Steve Christilaw: Toughness a most impressive quality that sports reveals

We throw words around so often that they too-often lose some impact.

As a writer you find that the right word, the perfect word to describe a person has been so overused that it reads like a cheap cliché.

An editor used to tell us that “nothing exceeds like excess.” Sadly, even that worthwhile axiom has become cliché.

And that’s a shame.

How do you describe someone when the right word has lost its meaning and its context?

Mark Twain summed up the challenge.

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,” he wrote. “ ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Lately I’ve been reflecting on one particular word: toughness.

We throw that one around like rice at a wedding. Thankfully it’s a trait that expresses itself in so many ways that it still hangs on to its importance.

Still, we throw it around without regard to its context.

Yes, it takes toughness to last through the final minutes of a big game. It takes toughness to shrug off pain and continue with a match. Yes, it is indeed a display of toughness to stay in the fight when the body is begging you to quit.

And yet that doesn’t quite touch the deeper meaning of what it means to be, truly, tough.

Toughness is a hallmark that only reveals itself over the fullness of time. Those short-term, obvious expressions of toughness are like icebergs: There is so much more going on under the surface than you will ever see in the moment.

True displays of toughness happen every day, not just in a big game or under a spotlight.

We talk about the toughness of the marathon runner as their body is wracked by oxygen debt at the end of the race. It’s as if toughness only comes out in the final 385 yards of the race and we ignore just how hard it is to get your body to run the first 26 miles.

The true test of toughness came out long before. It’s dragging your body out of bed and taking it out for training run after training run. It’s fighting through shin splints so bad that they bring tears to your eyes, and then going right back out the next day to train all over again.

It’s the cross country runner who has an injured hip that begs her to rest and heal, but who carries on with her team because they need her, even though she continually finishes sixth when the top five score in a match.

That’s where Emma Garza was all fall. But when the dust settled at the state cross country meet, it was her tough, gutsy sixth-place finish that broke a first-place tie to earn West Valley its third state cross country title.

Vince Lombardi summed up that kind of performance.

“Mental toughness is Spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication,” the Green Bay Packers coach said. “It is fearlessness, and it is love.”

It’s an undersized freshman playing defender on a GSL soccer team and physically challenging bigger, stronger attackers and winning. Central Valley’s Mady Simmelink has done that for four years.

“Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles,” Detroit Lions great Alex Karras said.

Perhaps even more than that, I see everyday toughness that never makes it to the spotlight. Toughness without ever entertaining thoughts of accolade is often the most impressive.

It’s the bench player who goes out there every day and works as hard as they possibly can so that the players ahead of them on the depth chart are prepared for the next game.

Wrestling depends on that kind of selfless toughness. No wrestler stands atop the awards platform without a deep sense of gratitude to the teammates who pushed them every single day, every minute of every practice, to reach that summit.

It’s an everyday version of the movie “Rudy,” just without the satisfying ending. For every Rudy getting a chance to put on a Notre Dame jersey just one time there are thousands more, equally dedicated and every bit as motivated, toiling in obscurity from everyone but their coaches and teammates.

“Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory,” Boston Celtics great Bill Russell said.

Toughness is impossible to fake. You are either tough, or you aren’t.

There are few things that do a better job of revealing the quality than the world of sport.

You don’t learn to be tough; it’s a quality you either have or you don’t. It comes out over time and is like the steel in a blade responding to the whetstone.

One of the toughest people in sport that I can think of was former North Carolina State men’s basketball coach Jim Valvano.

NC State won a Cinderella national title in 1983 under Valvano.

On my bookshelf is a copy of his autobiography: “They Gave Me A Lifetime Contract, and Then They Declared Me Dead.”

While he was still young, 47, Valvano was diagnosed with a form of cancer that strikes the glands and eventually spreads to the bones. It’s a form of cancer that is extraordinarily painful, yet he faced it with humor and humility.

In obvious pain, Valvano attended a 10-year reunion of his national championship team. Speaking to the crowd at Reynolds Coliseum just 10 weeks before his untimely death, he talked to his former team about the importance of hope, love and persistence.

His advice to them: “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.”

Less than two weeks later, he was given the inaugural Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award at the ESPYs. It was there that he announced the formation of The V Foundation for Cancer Research. Its motto: “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.”

You don’t get tougher than that.