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

EAST LIVERPOOL — In 2022 before his final public appearance at the Lou Holtz-Upper Valley Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame coach Lou Holtz, who died Wednesday at the age of 89, walked gingerly into the museum that bared his name and had a seat at the back of the building to prepare to receive fans, well-wishers and the final class of his Hall of Fame.

Since he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump in late 2020, he was also getting ready for a bust of his likeness to be unveiled in the lobby of the Potter Fieldhouse later that day.

I had been a bit curious as to whether Holtz had any run in with Trump while he had a brief and largely forgettable head coaching gig with the New York Jets in 1976, so I asked him about it. After all the Trump family name was well recognized in New York even in the 70s.

“Are you kidding me?” Holtz said. “He was all the way up there (as Holtz pointed above his head) and I was all the way down there (lowering his hands below his knees).”

And if you spent any time around the man, you knew that made perfect sense.

Ever since his days as a youngster in Follansbee, West Virginia, and later East Liverpool, Holtz was keenly aware of his humble beginnings and hung on to that for the rest of his life.

He called growing up in East Liverpool a blessing. Attending St. Aloysius school as a youngster, Holtz began his interest in football in the fifth grade when his uncle Lou Tychonievich let him play on the school’s football team he was coaching.

It made quite the impact on him.

“Uncle Lou was 10 years older than me and he adopted me like I was a little brother,” Holtz said in a 2021 interview. “He would take me to the movies and down to the corner to hang with the guys or take me to watch him play high school football. The band would play in front of the diamond and would march down to Patterson Field and all the fans would go with them. The stadium was filled and that was where my love of football was.”

Along the way his magnetic personality allowed him to connect with others and he used those connections wisely. He eventually landed at Notre Dame and led the Irish to their national football title in 1988.

The late East Liverpool historian Frank “Digger” Dawson knew the exact date he met Holtz — Sept. 2, 1951 — when he was a senior student manager on the Potter football team and Holtz was a scrawny sophomore.

“(Holtz) said ‘If I stand in this line all this time and don’t weigh 100 pounds, I’m going to be sick’,” Dawson said in 2022. “Well he made it just like every single thing he has done.”

The undersized 1954 East Liverpool High School graduate did enough with the opportunities he was given in high school to become a walk on at Kent State where he played linebacker in 1956 and 1957.

“I think back to whenever I was in high school,” Holtz said. “My father had a third-grade education, I was born during the Depression, no welfare, no food stamps. We always had plenty to eat because when my dad asked for seconds he said ‘you already had plenty to eat’. We were blessed. (In high school) I wasn’t a great athlete, I wasn’t a class officer, I never had a date, never went to the prom. If you go back and look at my high school record, you’d look at it and go ‘My goodness, he has absolutely no future whatsoever.’ How did I end up here? Because of good people.”

One of the important persons he came across in high school was his football coach Wade Watts. Watts was the first to envision Holtz as a coach.

It just didn’t turn out the way Watts thought.

“He meant high school coaching, not Notre Dame!” Holtz said in 2022.

Holtz went to Kent State with the purpose of wanting to learn how to coach. His first chance came when he was assigned to coach the freshman at Ravenna High School after a broken collarbone sidelined him at Kent State. It was not easy.

“I didn’t have a car but I walked 5 miles every day to coach the freshman,” Holtz said. “We went undefeated that year. Please don’t ask me how but we did.”

That experience led to more opportunities including coaching the Kent State freshman team.

“I knew every assignment on the team when I was in the game,” Holtz said. “I would tell the guy next to me what he was supposed to do and things along that line. I remember once I went to college, in English class, I was drawing offenses and defenses,” Holtz said.

Holtz did end up graduating from Kent in 1959 with a degree in history. He helped pay for that degree by wrapping bundles in the mail room of the Evening Review.

His college days also forayed into the military as he trained under Kent State’s Army Reserves Officers Training Corps and earned a commission as a field artillery officer in the United States Army Reserve at the time of his graduation from college.

He collegiate coaching career really started to launch as a graduate assistant at Iowa in 1960 where he served under College Football Hall of Fame head coach Forest Evashevski. The Hawkeyes finished second in the country that season.

That experience dove-tailed into stops at William & Mary, UConn, South Carolina and eventually a spot on the 1968 Ohio State national championship coaching staff led by Woody Hayes.

In 1969 he took his first head coaching job at William & Mary and ran with coaching at the highest ranks of the collegiate and professional ranks until his retirement in 2004.

Through the ups and downs of being a coach, Holtz was always keen to point out that his wife, Beth, whom he married on July 22, 1961, was a key role in his life. The couple produced four children and three went on to graduate from Notre Dame. Beth died of cancer on June 30, 2020 and was on his mind as he gave his final public address in East Liverpool on May 22, 2022.

“She only did one interview in her entire life and it was about cancer,” Holtz said. “They said ‘Mrs. Holtz, what did you learn from having cancer?’ She said I learned how much my family loved me.’ Why do we have to wait until there is a catastrophe before we realize it?”

Reflecting on the bust that students and members of the community will walk by at East Liverpool High School into the future, Holtz said he hoped his life provided motivation needed for children to follow their dreams.

“I’m just an average individual by any way you want to look at it,” Holtz said. “I hope when future students look at the bust and talk about Lou Holtz, they’ll think anything is possible. If that guy can do it, I sure can because I have more talent than he had.”