EUFAULA -- Courtney Upshaw drives a 2002 Buick LaSabre.

What? You were picturing Alabama's eight-cylinder linebacker behind the wheel of a muscle car or a big, honking SUV? Prepare to be surprised.

He saved some Pell Grant money for two years, then made a down payment on the used car in the summer of 2010. He paid sticker, a little more than $5,000. A surrogate father is sure he could have saved Upshaw $500, but negotiating on Upshaw's behalf would have broken an NCAA rule.

Finally, Upshaw had the means to drive himself back and forth between Tuscaloosa and his hometown on a large lake that separates Alabama from Georgia. It's a 200-mile drive one way through the heart of Auburn country to a town that he loves and a town that loves him.

But this story isn't about what a football star drives. It's about what drives a football star.

Most of all, it's about who drives this game-changer, who could be the driving force Saturday night when second-ranked Alabama plays host to top-ranked LSU in perhaps the most anticipated regular-season game in Southeastern Conference history.

This story begins with Upshaw and siblings moving in with an aunt when he was 4. He moved around with other relatives, and he didn't have much. Materially, that is.

"Country music stars brag about how poor they were, but a lot of other people don't want other people to know," Eufaula High School football coach Dan Klages said. "I'm not sure how much he wants of that."

Klages is one of many people who has offered Upshaw a ride. One of those drives stands out.

Driving home from Mobile



In December 2007, six months before going off to college, Upshaw played and Klages coached in the Alabama-Mississippi All-Star Game in Mobile's Ladd-Peebles Stadium.

"We were coming back, and I just thought there was an opportunity to have a little talk with him without trying to be too heavy with it," Klages said.

They were driving down a rural road when they passed a ranch-style farmhouse shaded by trees.

"Real cozy looking," Klages said, "and I knew where he lived. He lived in public housing."

Klages asked if Upshaw would like to live in such a house someday. Upshaw said yes.

"'That right there is within your reach," Klages told Upshaw. "'If you will stick with it, don't come home, you're going to get your degree. And you might not be able to buy that house right off the bat, but that's something you can have.' And he looked at me like he had never thought about that."

Klages was talking about education, not riches coming from a pro football career, yet nearly four years later, Upshaw's NFL stock is sky high.

"He'll be able to buy that house, tear it down and build a mansion," Klages said. "And buy everybody's farm around it."

Klages didn't see that potential instantly. When Upshaw was in the fourth or fifth grade, he attended a camp that Klages was running.

"He was at least half a head taller than the other kids and a decent athlete," Klages said. "I remember thinking, 'Hey, we've got a good one coming down the road.' And then we were playing touch football, and he came up bawling about somebody had punched him, and I thought, 'Oh, my God, he's a big softie. He'll never amount to anything.'"

Upshaw was injured when he played football during his freshman year in high school, and he didn't play as a sophomore. As a junior, he was an overnight sensation and went on to sign with Alabama as a high school All-American.

"We hoped he would be good enough to stick it out," Klages said. "And then when it looked like he would stick it out, we were like, 'Hey, maybe he'll get to play a little bit.' Then we were hoping he'd get to start. Then when he got to start, it was like, 'Hey, maybe he'll make a name for himself.'

"And then it was like, 'Can he maybe be as good on that level as he was on our level?' He's passed that. That's the most incredible thing about him. He keeps improving."

Driving around Eufaula



Fate put Upshaw in the same kindergarten class with Will McKenzie. One day Will came home and said he was about to get beaten up on the playground.

"Courtney stepped in and told them they'd have to get him, too," recalled Leigh McKenzie, Will's mother, Upshaw's "mother" and a science teacher at Eufaula High.

Soon the boys were best friends. When they were in the second grade, Will told his parents that he wanted to use his Christmas money to register his friend for basketball. Upshaw's aunt, who was raising not only her own children but two nephews and two nieces, said she couldn't get him to all of the practices.

"She agreed that if we would take care of it all, it would be fine," Leigh McKenzie said.

Will's father was the coach.

"I would never tell him this, but he wasn't that good, because his feet were so big," said Tom McKenzie, who went on to coach Upshaw in youth football. "I had no idea that he would be a college athlete."

Upshaw grew to love his second family, but he always has loved his own family, including an older brother and two younger sisters.

"When he was little, I would ask, 'Courtney, what do you want for Christmas?'" Leigh McKenzie recalled. "He'd say, 'Oh, I don't know, but my sister, she loves that baby doll that cries.' If he had money to go shopping, he'd shop for them.

"We'd go out to eat after a ballgame when he was 9, 10, 11 years old, and he'd save half his french fries for his sisters. Now, I don't think he thought they were not going to eat, but that was just him."

Molly Hagood is another special person in Upshaw's life. She lives across the street from the McKenzies. She was a Eufaula High School guidance counselor who was retired by the time Upshaw became a college football prospect, but she guided him academically nevertheless.

"Those people over there are just remarkable," Hagood said of the McKenzies, whose assistance for Upshaw was cleared by NCAA compliance. "They are not of great wealth. They have educated three very fine children."

Will has older twin sisters who "stay on Courtney like a house on fire," Hagood said.

"Of course, Courtney's family always wanted him to do the right thing. Remarkably, he didn't get trapped by things that I've seen other kids get trapped in."

Upshaw's older brother did get trapped and served some time for robbery. After an incident in which he defended his brother, Upshaw spent some time in the alternative school when he was in 10th grade. It was the year his father came back into the picture, the year Upshaw didn't play football.

