Chapter 7
Work
Whenever you start—give it your best. The opportunities are there to be anything you want to be. But wanting to be someone isn’t enough; dreaming about it isn’t enough; thinking about it isn’t enough. You’ve got to study for it, work for it, fight for it with all your heart and soul, because nobody is going to hand it to you.
General Colin Powell
I’ve read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don’t fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.
Lance Armstrong
Success doesn’t come to you . . . you go to it.
Marva Collins
Work is love made visible.
Khalil Gibran
Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people.
Colossians 3:23
It’s important to understand that work is not who you are; it’s what you do. Many people get that backward and think their lives are defined by what they accomplish or by what positions they hold. On the negative side, some define their lives by something bad that happened to them or by something negative they did. But you have to go back to the original concept of the Block O and work through all the components to get Work in perspective.
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
Work is one part of the journey of your life. It’s part of your spiritual journey. There are mornings or evenings when you don’t want to have your quiet time. And there’s probably no harder work than prayer. It can be work just sitting in church or in a fellowship of some sort and listening attentively. Marriage is work. Parenting is work.
Growth in each of the six of components of the Block O requires work. In this chapter, we’ll consider the importance of work, persistence, and toughness in life. As you’ll see, if you want to leave a mark on the lives of people around you, it takes intentional living.
Much of the Work section in the OSU Winners Manual features quotations from famous people who shed some light on the subject. Some of these quotations have stuck with our players throughout the years, and I’m glad to share them with you throughout this chapter.
No matter what endeavor you pursue in life, if you want to succeed, you’re going to have to work at it. As kids, we thought football was pure fun. We’d get a group of our buddies together and find a field to play. Those were fun days. I’ve always felt there’s a lot you can learn about people from how they play. But at some point, if playing football is what you choose to do with your life, there’s going to be an element of hardship and toil. Likewise, a musician who chooses to master the piano will tell you that she loves music. But to truly do justice to the instrument, a pianist must practice hours every day, even after she becomes accomplished. Someone who wants to become a writer must take the time to study and learn more about the craft. Many people say, “I know I have a book in me,” but until they sit down and put words on the page, it’s just talk.
Some guys with a lot of natural talent come into our program at Ohio State and are blown away by the amount of study football takes. These are guys who were always the best players in youth football and in high school, and some have leaned on their talent to make up for any deficiencies in their fundamentals or work ethic. At the collegiate level, and certainly at the professional level, you can’t get away with that. It takes a lot of work, a lot of conditioning, lots of repetitions each day, and then building on the knowledge you’ve gained until you get to a certain level of proficiency. And after you get to that point, it takes even more work to stay there.
Michael Jordan once said, “Coaches or players can say anything they want, but if they don’t back it up with performance and hard work, the talking doesn’t mean a thing.”
That’s how success is achieved. You work at it bit by bit, day by day, one step here, another there. You fall, you get up, and you keep going.
Coaches and players can say anything they want, but if they don’t back it up with performance and hard work, the talking doesn’t mean a thing.
Michael Jordan
Work Is a Lifelong Pursuit
My grandfather was a dairy farmer, and he never took a day off. Those cows had to get rid of their milk every day. My grandfather not only worked hard, but he was also the most spiritual man I ever knew. He died at age eighty-seven, sitting in his rocking chair, his Bible in his lap, opened to Psalm 23. I remember when I was an assistant at Ohio State, sitting by my grandfather out on the porch and talking about life. Death didn’t scare him at all. He had a heart issue and a bit of cancer, but he was still farming into his eighties. He loved that he was providing people with something important, something sustaining, and he farmed with a passion.
Believe it or not, my grandfather was actually excited at the prospect of death. He knew the answer to the question that Bobby Richardson asked when I was a kid: “If the game of life ended today, would you be a winner?”
Given how much time my grandfather invested in his dairy farm, it would have been easy for him to define himself by his profession. All he did was work. I’m not sure where the concept of a forty-hour workweek came from, but it sure wasn’t from my granddad. Nevertheless, he was one of the most well-rounded people I’ve ever known. He gave to people. He cared. He made time for his family. There’s no question you have to find the balance between your work and all those other things.
