The sun rose just a few hours before the Anna and Walter Smith arrived for the live broadcast of Nick Saban’s Thursday evening radio show.
Their Ford Escape pulled into the Tuscaloosa location of Buffalo Wild Wings right around 8 a.m.
On Wednesday.
The Tuscaloosa couple arrived 35 hours before Saban in what’s become a weekly tight-wire act between loyal and crazy. They sleep in the parking lot and eat two days worth of lunches and dinners inside where they’ve made friends with the restaurant workers.
Anna Smith’s children regularly tell her she’s nuts.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “But I tell them at our ages, I think we’re old enough to do what we want.”
Chris Todd is the Buffalo Wild Wings manager who closes every Wednesday. Like clockwork, he spots the Smiths every week. The camping out thing is a relatively new evolution of the weekly competition to be the first on line.
The winner gets the best seat in the restaurant not reserved by the university. That means face time with the guest of honor, autographs and pictures.
The Smiths used to arrive at 2 a.m., on the day of the show. “But they got beat once or twice,” Todd said. “So they started coming on Wednesday night.”
With LSU in town, they played it safe and moved it to Wednesday morning. A group of five-to-seven others do the same every week. One fan was already asleep in their car by 11 p.m., Wednesday with a long day of waiting to come. The Smiths, who also have season tickets to the games themselves, moved to Tuscaloosa two years ago to be closer to the Tide football team.
“I love my Alabama football – I always have,” Anna Smith said. “Moved to Tennessee and stayed 20 years and never got converted.”
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