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The Taylors stand in front of their new three-bedroom and two-bathroom home in Alberta City. The family's new home is Habitat for Humanity of Tuscaloosa's 16th National Championship House that was built from donations by Nick and Terry Saban and friends.

(Roy S. Johnson)

Tony, I need you to be sitting down.

Anthony Taylor thought he was going to lose the house.

He was driving, as he does, almost always. He was on I-20 one day last January, heading toward Tuscaloosa from the Birmingham airport. The owner of a sole proprietorship, On-Time Transportation, Taylor had dropped off yet another customer--a University of Alabama student heading out of town--when his phone buzzed.

He saw it was Ellen Potts, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Tuscaloosa. Just a few months before, she'd called him as he was driving, yet again, along I-20 and told him his family had reached the top of the list for a new home and they were ready to proceed.

He was joyous, after a journey that has taken him from Selma to suburban New York (many times) to San Diego to Tuscaloosa to Savannah and back to T-town, now with nine children, a wife weakened by heart surgery three years ago, and trying to earn a master's degree in religious studies--30 years after taking his first college class--while working one job until 7 a.m. each day, running his one-man airport shuttle and living in a house with immense sentimental value (it was handed down by his wife's grandmother) but little, very little, structural strength. "The living room," he says, "could fall down on us any minute."

Potts didn't tell him to sit down during that first call, which is why, this time, Taylor did not have a good feeling, as he slowed and pulled his black Ford Expedition onto the shoulder, near exit 79.

Tony, I've got news, and I've got to have you sitting down.

Potts began to tell him how Alabama football coach Nick Saban and his wife Terry, through their Nick's Kids Foundation, build a "championship" Habitat home--at a cost of $100,000--every time the Tide wins a national title and that Terry had emailed her about 18 hours after Alabama landed in Tuscaloosa after beating Clemson 45-40 to win the school's 16th national title and said, "We're committed to the 16th house."

"And Tony," Potts said, "your house was chosen."

Potts began to cry, so did Taylor, sitting on the shoulder on I-20.

"After all you guys have been through," Potts said. "We're about to start the work."

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Anthony Taylor was supposed to be born in Selma. Or near there in Orrville; that's where his family's from, most of them growing up on his grandmother's farm. But Anthony's mother lived in Mount Vernon, NY, a bedroom community outside of Manhattan, and she was on her way there when Anthony decided it was time to leave the womb.

He shuttled between North and South for much of his youth, finally settling in Orrville long enough to graduate from Keith High School. He told his grandmother he didn't want to go to college, so she sent him out to the field to bale hay. About an hour later, he says, he quit, walked back into the house and filled out a college application.

Two years later, Taylor had an associate degree in marketing from Selma University and moved to New York and then San Diego, until the 1992 riots in Los Angeles persuaded him to return South and enroll at Stillman, where he hoped to obtain his bachelor's degree in business administration. However, Stillman, he says, began defaulting on his loans, so Taylor transferred to Alabama, where, in 1996, he finally did earn that degree.

By then, he had three children, including a daughter, Bridget, and son, Derrick. The boy's mother, Angel, lived across the street from Taylor's youngest brother in Tuscaloosa; Taylor says he stared at her every day from across the way, saying to himself: "This will be my child's mother."

He was right, but Angel said Tony needed to mature before she would consider him a serious partner--and she was right, too. So she left him, and Taylor moved to Savannah, Ga. to pursue a career.

"When I graduated from college," he says, "my dream was to run a nightclub at night, with a day-time cafe." And, in fact, Taylor was managing R.D.'s Nightclub in Savannah when he met the owner of a local barbecue spot, Smokey's, who changed the direction of his journey.

The manager also owned a transportation company and told Taylor, "I'm gonna make you rich."

"I got my first cab in 1998 and never looked back," Anthony says, "though I never got rich."

For more than a decade, Taylor drove the streets of Savannah, launching his venture, originally called Tony's Transportation, in 2000. "Trying to get a piece of that American dream," he says.

Another dream was to see his first son and the woman he once stared at from across the street. But as years passed, hope faded until Bridget, now a teenager, introduced him to "this thing called Facebook," he says. "I was still Yahooing."