I’m in my mid-fifties now, and many of my friends are over sixty and still working. I met a woman on an airplane who was sixty-five. She said she had recently retired—and she hated it. She said she loathed the lack of interaction with people, so now she was back to working part-time.
Bruce Beard, a friend and mentor in the pension business, is one of the strongest Christians I know. He studies apologetics at Oxford and is just a brilliant guy. I remember him sitting with my mom and me talking about her future when she was in her sixties. Bruce said, “Even though there are some people who have made retirement a grand dream—‘I have four more years until I retire’—there’s nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement.”
Other coaches have certainly taught me a lot about what it means to work. Tom Landry, the famous coach of the Dallas Cowboys, used to say that you need something to believe in, someone to love, and something to do.
Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it.
Stephen King
Of course, I grew up in a coach’s household, watching my dad every day, and the lessons became even more real when I trained under Jim Dennison at the University of Akron, Tom Reed at Miami of Ohio, Dick MacPherson at Syracuse, and Earle Bruce at Ohio State. Those men taught me firsthand how to work hard and work smart.
I worked with a group of assistant coaches night and day. We all dreamed of being head coaches one day, but until then we were going to be the finest assistant coaches in America. Guys like Glen Mason, Gary Blackney, Bob Tucker, Dom Capers, and Mark Dantonio all worked their way to the top and became very fine head coaches.
Naturally, the workers I admire every day are our players and coaches. They are passionate about their daily tasks, and for them, at times, work looks like it’s more fun than fun itself.
I really admire people who have found a seamless transition in life. They’ve worked for a while, a lot of hours every week. They know what it means to put their nose to the grindstone and get things done. Then there are folks who have worked the eighty- to one-hundred-hour weeks and now want to work only fifty. I say they’re the best workforce you can find, because they know who they are and they know they’re not the right ones for the hundred-hour jobs. They’re not the principals anymore. They’re not the football coaches or the teachers, but they still want to be around kids and help them.
I have five guys on my staff whom we call academic encouragers. They’re retired educators who work two or three days a week. They’re out on campus; they make sure my guys are in class; they sit and build relationships with them, talk about school, talk about football, talk about the ups and downs of life. It’s perfect for them because that’s what they love to do, and we have a need in that area.
Work Is Part of the Fabric of Our Lives
The truth is, work is really a gift from God. In the beginning, God gave people meaningful work to do. It’s part of the fabric of our lives. And I’ve always believed that anything good in life takes effort. That’s why in the Block O, none of the elements can be accomplished without energy. If you want to keep your body healthy, it takes work. If you want to advance in your career, you have to work at it. Your conscious desire to care and give to others takes work. Your spiritual life takes work. Your family life takes work. And I guess it’s an individual decision where you’ll invest your time and energy in each of those areas, but my job as the head coach is to make sure that it isn’t all about football for my players and coaches. There’s a balance between each element of the Block O. I’ve had guys who have even gotten a little too carried away with community outreach. Athletes can get caught up with the pats on the back and the good feelings. Some people can get so excited about exercise that it becomes the thing that drives them: “I’m going to run that marathon or do the triathlon.” There’s nothing essentially wrong with those pursuits, but they have to be kept in balance with everything else.
Work is universal. Work is required in all phases of life. You don’t inherit a deep spiritual life. You’re not going to wake up one day and find you have good relationships with your children or your grandkids. You don’t “discover” a good marriage; you have to work at it. But when some people talk about work, their only point of reference seems to be the number of hours they spend on the job—as if that’s the only way to gauge it.
Keeping Work in Perspective
Success is the intersection where dreams and hard work meet.
You hear a lot about the work ethic of NFL coaches. How some will sleep at the office a few nights a week, for example. I’m not sure I believe all that. Some of those stories are legends.
Having said that, I know that coaches can get work out of whack at times. We place far too much importance on our preparation and planning. But all of us have to find our own ways of doing things. There’s no question that balance is tough, especially when we love what we do and want to do it with passion.