The incident that resulted in Upshaw going to the alternative school "had to do with nothing but a terrible situation," Tom McKenzie said. "They lived in that house for six or seven weeks with no water and no power."

Upshaw didn't understand that this wasn't normal until he went to college.

Driving to Tuscaloosa



Upshaw didn't have a vehicle or much else when he left Eufaula as a passenger in his aunt's car.

"You've got to realize he went up there with almost no clothing," Tom McKenzie said. "Did not have a driver's license. Had no form of identification.

"That was a real eye-opener for Courtney, getting there and realizing there is a different life."

After rooming with teammates for three years, Upshaw now lives alone in an apartment that he keeps tidy.

"You ought to look at his tennis shoes," Hagood said. "That will tell you a lot about him. Box after box after box of these shoes, and they look brand new. I'll bet you if somebody messed with his shoes, he'd be upset."

Burt Smithart, a circuit judge in the Eufaula/Union Springs area and a longtime Upshaw supporter, has visited the apartment.

"He cleans the shoes up and puts them back in the box every time," Smithart said. "I think it's like my grandparents, who grew up in the Depression. He's so used to going without that he really, really keeps an eye on them."

After Upshaw had been at Alabama for a year, trouble found him. He and a young women portrayed as his girlfriend were arrested by a campus police officer and charged with domestic violence/harassment after a verbal altercation became physical. Defended by Smithart's brother, a Tuscaloosa attorney, Upshaw was granted youthful offender status and agreed to anger management counseling.

"Everybody here said, 'Aw, that's not Courtney,'" Leigh McKenzie said. "That was not his girlfriend."

Upshaw was interested in another girl, and he wanted both girls to be friends. They were at a school party, and the girlfriend called to say the other girl was causing trouble.

"Courtney said, 'I was just chilling at my apartment. I'll go over there, because I want to be friends,'" Leigh McKenzie said. "Well, he's real naive on that. Very, very naive. Still is naive. That just didn't work. So when they were leaving, she slapped him. He told my husband the next day, 'She hit me hard. It hurt. I grabbed her, just out of instinct.' He would never hurt her."

The only other trouble Upshaw has been in was recent. He kicked a Vanderbilt player in the helmet on Oct. 8 and sat out the first quarter of the next game.

"He said the guy was trying to hurt him," Leigh McKenzie said. "Courtney told the guy to stop, and the guy didn't."

Driving home



Upshaw comes back to Eufaula when time allows, and he's treated like a celebrity.

"He's as big as there is," Klages said. "If Elvis came back to life, it might draw a bigger crowd, but I can't think of anybody else."

Upshaw now stays at the McKenzies' house when he's in town, and he always visits the high school and asks if there are any at-risk students he can counsel. He visits with Dewey Norton, a student with cerebral palsy who can't talk but lights up in his wheelchair just at the mention of Upshaw's name. A framed photo of Upshaw and Norton sits on a top shelf of Upshaw's apartment. Upshaw seems to be drawn toward young people in wheelchairs, the McKenzies say.

Before he left for college, Upshaw asked Eufaula High principal Steve Hawkins how to repay him for everything he had done. Hawkins urged Upshaw to pay it forward.

"For someone who's as ferocious as he is on a football field, I don't know how his heart fits inside his chest," Hawkins said.

A nurse at a local nursing home told him about a resident who is a big Alabama fan, and now the player is a frequent visitor.

In May, with Burt Smithart's assistance, Upshaw started the 41 Fund to raise money for Tuscaloosa tornado victims. A long day was spent signing autographs at a Eufaula discount store.

Later, Upshaw was signing for a long line of people in Alexander City. State troopers arrived with instructions to drive him to Dadeville to meet Gov. Robert Bentley, who wanted to applaud Upshaw for his tornado relief initiative.

Driving to Birmingham



In the past year, Upshaw has reconnected with his mother, Lisa, who lives in Birmingham. He drives there to bring her to home games, then drives her home. Her sister, Donnella Williams, doesn't get enough credit for the part she played in raising Upshaw, said Leigh McKenzie, who has become friends with Upshaw's mother.

A human environmental science major, Upshaw will graduate from Alabama in December with a grade-point average higher than 3.0, Smithart said. If all goes well, he will lead Alabama to a national championship a month later, then be selected in the NFL draft a few months later, perhaps in the first round.

Later, Hollywood could come calling. This could be a sequel to "The Blind Side," the story of a high school student in Memphis who moves in with a wealthy family and goes on to play college and pro football.

The McKenzies haven't seen that movie, but they're familiar with the story.

"Courtney told us one time, 'We're kind of like that,'" Leigh McKenzie said. "And I said, 'No, because you have a family, and they love you, and you love them.'

"That child let go of his own family and became part of a new family. Courtney doesn't have that. He's pulled in a thousand different directions. He's active with all kinds of families."

The boy who had so little now is a young man who has so much.

"I like this story better than 'The Blind Side,' because it involved all these people when he was a second grader," Smithart said. "Everybody was doing what they did because it was the right thing to do.

"It's such an incredible story about where he was and where he's going. That journey is incredible because it took so many people to keep him on that track, but mostly it took Courtney."

It won't be long before Upshaw is driving something nicer than a 2002 Buick LaSabre. The eight-cylinder linebacker is driving his own life now.

"He grew up uncertain about who was going to be in charge of him, so I think he just made up his mind somehow as a young kid that, 'I'm going to do what I have to do to be successful,'" Hagood said.

That is Courtney Upshaw, Leigh McKenzie said.

"He's always been driven," she said. "Always."