As Borland continues his comeback from an Achilles injury, it's clear he's needed on Ohio State's defense. Here's how he got to that point.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- This all started with a game of patty cake?
John Greenidge chuckles at that question.
He's a four-time black belt. So it wasn't meant as an insult. It just seemed so, kind of silly, the image Greenidge and a young Ohio State linebacker Tuf Borland playfully clapping hands as a way of preparing to play football.
Greenidge has been coaching athletes for more than a decade with a program that uniquely blends strength training, hand fighting and a deeper understanding of how the mind interacts with the body. It's developed over his 30-plus years as a competitive martial artist and gymnast, a method he uses with athletes across all sports out of his JG Tumbling and Training gym in Chicago. Borland has been a client since he was in eighth grade.
Years of training athletes led Greenidge to the discovery that young girls typically have better hand-eye coordination than young boys, a skill he attributed to girls being more likely to play patty cake as children. So that's where he and Borland started in their first session eight years ago.
"When you think about it, it's just hands coming at you, and you get used to that movement," Greenidge told cleveland.com. "We used to play patty cake a lot. Then after a while instead of looking at each other, we would look away from each other and play. Now you're training your peripheral vision, which is actually faster than your linear vision. It takes 1.3 seconds of thought to get from your brain to your extremities."
A conversation with Greenidge goes a lot of places. From games of patty cake (the more manly term would be hand fighting) to physics lessons about the angles at which you can hit a moving train with a pickup truck to knock it off of its tracks. You get a crash course in anatomy and psychology, and how the body is a system of levers that can be manipulated when pushed and pulled the right way.
At some point you get to how the heck any of that has anything to do with Borland, the sophomore middle linebacker and Ohio State captain with the unique name who's made a stunning comeback from an Achilles injury suffered less than six months ago.
You hear Achilles injury and think extensive rehab. Borland doesn't like to share the exact nature of the injury, whether it was a tear or something else. Regardless, the fact that he was on the field last week against Oregon State seemed awfully early when you consider such injuries often end entire seasons. Then you learn how Borland has been in tune with his body for years, how he's focused extensively on high-concept physical training since before he was in high school, and how that's affected him as a football player. Then it starts to make a little more sense.
"He's always been a fast healer," his father, Kyle Borland said. "I had no doubt he was going to meet or exceed the projections for his recovery time."
Tuf, born Jarred Tuf Borland, didn't have much choice.
That story can be worn out, the one about the guy who was born to play football. With Borland, though, there really isn't any way around it.
"It's in his blood, so to speak," Kyle said.
Kyle played football at Wisconsin and then briefly in the NFL. Kyle's brother Brian is the defensive coordinator and safeties coach at the University of Buffalo. Their father was a high school coach in Wisconsin and then a college coach at Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater. Their grandfather was a high school coach in Iowa. Tuf's younger brother Trevor is a junior defensive end and tight end at Bolingbrook High School in the Chicago suburbs.
The Borlands' love affair with football wasn't going to end after three generations.
When the time came to take Tuf's training to another level, Kyle sought out the traditional strength and speed options. Through a mutual friend he met Greenidge, and became intrigued by his different approach.
"We really liked the idea of total body awareness, mind awareness and how the mind affects the body," Kyle said. "I really think that's been beneficial for Tuf."
Some of what Greenidge and Borland do sounds very familiar. Pushing and pulling sleds, push-ups, bear crawls, jumping rope and an ab regime. There are nine or 10 stations, three sets of each and high reps. Always high reps.
That's also just the warm-up.
When freshmen arrive at Ohio State, they typically remark about how the winter and summer conditioning drills are so grueling that they often mistake the warm-up for the full workout. For Borland at least, that wasn't anything new.
"When most people train, they train the body to fatigue and then they stop. With what we do, we start at fatigue," Greenidge said.
The warm-up is an hour long, including between 200 and 500 jumping jacks on a mat at the start. Doing them on a mat rather than on the hard floor is part of the plan to exhaust the athlete before the training really starts.