"Daddy," Bridget told him, "nobody's Yahooing."

After searching for a couple of months, Bridget told her father she had found his oldest son and his mother. And after getting onto this newfangled Facebook thing, Taylor sent a friend request to Angel, who was still living in Tuscaloosa. She accepted, and her first three messages to him carried only one word: wow, wow and wow.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

Angel came to visit Tony. "Nobody comes seven hours to see me, then boom she did it," says Anthony. "On March 17, 2011. She stayed the night, then brought me back to Tuscaloosa."

In 2013, they married, becoming their own Taylor Bunch. Angel, by then, had two other children, Zion and Zaria, whom step-dad Taylor calls "my babies."

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Anthony Taylor was supposed to be a minister, his grandmother used to tell him. But he wanted none of it. "I just wanted to run in the woods," he says.

Yet, he says he received the call from God in 2008 and is now ordained. He's not looking for a congregation, but just wants "to keep preaching the Word."

To do that, he decided he needed a master's degree, which he is now pursuing at Alabama, majoring in religious studies with a minor in Judaism. "Even though God's Word is free, people want to see the paperwork," he says with a laugh.

For the last several years, Taylor has been taking classes at UA during the day, a few at a time, pieces together money through loans and what he is able to earn working nights as--what else?--a driver for the university's 348-RIDE shuttle service for students, and cruising I-20 shuttling students between Tuscaloosa and the Birmingham airport.

He's just nine hours from graduation but has maxed out on loans--"since I started college so long ago," he says. So he won't be able to enroll for this coming Spring semester or finish until he saves the money to pay for it: up to $20,000. He'll do a class at a time if he has to. "As long as I have not graduated and am still in school, I won't fall into default."

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Tony didn't believe the storm would hit Tuscaloosa. Angel had been tracking it for days on The Weather Channel, but her warnings to him fell on deaf ears. So on that morning in late April 2001, Tony, who had not yet moved all his belongings from Savannah, headed to Georgia to make another run.

Of course, the storm--the tornado--did hit Tuscaloosa, on April 27. Devastatingly. Angel and her children huddled for protection in the home in Northport she inherited from her grandmother as the storm raged. In the aftermath, 64 people were dead, including six Alabama students; and countless residents of Tuscaloosa and Birmingham suffered millions in property damage.

"That's why I listen to my wife now," Tony says.

Following the storm, the Sabans contacted Habitat and said they'd raise enough funds with other donations to the couple's Nick's Kids Foundation to build a home representing each of the Tide's then 13 national football titles. And January of 2012 and 2013, the Sabans and friends donated funds to build "championship" homes No. 14 and 15.

Thankfully, in 2001, none of the Taylors were injured but the home's foundation was shifted, causing it to teeter precariously. In 2012, they applied for repairs through Habitat but when engineers inspected the house it was determined that it would cost more to repair it than to build a new Habitat home.

So the Taylors waited. Tony added a few hours working with Habitat--which requires families to fulfill 350 hours of volunteer work as part of qualifying for a new home--to his already jammed days. "I get off at 7 a.m., usually run to Habitat, go home to do homework, spend a few minutes with my wife, then take a nap," he says. "And the whole cycle begins again."

When it came time to pick a location for their new home, the Taylors chose Alberta City, not far from campus. "It's about to become the second future of Tuscaloosa," Tony says, noting plans to build a train station there. "I want to be part of it."

Tony and Angel Taylor meet the Sabans

In February, about a month after Taylor cried on the shoulder of I-20, Habitat broke ground on the Taylors' new home. Altogether, four donors--Mike Brunner, Farid Rafiee, David and Lynn Gwin, along with the Sabans--each donated $25,000 to Nick's Kids to sponsor the home.

Although she is still weakened from her heart procedure, Angel pulled weeds and paint alongside Terry on some of the days she and other donors pitched in to build and prepare the home. Tony says that when he met Terry he "just boohooed" with gratefulness. "She was so humble and sincere," he says.

And on the day Nick came to the home site to join the check presentation, Tony made sure to stand directly behind him and touch his shoulder. "Sir," he said to the coach. "I feel this is a blessing God gave us."

On Friday, the three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,200-square-foot home will be dedicated by Habitat and the Taylors will be free to move in.