On the flip side, I’m sure a certain percentage of the population avoids giving an honest day’s work. They stare at their computer screens all day and don’t do the company’s work—and then wonder why there are cutbacks.
One thing we do in the OSU Winners Manual is provide an in-season weekly schedule. We outline rules of personal conduct, and one guideline in particular seems to prevent a lot of problems. We tell our players not to be out past 10 p.m. We tell them, “Nothing good is going to happen after 10 p.m. You might survive it, nothing bad might happen, but nothing good is going to happen either.” We also tell our coaches, “Any play you devise, any idea you come up with after ten o’clock is not going to work in the game.”
If you asked our players about us coaches, they’d say, “Those guys are always working.” Compared to them, we are, because we’re not going to class and football is all we concentrate on. But we try to balance the schedule, and if we work a few late nights, then we take some mornings off.
Some athletes in our society want to get an edge by using performance enhancers. One of our rules of conduct centers on drug usage. We tell the players there will be no sympathy for drug users of any sort. “If you need an upper of any kind to get ready to play,” I tell them, “do us all a favor and quit the team. There is no drug that improves an athlete’s performance. What improves you is hard work.”
It’s important to get work in its proper perspective, to see it for the gift it is, and to use it for the good of your team.
Every guy I’ve ever coached at Youngstown State or at Ohio State knows about the gazelles and the lions. This is one story they always talk about. And we always tell this story the night before the most challenging day of preseason: the running test.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning, the lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up, you’d better be running!
The running test is challenging because it’s just plain hard. It taxes the mind and body with a combination of sprints and endurance. We begin in three groups, the cheetahs, the lions, and the bears. Players line up on one sideline, run the fifty-three yards across the field, touch the other sideline, and run back. The cheetahs have to do it in sixteen seconds, the lions in eighteen seconds, and the bears in twenty seconds. They get a thirty-second rest, and then they do it again. We do the drill twenty times.
The players have to have speed, or they won’t complete the drill on time, so there’s an aerobic component. And because they have to slow down and change directions at the sidelines, there’s an anaerobic component as well. After ten repetitions, we add one second to the completion time and extend the rest time to forty-five seconds.
Now, if you want to talk about work, at the end of the running test those guys know what they’re made of. But they also know they’re not just running to stay busy. There’s a point to all our conditioning work. It’s making our players stronger. It’s showing them that they have endurance and that they’re up to the task ahead of them.
On the journey to success, after we’ve made all our preparations—the goals and blueprints and dreams—the next step is to work toward those goals. To do that, we need two qualities that are vital to our work: persistence and toughness.
Persistence
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge
Persistence is the key to the success of any team, business, endeavor, or person. We have a page in the Winners Manual that the guys come back to again and again. It says, “Whatever you do, do it passionately. Failure is an event, not a person. Every obstacle presents an opportunity . . . if you’re looking for it. Relax! You only fail when you quit.”
A player’s career is not defined by one event. A fumble, an interception, or a bad decision that costs the team does not mark him for his career—unless he allows it to. Many people have had something bad happen to them, and they’ve allowed that thing, whatever it is, to define them. Maybe they made a poor decision when they were younger, and now they’re living in the shadow of it. It could be a disease, a bad family of origin, or the loss of something dearly loved.
Passion makes every detail important.
G. K. Chesterton
Persistence is a quality possessed by people who want to achieve. If they have a passionate desire to succeed, the goal becomes much more important than the obstacles thrown in their way. They realize that a single event, failure, or circumstance does not define them.
Focus on the Performance, Not the Performer
One thing we try to do as coaches—and we fail at this many times—is to evaluate and critique the performance and not the performer. That’s hard to do. It’s a fine line to walk. Our players want us to critique their performance, and they want us to be truthful and tough, because they want to become the best players they can be. But as coaches, we have to make sure that our players know that our critique is about their actions on the field and not about them as individuals. We want our players to receive a critique as coming from someone who loves them, who wants to help them improve, and not to think that they themselves aren’t good enough. This isn’t about them; it’s about their performance. It’s a lot like parenting children. When you’re correcting your children, you hope that they don’t think you’re analyzing them as people. You’re looking at their behavior and trying to help them, but you’re not critiquing them as individuals.
