Wayne Johnson is a Grammy-winning guitarist. He's traveled around the world with popular jazz band The Manhattan Transfer. He's worked with John Tesh, Bette Midler and Natalie Cole as part of more than 30 years in the music industry.

But in one weird little corner of the internet, he's best known as the guitarist who looks just like Nick Saban with long hair.



"It's a fluke thing but such a bizarre little story," Johnson says.



It all started in the early 2000s after someone rediscovered John Tesh's Avalon Ballroom concert on Catalina Island in the mid-1990s, a three-night set for Tesh and his band later made into a concert video. The most popular video, and where the comparison originates, is Tesh's "Roundball Rock." Midway through the iconic NBA on NBC theme, after Tesh plays a voicemail he left himself on an old answering machine and after he pretends to bounce a basketball in rhythm to the music, the cameras cut to Johnson wailing away on his guitar.



And that's all it took.

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For years now, YouTube users and message board posters have rebranded that short clip as "Nick Saban shreds," "Nick Saban playing guitar" and other variations including the Alabama football coach. Given how notoriously serious Saban is, imagining him shredding a guitar for even a minute has proven to be popular.



Johnson first became aware of the weird phenomenon when someone reached out to him and asked for permission to use the video. Before he watched the video, he never noticed any resemblance to the man who could go down as the greatest college football coach ever. He had been compared to celebrities before--the late Alan Thicke is the one he got most often--but never Saban.



Yet, it didn't take long for the accomplished guitarist to be dissolved down into a funny meme. If you only know the meme, you wouldn't know he won a Grammy in 2004 for best pop instrumental album of the year. You'd have no idea he was part of The Manhattan Transfer, a jazz band so popular in the 1980s groupies followed them from stop to stop. You wouldn't know he's been around the world 25 times as part of his music career.



To Johnson's credit, he's taken the comparison well. The first time he watched the video he admitted it was hilarious.



"I was proud of it when I saw that," he says. "I thought this is so cool. Nick Saban, in the college football world, is like a god."





Johnson, who now travels the country as a Taylor Guitars instructor, has theories on why the clip is so appealing. First, there's the absurdity of imagining a straight-laced coach having a side hustle as a rock-and-roll guitarist. It makes you want to believe it's really Saban playing guitar. Whether Johnson actually looks like Saban or not --more recent photos show the resemblance as tangential at best--is irrelevant.

Once you see that "Saban shreds" tagline, it's almost impossible not to see it. "It's kind of a mind over matter thing," Johnson says.





The two have never been in the same room before though Johnson does have a distant connection to the Alabama football program. His stepson, Sodie Orr, is good friends with former Alabama long snapper Cole Mazza dating back to their days going to the Rubio Long Snapping camps. Johnson took his stepson to college camps all across the country, including Florida and Oregon, but skipped a trip to Tuscaloosa because Mazza had already been awarded a scholarship the prior year. Still, he's a big college football fan and appreciative of the dominant program in Tuscaloosa.



He wonders whether Saban has ever seen the clip and would love to somehow meet him because of it. It makes him laugh even thinking Saban might know who he is based on a "silly little video."



When he's not touring or giving guitar tutorials, he sometimes watches Saban press conferences hoping to get his answer.



"I keep thinking in one of these little reporting sessions someone is going to say, 'Nick, is it true?'" he says. "That'd be funny."