The fight of a lifetime

​Steve Burrough quietly carried on a conversation with a visitor while intently watching his Oak Mountain High wrestling team work its way through a recent practice.

He playfully chided one wrestler for appearing to wear his shorts backward and kidded with a few wrestlers sitting out because of illness or injury. Instructions were either given quietly or with a quick point of a finger. His wrestlers knew what he wanted — whether it came with verbal instructions or not.

​A few minutes later, he walked into an adjacent room to tell his story. It’s a story of frustration. A story of persistence. A story of overcoming obstacles while not always knowing the entire cause of those obstacles. A story that is inspiring and sad at the same time. In many ways, also a story of how wrestling — and the kids he’s coaching — serves as one of the vehicles that keeps him going.

​Burrough’s story begins with a persistent cough that started more than eight years ago and eventually became much more. Doctors can’t tell Burrough everything that he’s fighting right now, but it’s partly a lung disease called mycobacterium avium complex (MAC). He becomes winded easily, and the coughing fits grow worse. The weight loss is so severe that, at one point, he tugs at a Minnesota wrestling shirt hanging off his shoulders, smiles a small smile and says, “This shirt would be tight on me. I wouldn’t say I was a muscle head, but I was a pretty big guy.”

​What he doesn’t do is ask for sympathy.

​“I don’t really feel sorry for myself,” Burrough said. “It’s my new normal.”

​Understanding that “new normal” is difficult without visiting his past, which is inseparable from wrestling. Basketball was Burrough’s first sporting love. His father was a big man — 6-foot-4 — and Burrough figured he’d be the same. When he entered Pinson High, however, he was 5-foot-2 and in need of finding a new sport.

​“My dad suggested that I go into wrestling,” Burrough said. “When he said wrestling, I’m picturing ropes. It wasn’t that. It fit my personality more. I’d always been small and aggressive. I guess you have to be when you’re small.”

​Burrough was a state champion wrestler by the time he graduated. He was also in love with the sport. After a couple years in college, he returned to his alma mater to help out as an assistant wrestling coach. Eventually, he moved on to help out another school before deciding, at the age of 32, not only to return to college but walk on the wrestling team at Carson-Newman University.

​“I don’t guess I went back with expectations of being an All-American,” Burrough said. “I really went back and learned more of a college style wrestling.”

​It seems attending clinics and watching videos would have been an easier route. But easy isn’t the way wrestlers operate.

​“You always hear that Alabama wrestling is not very good,” Burrough said. “I heard so much of that when I was younger, you start to kind of believe that. I wanted to at least find out if I would be able to do it. It did two things for me: It kind of settled it in my mind that had I had the opportunity I could have done an all right job and then going back and learning.”

​He eventually finished his college degree work at Montevallo and settled into his life as a history teacher and wrestling coach. He had short stints at Erwin High and Moody High before coming to Oak Mountain in the 2005-06 school year. He turned the Eagles into a winning program, finishing third in state three successive years early in his tenure and in the top five several more times.

​The persistent cough was a steady visitor during that time. It would get worse in wrestling season but was generally thought to be acid reflux or post nasal drip. In the summer of 2014, though, the coughing fits worsened. Burrough returned to his doctor and went to a series of specialists. During one of those visits, he was given a checklist of symptoms that included loss of breath and sudden weight loss. All the questions were checked with a no. He was given instructions to come back in three weeks.

​“By the time I got back there, my voice was a whisper and I had lost 20 pounds,” Burrough said. “Every checklist question was yes. The 20-pound weight loss in that three weeks, I guess, got everybody’s attention, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it finally got them pushing to find out what was going on.”

​The MAC diagnosis came, but, Burrough said, doctors weren’t sure if “that was the chicken or the egg.” He’s visited the Mayo Clinic twice, once to take out a lymph node that had nodules growing on it and clip his vocal cord. Now, he uses a microphone during class and often while coaching.

​Presently, he’s lost 45 pounds and he tires easily. Burrough takes an antibiotic regimen three times daily and nausea medicine nightly before going to bed. The biggest frustration is the continued unknown about all that he is fighting. He struggles to get off the couch on Sundays during wrestling season. Getting out of bed on Monday isn’t easy, but he wouldn’t dare miss the early morning practice. Burrough demands his wrestlers show up and demands the same from himself.

​“[The wrestlers] don’t say much about it,” said Burrough, who missed 10 to 12 days during wrestling season last year because of surgeries and procedures. “I don’t know that they know a whole lot about what’s going on. They can definitely look at me and tell something is different. I kind of think they aren’t willing to complain too much when I’m over in the corner coughing up my lungs and looking like I don’t feel very good.”

​Others certainly notice and are inspired. Oak Mountain Athletic Director Tina Mills said in an email that Burrough “has continued to show a dedication to the boys on that team that inspires us all” and that dedication is what “is right about public education and sports.”

​Senior Jaried Buxton leaves no doubt about what Burrough means to the wrestlers.

​“I really appreciate him staying,” Buxton said. “He was really sick last year and had a lot of surgeries. I thought that he really cares about us. He’s still here without taking off sick days and all of that. When I see him do that, it makes me want to win for Coach.”

​Burrough is in no hurry to leave coaching. He has a son in seventh grade who he wants to coach. He also is excited about his current team, which has the pieces to be special. Alex Thomas (106 pounds) and Michael John Harris (132) were state finalists last year, and Coleman Reeves (160) and Buxton (170) finished third. Hall Morton, a state placer in 2014, was one of five additional state qualifiers returning from last year.

​They will follow Burrough’s lead.

“We talk about adversity all the time anyway, just being a wrestler to begin with,” Burrough said. “It’s a great tool to teach adversity and overcoming odds, stepping up when you need to step up. This has just given me another avenue to teach that.”