This principle applies as well to our relationships with God. God loves us, and there’s no question he’s going to evaluate our behavior. If we’re sincere about following him, we’re going to evaluate our own behavior and try to change, to align ourselves with his will. But we should never think that our performance will change how God feels about us.
I told a story in chapter 4 about yelling at a player who had committed a personal foul. When I yelled at him, “You’re not worth fifteen yards!” one of the things that made that moment so egregious was that I was focused on the player and not on his performance. I still can’t believe I said that. The message I sent that day was as far off the mark from what I believe and how I should have acted as I could get. But at the same time, I have to see my own performance as a coach that day as an event. I’m not a failure because of that one instance when I lost my cool.
Whatever you do, do it passionately. Failure is an event, not a person. Every obstacle presents an opportunity . . . if you’re looking for it. Relax! You only fail when you quit.
Failure is an event. That’s a difficult concept for a lot of our players to grasp, because they’ve had so much success at other levels of competition. But it’s true. Failure is an event—it’s not personal.
Learning from Failure
Each year, I get a lot of cards and letters from people who write me long, heartfelt messages: “Coach, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about the loss in such and such a game. You must be devastated.” Stuff like that. Well, I read those letters, and I appreciate the sentiment. I know the people who wrote them care. And if they’re reading this now, I hope they’re not mad at me, but I have to say that I have never had a loss as a head coach that devastated me. Now, of course, I’m disappointed that LSU came out on top in the BCS championship game in January 2008. Sometimes I think that we might have had a different outcome if we’d done something different in the third quarter, or if I had told the players about a particular defense LSU was running, maybe they wouldn’t have made certain mistakes. Those kinds of things go through your head, for sure. But I’m not personally devastated by that loss.
Flip it around. When we win a big game, I get letters and e-mails and notes about our being at the pinnacle of the sport and about how my career has great meaning and blah, blah, blah. Yes, winning the big one is great. It’s a wonderful feeling to see the confetti coming down and the joy of the players, and it’s great to be able to share that with your family and know that all the hard work you’ve put in for a whole season has paid off. But honestly, I don’t feel any different about myself during the presentation of the trophy than I did before the game.
It can be difficult to keep that perspective, however, because the sportswriters and interviewers focus simply on whether you won or lost. You’re either a good guy or a bad guy. To me, that’s what persistence is about. Persistence takes the focus away from the performance and puts it on the process. Okay, that play, that business plan, that decision you made didn’t work. You didn’t sell as many books or burgers or whatever you were trying to sell. But in those situations, you are not a failure. The bad things that happened didn’t make you a failure. Those were simply events, not reflections on you as a person.
After a loss or a disappointing performance, go back to the problem, analyze it, ask what you can learn from it, figure out how to do it right and how you are going to visualize doing it right the next time. Remember, the fact that you didn’t achieve the desired outcome doesn’t mean you are a failure. It simply means that the plan you had in place didn’t work, so you have to get better. If you don’t improve, you may no longer be employed—but that doesn’t make you a failure either. Everything that happens—good and bad—should motivate you to be persistent. When things don’t go your way, back up and start over. Learn what you can do to improve, and get back in the game.
Two Types of Persistence
There are two types of persistence. In the first type, we start having doubts and aren’t sure about ourselves or about the plan we’ve set forth, but we press on anyway. We may not be certain about our ability, but there are some factors inherent in what we’re doing that propel us forward.
The second type of persistence comes from something deep inside us. Persistence isn’t just what we do; it’s a part of who we are. If we’re this type of person, it doesn’t matter what the score is, what our record is, or what obstacles are in front of us; we’re living a lifestyle that says, “We’re not giving up.” We have a plan, and we’re going to persist. Period.
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Walt Disney
I would say I’m characterized more by the second type of persistence than the first. I can’t think of many times when I’ve been ready to toss it all in. Maybe I’m too naive to know when to quit. Or perhaps it’s a gift God has given to me through the years.
