20 years would equate to winning a state championship roughly every other year. Another way to put it is UMS-Wright wins the title at the same frequency as every other team in the classification wins it combined.

Curtis has threatened to retire before, but even he doesn’t buy that anymore. Last week he told me he wouldn’t know what to do if retired. He said he doesn’t fish or golf or even enjoy yardwork. If he got out of coaching, he said, he would have to seek out a whole new group of friends, since almost all of his strong connections are in the coaching community.

The Bulldogs won state championships in 2017, 2018 and 2019, but not in 2020. That means they’re due for another one.

Nick Saban is experiencing no such mini-drought. Saban celebrated his 70th birthday on Halloween as the reigning national champion. After going undefeated a year ago, Alabama is 6-1 this season, but still in complete control to win a seventh national championship in the last 12 years.

That can’t be true, can it? Yep, the Saban-led dynasty is in position to win seven crowns in 12 years.

To get there the Tide will have to win four more regular-season games, beat Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, then win two playoff games. That’s a tall order, but it just goes to show that winning a championship in any season is much harder than Curtis or Saban makes it look.

It wasn’t that long ago that both coaching legends would have been forced into retirement by now. In fact, it was a major story in the state when legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant approached his 70th birthday. At the time, in the early 1980s, state law mandated that once a state employee reached 70, retirement was required.

Politics being what they are, lawmakers scurried to be the first to pass legislation that would exempt the popular coach from the rule. Sadly, the rule never had to be bent for Bryant. He retired at the age of 69 and was dead before his 70th birthday.

As a young kid, I remember Bryant being very old in his final seasons as coach at Alabama.

Nobody would consider Curtis or Saban old. Their results certainly indicate they haven’t lost their fastballs.

Saban was asked last week about when he might retire. He laughed off the question like a man who still intends to be in the game for many years to come.

“I just kind of keep on keeping on,” he said. “I don’t have a timetable for anything. The only thing that I’ve ever said is that if I felt like I was riding the program down or I wasn’t able to make a positive contribution to the program, then that would probably be time to let somebody else carry the torch.”

Saban has already passed Steve Spurrier on the list of greatest coaches in the history of the SEC. Spurrier weighed in last week on the idea of coaching past the age of 70.

“One time I was talking to Saban about seven to either years ago, and he was asking me — my last year I was 70 — and I said, ‘It wasn’t 70, it was when we started losing.’ And if he ever loses three games in a season, he might start to think, ‘I don’t need to do this anymore.’ But as long as they’re recruiting the way they are, with the players they’ve got, he can go another 10 years easy if he wants to.”

In 10 years, Saban will be 80 and Curtis will be 81. That sounds really old to be putting in the kind of hours and dedication it takes to be successful in football. But watching them both perform these days, it seems even less likely the game is going to pass either of them by during that time period.

Who knows what the future holds? What we do know is that two of the best to ever do it are going as strong as ever past the age of 70. 

Randy Kennedy, who has been a leading voice on the Gulf Coast sports scene for 19 years, writes a weekly column for Lagniappe. His sports talk show airs weekdays from 2-6 p.m. on Sports Talk 99.5 and the free iHeart radio app.