"We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same." --Carlos Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan

I have wondered over the past year why the multi-millionaire head football coach of THE Ohio State University was triggered so viscerally by the semi-lucid musings of a championship-winning former Notre Dame head football coach who had the audacity to question Ohio State’s toughness.

In reality, prune-ripe Coach Holtz didn’t actually question the toughness of Ryan Day or his program. He said, simply, that teams that have defeated Day’s Ohio State squads were able to do so because they were “more physical” than Ohio State.

Regardless of the validity of Holtz’s claim, the event evoked considerable agita in the mind of our once-and-now again beloved head football coach. I don’t think I need to further detail the controversy that has re-surfaced this week with the impending showdown between the Irish and Buckeyes. 11W readers remember.

The reemergence of the Holtz vs. Day beef this week returned my thoughts to consider what nerve Holtz had touched in Ryan Day’s psyche. Emerging from a year of personal adversity, perhaps now I can better empathize with Ryan Day’s emotional response and verbal rejoinder to the withered Holtz.

When someone’s “toughness” is doubted, what is really being questioned? In the alpha male-dominated world of competitive sports, toughness is almost always, at its most essential, assumed to be about size and strength. One hundred percent of respondents would reflexively deem Tyleik Williams—all 75 inches and 327 pounds of him—“tougher” than my 215-pound pansy azz.

In the context of last year’s OSU-ND matchup in South Bend, Holtz was implying that the Irish DL was bigger and stronger (“more physical”) than the OSU OL—something that many OSU fans might have tacitly agreed with prior to the outcome given the OL’s struggles. Holtz also explicitly called ND’s OL better/tougher/more physical than OSU’s DL, something that many of us probably wouldn’t have agreed with.

While I think Holtz’s message about ND being “more physical” than OSU last year was mostly innocuous, Day clearly interpreted it very differently. In Day’s interpretation, his program’s physical prowess wasn’t being questioned. His team’s—as well as his own—mental/psychological and emotional “toughness” was on trial.

Knowing what we know about Day’s experience losing his father as a child, to suggest that he or anything he oversees lacks “toughness” is anathema to him.  He’s also witnessed many of his players overcome psychological, emotional, and physical trauma: from the death of Tate’s mother in a drive-by shooting, to Henderson’s sleep paralysis and physical ailments, to the doxing and targeted vitriol that multiple players and coaches (and their families) have endured during their Ohio State careers.

While Day isn’t a physically-imposing, foul-mouthed, alpha male human specimen, the kind of resilience and “toughness” that he has been forced to develop in life shouldn’t be understated. It’s admirable.  If you’ve ever been close to someone with PTSD (or experience it yourself), you know that “toughness” most often has nothing to do with physical strength. Toughness is more about our hard work to make ourselves stronger mentally, emotionally, and, yes, maybe sometimes physically.

I hope this Monday will serve as a culmination of Coach Day’s life-long efforts to build resiliency and “toughness” in his own life, his family’s, as well as the men he leads inside the WHAC.

Even if shriveled Coach Holtz didn’t exactly call out Coach Day or the team as lacking “toughness,” I think that event still served a purpose: to inspire Coach Day to re-double his efforts to succeed—and see those he leads succeed—in the face of renewed adversity. That is, when adversity slapped Ryan Patrick Day in the face yet again, he did what he knows best: he rolled up his sleeves and got to work to make himself and his program better.

We would all do well to take inspiration from and to emulate his example.

God Bless Buckeye Nation, and Go Bucks.