Mark Winne

Alex Golesh's parents left Moscow with two kids, four hundred dollars and no English. Today as coach of Auburn he beat number 1 Georgia His father was a telecommunications engineer. In New York he drove a truck. His mother was a medical aide. She cleaned houses. Their seven year old is the head coach at Auburn. Tonight he walked into Athens and beat number one Georgia on the road. Here is the whole thing. The Soviet Union was coming apart. Vladimir and Bella Golesh decided they were taking their sons out. Here is the father, on why. "We were scared." "We didn't know exactly what life would be like. We just knew we had to get to America." "Leaving Russia was the only decision." It took about two years of paperwork and interviews before they could go. An aunt in New York sponsored them and met them at the airport. They brought a few bags of clothes and four hundred dollars. Not one of them spoke the language. They landed in Brooklyn and lived in a two bedroom apartment above a bodega. Alex was seven and learned English at school. Now here is what he actually remembers about arriving in America. Bananas. "I loved bananas. That was like my thing." "They were really hard to get. They were like a delicacy almost." "Man, in America, you can get all the bananas you want." That was the measure of the whole country to a seven year old. You could have as many bananas as you wanted. He remembers the street vendors too, and wanting to try what he had only seen people on television having. "I was like, I just want to try that." "I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever tasted." Later the family moved to Ohio because it was cheaper to live there. And that is where he saw this sport for the first time. Here is how he describes figuring out what he was watching. "These dudes are running around and hitting people, and it's encouraged. Like, people are clapping for people smacking people." "That was the first time I ever saw a college football game. I thought it was the coolest thing ever." Here is his wife Alexis. "I'm absolutely astonished every time I hear the story." "Alex had never even seen American football." And here is the line from him that explains all of it. "When you're a kid, you don't really know what you don't have." His father never stopped working. He drove for a pizza company, then managed a store, then ran a warehouse. And his mother, who got off that plane unable to say one sentence in English, works for a language translation service now. A man who fixed telephone lines in Moscow got in a truck in New York instead. His wife cleaned other people's houses. They did it with four hundred dollars and no way to ask anybody for help. Tonight their kid walked into Sanford Stadium and beat the best team in the country in front of its own crowd. 27 to 24, on a field goal at the end. Here is the last thing his father said about leaving. "We are free." For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap