Former football coach Lou Holtz smiles after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Donald Trump, in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Even as a youngster growing up in East Liverpool, Lou Holtz had a love for the game.

“He’d call and say we got a team, we’ll play you Saturday morning,” Bob Duffy said. “He just loved football.”

Holtz, a College Football Hall of Fame coach who led Notre Dame to its last national title in 1988, died Wednesday at age 89.

Frank Wolfe, a 1953 graduate of East Liverpool High School who was a year ahead of Holtz, was the quarterback on Holtz’s first elementary team at St. Aloysius in East Liverpool.

“Even in those days Lou had a football mind,” said Wolfe, who lives in Chester, W.Va. “We would run a play and as soon as a play was over, Lou would go over to his uncle (and coach Lou Tychovienich), Uncle Lou so and so didn’t do what they were supposed to.

“Even in those days he knew what everyone was supposed to do. I said, ‘Shut your mouth you’re going to get all of us in trouble,’ He said, ‘You’re not doing the play right.’ He knew his football, even then. I guess he just had a football mind. He was born to do that.

They practiced after school in an area known as Skeleton Park, where the city hospital is located toward the Newell bridge.

“I was the quarterback because I got good grades and called the plays,” Wolfe said. “Lou was a guard or tackle. In those days, kids weren’t big. We had some big boys, but they were in the eighth grade.”

Duffy was a 1953 graduate of East Liverpool and served as sports editor of the Evening Review from 1956-69.

“He was a year behind me in school,” Duffy said. “We played a lot of touch football and basketball together. Our friendship grew after that.”

Holtz worked at the Evening Review, wrapping bundles in the mail room to save money so he could attend Kent State. Holtz walked onto the Kent State football team because he was told it would help his coaching prowess.

Duffy said when Holtz was named head coach at Notre Dame in 1986, he stopped by the campus during a summer family vacation.

“I walked in and his secretary said, ‘Lou is very busy today. I don’t know if he has time to see you, but I’ll see if he has time.’ Lou came running in. He said, ‘Duffy, what are you doing here?” I’m here to see how you’re doing in this new job.

“He was a special guy to me. He never forgot East Liverpool.”

The diminutive Holtz played guard at East Liverpool High School.

“In high school, he was so small, Wade Watts was afraid to put him in,” Duffy said.

He said the last time he saw Holtz was May 21, 2022, when he was inducted into the Lou Holtz/Upper Ohio Valley Hall of Fame in East Liverpool.

“The year before, he came in the Casa De Emanuel restaurant with (Bob Sebo and Frank Dawson),” Duffy said. “Lou said, ‘How are you doing? Are you in my Hall of Fame? He said, ‘You are now.'”

“He said Duffy helped him get started,” Wolfe said.

When Holtz got ready to speak, it was always a guarantee there were plenty of people ready to listen.

The larger-than-life personality of the Follansbee-born, East Liverpool-raised College Football Hall of Fame coach helped him in so many venues – from the gridiron where he won 249 college football games with six teams, including a national championship at Notre Dame, to the television studio where he became an ESPN staple, and back to the Ohio Valley, where his words of wisdom always were welcome and greatly anticipated.

“He was one of a kind,” said Doug Huff, the longtime sports editor of the Intelligencer and a sports historian who had rubbed elbows with Holtz at numerous Ohio Valley athletic functions, including the Upper Ohio Valley Dapper Dan Club.

Huff remembered one year he was the toastmaster for the Dapper Dan dinner, sitting in between Holtz and Brian Kelly, who was entering his first year as Notre Dame’s football coach. Holtz helped secure Kelly’s attendance that night, Huff said, but it was often Holtz who was the man of the hour at the dais.

“Every time there was talk about a banquet, they were always like, ‘Can we get Lou to come? If we can get Lou, the fans will be there,'” Huff said. “He was just a magnet for Ohio Valley fans. And all the reporters wanted to be there, too, because when he was talking, they always knew they’d have something to write about.”

Holtz was the author of so many verbal gems. Among them were, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it,” and “Don’t ever promise more than you can deliver, but always deliver more than you can promise.” When his coaching days ended – he is the only coach in college football history to take six programs to bowl games – he not only gained further fame as a college football analyst, but was in high demand as a motivational speaker.

“People came out of the woodwork to see him, get an autograph and get their picture taken with him,” Huff said.

Throughout, he never forgot his Ohio Valley roots. On top of returning often for banquets and other events, he founded the Lou Holtz Hall of Fame, now the Upper Ohio Valley Hall of Fame, in East Liverpool. That hall of fame not only honored prominent sports figures from the region, but other notable inductees in the fields of education, government and more.

Huff remembers one summer during the East Liverpool High football team’s preseason practices, that Holtz’s longtime friend Frank “Digger” Dawson was able to bring Holtz back home and surprise the players on the practice field.

“So Lou comes running out on the field, and he’s saying, ‘OK, guys, crack the whip. We’ve got some work to do,'” Huff said. “And the players were all looking at each other like, ‘Holy cow, that’s Lou Holtz.”

Holtz was a window to a time in college football where coaches like him, Bobby Bowden and Steve Spurrier held court as soundbite machines, always giving the media something good for their stories. It’s one of the reasons, Huff said, that he was always such a successful coach.

“He was just able to relate to those 20- and 21-year-old players,” Huff said.

Holtz was a college football coach from 1960-2004 except for one year with the New York Jets in 1976 and three years after retiring from Notre Dame in 1996.

“It was always a dream of Lou Holtz to coach at Notre Dame,” Duffy said. “I’m sure he’ll be buried there. That is where his wife (Beth) is buried.”

Holtz entered hospice care in January.

“He was always true to East Liverpool,” Wolfe said. “He was a tremendous man and I’m glad his suffering is over.”

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