"You're working the transverse muscles of the feet, burning the feet out and starting to make the person tired," Greenidge said.
Once the warm-up is complete, more traditional methods like bench press and squat are combined with balance work and stations dedicated specifically to martial arts hand fighting. That's where Greenidge's four black belts -- two in taekwondo and two in karate -- come into play.
"The hand fighting we do is how to fight in a closet, or in a phone booth," Greenidge said. "What we taught is that for somebody to be able to control you, they have to reach out and touch you. As soon as someone touches you, they are at a longer lever and I'm at a shorter lever. That means I'll have more power over them. Your body is basically a bunch of levers."
No, Borland is not also a secret black belt. He never took up martial arts outside of this work with Greenidge.
But you see some of the skill in how Borland plays. How, for an undersized middle linebacker at 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds, he's adept at using his hands to shed blocks from offensive linemen much larger than he is, and how he moves his body into the right gaps to plug up running lanes.
That led to Borland finishing fourth on the team in tackles last year, despite only starting the final five games. When he took over as a starter, and OSU shuffled the linebacker pieces around him, a position group that was problematic for much of the season started to turn a corner.
"If you pull back and look at a play and see everyone in their position, they're waiting for the offense," Greenidge said. "Defense is a reaction. If you look at his position, you'll see his mind is always moving even without him moving. You can see the twitching of the muscles getting ready to go. That's how he always trains."
Coming off a season opener in which linebackers often found themselves out of position, a full return from Borland can again have the same effect it had last year for the Buckeyes. Though that's still at least one more game off.
He was in 10 plays last week, part of a plan that targeted between six and 15 snaps. That number should come up this week against Rutgers and again next week against TCU as Borland, reluctantly, is worked slowly back into the plan.
"Tuf is such a committed young man to what he's doing," defensive coordinator Greg Schiano said. "And he's made incredible progress. As a coach and as a father I kind of am hesitant, because that's a serious injury, as you know. But you have to trust the medical people and if they say he can go. ... One of the hardest things is going to be hold him back. If you know Tuf at all, he is a laser-focused guy. And he's put that laser focus on his recovery and getting ready to play."
When Kyle and Jeny Borland flew from Chicago to Columbus last March after getting word of their son's injury, the initial feeling is what you'd expect.
Kyle asked himself questions, "Why him?"
Tuf was coming off such a productive season the year before. Kyle recalled being on the verge of tears in Ohio Stadium last September when Tuf got his first defensive snaps in a win over Army. The end of last season was supposed to be a springboard into a full year of being a starter.
That was all put into question when Tuf injured is Achilles on what he called "kind of a freak thing" on an otherwise normal early play in spring practice. Then Kyle was assured that this road back would be a shorter one when he saw Tuf back in the Woody Hayes Athletic Center the same day he was released from the hospital.
It always sounded kind of cheesy, the way Urban Meyer would describe his optimism for Borland making a quicker recovery than most. Stuff about living up to the name, corny lines that write themselves. It turns out, though, that since he was in elementary school, Tuf has been focused on exactly that.
The name is unique. Kyle Borland once worked with a Montana-based sales rep named Tuf, and the name always stuck with him. The Borlands gave their oldest son the name Jarred Tuf with the intention of calling him by his middle name. They also wanted to give him an out in case he wanted to shed that moniker when he got older.
But his grade school teachers refused to call him "Tuf" out of fear that it might incite other students to pick on, or worse, try to fight the tuf guy. Tuf decided he wasn't going to give them a choice, and around the time he was in fifth grade he persuaded his parents to legally drop the Jarred.
Tuf was Tuf.
"I always teased him, you better be tough then," Kyle said.
Turns out that it was good self-awareness by Tuf, and good forethought by his parents to give their son a name that quite literally described his mentality when faced with new challenges.
"He's like missile," Greenidge said. "When he has the target, he's focused on the target. ... I would really hate to be the person who has to line up against him. If you're the person who has to line up against him, and look into his eyes ...
"Good luck."