MONONGAH, West Virginia —He found the five garages nearly 45 years ago, tucked behind old houses on a stretch of Miner's Row. Five garages packed floor to ceiling with what appeared to be useless throwaways to just about everyone else but would come to mean everything to the young man who had just driven home to bury his father.

No one knew about the garages and what his father had stored in them, Alabama coach Nick Saban says now. But he was determined to find out.

Times were tough in the early 1970s in those small mining towns up and down State Road 218. There were strikes at the mine, and when you're trying to raise a family and there's no food on the table and nothing makes sense anymore,

there was always Nick Saban Sr.'s Gulf service station on the corner of State Road 218 and U.S. 19. It may as well have been a bank.

"I walk in those garages, and there's tags on junk everywhere," Saban says. "An old bald tire had a tag that read, 'Bob Moore, $5.' That thing wasn't worth a nickel. He was taking people's junk and giving them money to survive."

And no one ever knew, Saban is asked. Not even his father’s wife?

"He didn't want any attention," Saban says.

As Alabama begins yet another postseason in the College Football Playoff, Saban doesn't like to talk about the millions he and his wife Terry have raised for his charity, Nick's Kids, or the 17 houses he built for victims of the Tuscaloosa tornado of 2011, or rehash the countless stories of helping others and changing lives for the better. The story, he says, is those who need help, not how they get it.

Just when you think you have the Death Star of college football all figured out, that he's an obsessive, controlling, meticulous perfectionist, along comes a refreshing reality to knock it all sideways.

"If I break down crying while I'm talking about Nick Saban and his dad, well, I'm not a damn bit ashamed of it," says Tom Hulderman, a childhood friend of Saban’s. "That's how much those two men have meant to me and so many others."

Twice a year, Hulderman finds his way to Mount Calvary Cemetery. Once there, in his mind's eye, he still sees the line out the church door for the funeral mass 44 years ago and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd at the burial. He still feels the pain of a community rocked to its core from a sudden, sickening loss when a 46-year-old Nick Saban Sr. dropped dead of a heart attack while jogging home one evening.

Right up on that small hillside and across the street from those garages is the gravesite of Nick Sr. On each visit, Hulderman wipes the headstone perfectly clean and places flowers in front of the black granite stone that reads, No man stands as tall as when he stoops to help a child.

"Not a day goes by where I don't think of him," Saban says of his father. "We were inseparable; we did everything together. Sometimes I think, 'Would he be proud of what we've accomplished?'"

He stops mid-sentence, pursing his lips and tapping his finger on the arm of his chair in his palatial office overlooking the football kingdom he has built at Alabama. He swallows hard to continue, because no matter where and how his life has evolved or how successful he has become as a football coach, he's still a 22-year-old who lost his father way too young.

"I think he'd be more proud," Saban says, "by what we've accomplished away from the game of football."