I grew up observing the quality of persistence in my father. He was methodical in his work, slowly building from one year to the next, and stayed at one place, Baldwin-Wallace, for twenty-three years. He’d have one year that was good and then two that were very average. In those days, you could build a program slowly, over time. I’m not sure that if he were coaching today, they’d let him work that way. I was at Youngstown State for fifteen years, which at that level is pretty unusual. I attribute that longevity to persistence.
Today, people are on the move a whole lot more. Seldom do you find a person who stays in one place for very long, and I suppose there are a million reasons for that. The world isn’t as patient today; we have fast cars and microwaves, and we want things right now. In a world that values results over everything else, we need to be persistent to pursue and achieve our goals.
We’re no longer just competing regionally or nationally—we’re competing with the whole world in a growing global economy. We can have our legs taken out from under us pretty quickly these days. So we have to adapt and learn and persist if we want our work to move forward.
When Persistence Pays Off
One player at Ohio State who exemplified persistence was Antonio Smith. He came to the team in the fall of 2002 as a walk-on. He had grown up in the inner city of Columbus and was a pretty good player in high school, but he hadn’t been recruited at a national level. When Ohio State offered him an engineering scholarship, he decided to go to his hometown school and try to make the team.
During his first couple of years, you could count on the fingers of one hand how many times he played in the regular season. Still, he worked hard, did what we asked of him, and occasionally had the opportunity to play on one of our special-teams units. Antonio was five feet nine, which isn’t tall for his position, so he was up against some big odds and some great talent.
Before his final season, when he filled out his goal sheet, he wrote down that one of his goals was to earn a football scholarship. I called him in and told him he’d earned it. We had given him a shot to play defensive back, and he was now competing for a starting position.
One man with courage makes a majority.
Andrew Jackson
Spring conference is the time each year when our players sit down individually to talk with the coach, and I have a chance to help them with their goals and plans. The players and I talk one-on-one about what the team needs and expects from them, and I hope to plant some seeds in the areas of purpose, goals, and values. During the spring conference before Antonio’s senior year, we discussed many things, including goals and expectations.
Antonio was a great young man in the community—a really special kid who was great with outreach—and I attribute a lot of that to his grandmother who raised him. At the end of a player conference, sometimes I say, “Hey, I’ve done most of the talking; now let me hear from you.” This time I said, “We’ve gone over your goals. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Two things, Coach,” Antonio said. “On one of those Friday nights before an away game, I’d like to share my faith with the team. And because I’m a senior, I’d like you to consider me to give one of those talks.”
At our away games, when we have our chapel service the night before the game, one of the players will talk to the team, because we don’t really have a chaplain. The subject can vary. It might be about the game, or it could be about the player’s faith or whatever else he wants to share. We always let a senior lead those nights.
“Okay, let me jot that down,” I said. “What’s the other thing?”
He thought a minute. “I really have a goal of being the starting cornerback on the NCAA video game.” He was talking about the Xbox or PlayStation game that matches the uniform numbers of some of the real players from individual college football teams with the numbers on the players at each position in the game.
I sat back and looked at him. “Hey, Tone, I don’t know how they decide who to put on there.”
“I don’t know either, but I thought you’d have something to do with it,” he said.
I shook my head. “I don’t have anything to do with that. I guess maybe they assess things after spring practice or the regular season, for each of the teams.”
“Okay, that’s just one of my goals,” he said.
When the season came along, I didn’t know for sure whether Antonio would be a starter for us. But because he was so dependable and consistent—and throughout his collegiate career he had been trying to become the best he could be and contribute to the team—we gave him a starting slot. And then he ended up having one of those storybook years. He started all thirteen games and finished second on the team in tackles, with seventy-one. He was a candidate for the Thorpe Award—awarded to the best defensive back in college football—and was named first-team All–Big Ten. It was amazing. If you had told me a few years earlier that Antonio would have that type of success, I wouldn’t have believed you. But he had tremendous persistence. He just wouldn’t give up. He earned his engineering degree and received a lot of job offers, but he decided to sign as a free agent with the Indianapolis Colts.
