Toughness

I was watching the Stanford 36-28 victory over Oregon State last evening when I got a text message from Un-Pseudo Stoops (we’ll often text back and forth during Cardinal sporting events):

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Wow. I’m a Jim Harbaugh fan. This team actually looks tough. Not ready to say good, but I’ll give them tough.

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I couldn’t have agreed more (of course, immediately after that Stanford let OSU march up and down the field on two consecutive drives to almost tie the game up, but let’s just put that aside for a moment). The other word that popped into my head as I watched us run up 200+ rushing yards on a Pac-10 team for the first time in (probably) years was ‘prepared’. However, ‘prepared’ isn’t the same type of compliment as ‘tough’. Being excited about your team being ‘prepared’ is a backhanded compliment if I’ve ever heard one. After all, to be excited about good preparation implies your team has previously been decidedly ‘unprepared’ in the past (read: 2004-2006).

‘Tough’, though, is a real compliment in sports. It implies a certain grit and iron that we love in our athletes. At its core, toughness in sports indicates an acceptance of (or even interest in?) giving and receiving physical punishment for the purpose of winning. The other indicator is a complete unwillingness to complain or whine. At the end of the day, this is why Favre’s legacy has been tarnished, not because he decided to un-retire - we can all understand still wanting to play, just not crying about being unwanted.

In many ways, ‘tough’ is the greatest compliment that can be paid to an athlete who is, on balance, less physically-talented than his competitors. That’s why I was so excited, as a 49ers season ticket holder, to read Michael Silver’s article on JT O’Sullivan’s lack of sympathy for Alex Smith and Shaun Hill.

(Getty Images/Greg Trott)

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Harkening back to his college days, O’Sullivan recalls, “I loved it when we’d play a school from a more prominent conference. You had a bunch of guys who thought, ‘I’m pretty sure I was good enough to play at this school, but they didn’t want me.’ You get a whole group like that, all of us with chips on our shoulders, and it’s pretty powerful.”

Eight employers later, does O’Sullivan still carry that chip?

“Oh,” he said, “the chips have turned to boulders … to mountains.”

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At the end of the day, toughness really can’t be proven with some words in an article, it has to be shown by doing things like diving into the stands at full-speed to make an outrageous catch (Jeter). Those are the types of moments that can make even me, a guy who hates the Yankees, acknowledge the legend of Derek Jeter.

But to me it’s a good sign that O’Sullivan’s bitter and angry. It’ll make him that much hungrier to not lose his job after all these years of waiting.

Let’s go, Niners.