And guess which number was used for one of the starting OSU cornerbacks on that video game? Antonio Smith’s number 14!
Toughness
Everyone has a plan until they are hit.
Evander Holyfield
Football players at Ohio State know the truth of Evander Holyfield’s words.
You never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.
Irish Proverb
You’re going through the game, doing everything right, running your patterns, blocking, doing what you’re assigned to do, following the plan.
And then you get hit.
Hard.
You can’t breathe.
You see stars.
And when the breath starts coming again, you begin to feel the pain, just in time to get hit on the next play, and the next, and the next.
We talk a lot about toughness with our players—but it’s a toughness that transcends being able to take a hit on the field. True toughness comes from courageous actions and applies to every aspect of the game of life. We have to be tough enough to make good decisions—decisions we know are right, even in situations where the right thing may not be the most popular choice. This type of toughness may very well be the hardest thing for young athletes today.
Here are some of the decisions our guys have to make. Someone offers them drugs for free, just to try. Someone else offers them a lot of money in exchange for tickets to a big game. Another person takes them aside and says, “Hey, I can get you twenty dollars for every autograph you sign.” And this is only scratching the surface—there are countless other temptations out there. These decisions are the most difficult thing about playing in the limelight at Ohio State. It’s not the practices and the running tests and the two-a-days that will break players down. It’s the moral and ethical challenges that test their conscience.
I hated every minute of training, but I said, “Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”
Muhammad Ali
Really, that’s the toughest part about life in general, isn’t it? Suppose you’re stocking shelves and somebody says, “Hey, why don’t you just take a few of those and we can sell them. Nobody’s going to know.” What do you do? You can either make the right decision, or you can say, “Yeah, this company makes enough money. They won’t miss a few of these.”
It might be tempting for business owners to fudge on their taxes. After all, “The government gets enough of our money.”
On the football field our players get tired; they get sore; maybe they pull a muscle or get a cramp. In extreme cases, they might break a bone. They have to be ready to handle those things, sure, but their greatest challenges will often be found in life off the field. When players are enjoying time with their friends and someone says something derogatory, confronts them, or challenges their manhood, they have to make a decision about whether they’re going to stand up to that person and do something that might make them feel good for the moment but will have lasting repercussions.
Or maybe a group wants to go one direction and in a player’s gut he knows he shouldn’t be doing that. Maybe it’s alcohol or drugs or a young woman in the dorms—whatever the social atmosphere is at the moment. The courage he has at that moment to do the right thing will affect the trajectory of his whole life.
Doing the right thing when the pressure’s on is a lot tougher than any football practice, and it will have an impact on players’ lives a lot longer. Real-life decisions are the tough things. So we make it clear to our players that their toughness off the field will affect their lives even more than decisions they make on the field.
Tragedies and Triumphs
Often, the most difficult challenges in life are situations that we can’t explain. When life really punches you in the gut, you find out how much toughness and courage you truly possess. I had no idea how difficult things could be until I got a late-night phone call in January 1996, when I was coaching at Youngstown State.
The secret is this: Strength lies solely in tenacity.
Louis Pasteur
The caller said there had been some kind of altercation outside the home of Jermaine Hopkins, one of our players, and that shots had been fired. While everybody else was running for cover, Jermaine, for some reason, had walked out onto the porch and was killed.
Here was a young man who was perhaps our most popular player. An All-American defensive end, he had set a school record for sacks in 1994 and contributed to two national-championship teams, in 1993 and 1994. He was our captain and a great friend to the entire team.
He was also the nicest guy in the world. He was preparing to graduate in the spring with a degree in hospitality management. His dream was to open a restaurant and help his parents. On that night in January, he had cooked for some of his friends and put out a little spread at his house. He was practicing his craft and had invited a bunch of the guys over to eat after a party earlier in the evening. Now he was dead, the victim of a senseless shooting.
The guys who were at Jermaine’s house had taken him to the hospital, and we sent them back to the stadium to wait. Once Coach Ken Conatser and I knew that Jermaine had died, we called his parents from the hospital and then went over to the stadium to talk to the players.
We thought the safest thing was to take them over to the police station, which was not far away, because emotions were running pretty high. A lot of the guys thought they knew the identity of the shooter, and they wanted to go after him. So we were in a holding area, all of us in the same room, when we told them that Jermaine had passed away. When they heard the news, there were guys running, trying to get out of the room. I grabbed one kid, who was Jermaine’s best friend, and tried to calm him down. He was a big guy, and he just about broke my back. The sorrow and anger in that room were extraordinary.
That night, my own words came back to me. I had warned my players that things would be harder for them off the field than on it. In the days that followed, we met as a team and grieved. We had terrific support from area clergy, counselors, and university administrators. We let people spill out their emotions and say what they felt. I think we were all able to get some things said and talk it out, but I’m not sure a person ever completely heals from something as devastating as that.
Losing games is hard. Seeing a player get injured and watching his dreams die is a huge challenge. But I’ll tell you, helping that team understand that Jermaine wasn’t going to be with us anymore was the most difficult and toughest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. Losing the LSU game for the national championship? That was a tough loss, but it doesn’t even come close to the pain of losing a great player, friend, and teammate. That kind of event puts everything else into perspective very quickly. I can’t imagine going through anything more painful.
After Jermaine was laid to rest, we retired his number (58), and the university set up a scholarship in his name. Even in death, he was able to give to others.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison
In the spring of 2006, we encountered another difficult situation, this time at Ohio State. During spring practice, Tyson Gentry, a third-year sophomore walk-on from Sandusky, Ohio, who was both a punter and a wide receiver, got hurt on a passing drill. He was running a crossing route, a routine play, but when he caught the pass and was tackled, he landed kind of funny. It didn’t look like a big deal, and everybody headed back to the line, but Tyson didn’t get up. When the coaches got to his side, he wasn’t moving at all. He couldn’t feel anything from his neck down.
We canceled the rest of practice. I talked with the other players about the injury and then went over to the hospital to be with Tyson. As it turned out, he had a fracture of the C4 vertebra, about where the neck goes into the shoulders. The doctors fused the surrounding C3 and C5 vertebrae together, and today Tyson has movement in his arms and some of his upper body. His goal now is to walk again.
These types of life challenges cause us to reflect on all the Big Ten Fundamentals, especially the fundamental of faith. When life is suddenly coming at you quickly and overwhelming the football component, you need to have the whole person developed, because it isn’t just about football. Tyson Gentry understands that, and I’ll talk more about him in the chapter on heroes and winners.
The disappointment about Tyson’s injury never ends. The feeling of loss over Jermaine’s death is always there. But these situations show us what’s important and force us to handle every day with persistence and toughness.
Questions for Reflection
1. How many people do you know who have fallen into the trap of defining themselves by what they do rather than by who they are? Is there an experience in your life that you feel is defining you right now?
2. Think of someone you truly admire who is successful professionally and also has deep relationships. What is one thing you can do regarding your work to be more like that person?
3. What has been the toughest experience of your life? How did you get through that experience, and how did it affect you?
4. How is persistence linked with passion? Can you be persistent about something for which you feel no passion?
Your Personal Game Plan
1. Personal/Family: How are you doing with balancing your family and work? Talk with your family members, and get their response to this question; then take action on that information.
2. Spiritual/Moral: Knowing that our spiritual lives take work, what can you do today that shows you’re willing to work at digging deeper into this area?
3. Caring/Giving: If you have previously defined your life by some negative experience, today can be a turning point. What one thing from your past could you let go of today? Is there someone hurting whom you can help today?
4. Health/Fitness: What do you need to be persistent about regarding your health today?
5. Your Team: Who on your team is going through a tough time? How can you reach out and walk alongside that person through this season?
6. Academics/Career: Are there people at your workplace or on your team that you admire for their persistence? Tell them how much you appreciate their example, and ask them what motivates them to be persistent.