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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Kathy Grinch is seated in a wheelchair inside her apartment at Solstice Senior Living. Grinch, 70, has needed wheelchairs most of her life. But she stubbornly resisted switching from her manual wheelchair to this power model.

Kathy’s younger brother, former Missouri coach Gary Pinkel, calls her “my hero” and devoted lots of space to her in his 2017 memoir. Her youngest son, Alex, is a rising star in the coaching world, preparing for his first season as Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator. He cites his mom as an inspiration and a constant reminder to not complain about daily inconveniences and minutiae.

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And yet sitting here, Kathy seems a tad perplexed that a reporter wants to tell her story. This is what it is. This, the hereditary spastic paraplegia that has denied her a “normal” life since adolescence, didn’t stop her from having a long, successful career, a blissful marriage and the joy of becoming a mother and grandmother.

“I wish I had some great words of wisdom,” she said. “You just deal with what you deal with. You wake up, and you either get out of bed or you stay in bed.”

It doesn’t take much time spent with Kathy and Greg, her husband of 48 years, to discern how Alex Grinch became the person he is. His passion for doing everything with purpose? Such rigidity was vital to make the Grinch household run. His almost allergic reaction to complaining? Pinkel swears he’s “never, ever, ever, ever” heard his sister complain or express any self-pity.

Throw in Alex’s two brothers-in-law who live with muscular dystrophy, and his mother-in-law who takes care of them, and it’s easy to understand why he doesn’t tolerate excuses from anyone.

“God dang, what do you have to complain about?” Alex said. “My mom and my brothers-in-law — you never hear them complaining. You don’t hear them bitching and moaning.”

The former Kathy Pinkel enjoyed a relatively standard life in Akron, Ohio, as a young child. But around puberty, she began to have problems with her legs. In high school, Kathy would leave classes early to get a head start on the hallway crowd. She remembers one particularly scary moment when, as she stood at her locker talking to a friend, her legs suddenly gave out and she fell.

In his 2017 memoir “The 100-Yard Journey: A Life in Coaching and Battling for the Win,” Pinkel writes of becoming his big sister’s “guardian” after her legs began to fail her. He writes that people who stared at her “would make my blood boil” and that he became especially angry if he saw anyone without a disability park in a handicapped spot.

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“Years later at Mizzou, I had a couple players park illegally in handicap spots,” Pinkel wrote. “The word got out pretty quick among the players. It’s safe to say it didn’t happen again.”

Kathy’s condition steadily worsened. She needed a cane when she began college at Kent State. After she transferred to Wright State in Dayton, Kathy needed a wheelchair. But Wright State, it turned out, was the perfect place for her. A newer university — it opened in 1967 — Wright State was smaller, with all the campus buildings connected through a network of underground tunnels that made getting around relatively easy. Those tunnels are part of why, to this day, Wright State consistently is ranked as one of the best colleges in the United States for students with physical disabilities.

Wright State ended up being the perfect spot for Kathy for another reason: It’s where she met Greg Grinch in 1971.

A Marine who had enlisted during the Vietnam War, Greg Grinch returned to Ohio and enrolled at Wright State. Kathy and Greg met in the dorms and quickly hit it off. When she found out Greg was a football fan, she asked if he might drive her to Kent State so she could watch her brother Gary’s spring game.

“The only bad thing was that he was an Ohio State fan,” Gary Pinkel told The Athletic with a laugh. “But he is the unsung hero here. It takes a special person to be able to do what he’s done in their marriage. You talk about leading by example. He’s a man dedicated to his wife, through the tough times and easy times.

“I’ll never forget the day I met him. Little did I know that he would be my brother-in-law and that we would have such a great friendship.”

By the time Greg and Kathy married, they still were unsure of exactly what disease she had. Kathy largely had resigned herself to not having children. Then her younger brother — also named Greg — reached puberty and began having similar problems. That’s when the whole family went to the world-class Cleveland Clinic for genetic testing. It was there that doctors finally gave the ailment a name: Hereditary spastic paraplegia, a rare disorder that causes progressive weakening in the legs. Both Kathy and her brother Greg inherited the gene that caused it from their parents. Gary escaped that fate.

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“Over the years, it was a real guilt feeling for me because, you know, why was I the chosen one?” Pinkel said.

Because Greg Grinch didn’t carry the same gene, he and Kathy had two healthy boys.

“Medically, there wasn’t any reason why I couldn’t have kids,” Kathy said.

Greg Pinkel loved basketball and after his diagnosis, played wheelchair basketball for many years. His health deteriorated, though, and in 2005 — one day before his 47th birthday — he died of a heart attack.

Drew and Alex Grinch agree: Because their mom was in a wheelchair from the time they each were born, it never really seemed like that big of a deal.

“Her condition didn’t come as a result of an accident, so there was no before and after from our perspective,” Drew Grinch said. “She had us in the wheelchair, so that’s all we’ve ever known. I think, certainly, we probably had some awareness of that at a young age, just that it was different from other people. But, honestly, she was so active.”

When the boys were little, they’d sit on her lap as she scurried around the house or through the grocery store. As they got older and started walking, they’d walk on either side of her in public, holding onto the wheelchair.

“She’d go all over the place and they wouldn’t move,” Gary Pinkel said. “It’s funny because if you put a normal baby in there, and that baby would be flying off, trying to do whatever. It’s amazing how kids deal with those things.”

Greg Grinch became a middle school principal in Grove City, Ohio, and later was elected to the city council. Kathy worked in Columbus for the U.S. Department of Defense for many years, writing course material and training employees on various systems.

Kathy never missed her kids’ sporting events. She worked hard to overcome obstacles that existed much more frequently in a world before the Americans with Disabilities Act became federal law in 1990. She made dinner most nights. She did the family’s laundry.

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Drew Grinch recalled that the Grove City Little League baseball fields were connected by gravel walkways, making it difficult sometimes for his mom to get from place to place.

“Sometimes, someone would have to help her get through those things,” Drew said. “But most of the time, she was just wheeling herself through the gravel. I remember a lot of times someone asking, ‘Can I give you a push?’ and her saying, ‘Oh, no, I got it.’

“Probably just another example of us not giving it as much credit as it deserved at the time.”

Kathy said once that one of the boys — she can’t remember which one — told her that he wished that she wasn’t in a wheelchair.

“I said, ‘Well, I do, too,’ but you know, some moms are heavy and some moms are thin. Some moms use helicopters and some moms use wheelchairs,’” Kathy recalled. “It was just so matter-of-fact. I never, ever felt like they were nervous about me being around, or that they didn’t want me to meet their friends.”

She watched Alex’s Grove City High and, later, University of Mount Union games mostly from the sideline. It was only an issue once, when, during a Mount Union road game at Ohio Northern, one player tackled another and they tumbled off the field and onto the track, slamming into Kathy. No one thought much of it — Greg and Kathy left and drove to Toledo, where Gary was coach at the time, to catch the Rockets’ game that night — but the next day, her leg was red and swollen. A hematoma had developed and kept her in the hospital for several days.

“It was scary,” Greg Grinch said. “That was the longest that she’s been hospitalized since I’ve known her.”

He added with a laugh, “Now, we tell people that she had a football injury.”

A couple of years before that, when legendary Mount Union coach Larry Kehres was recruiting Alex to play for his NCAA Division III powerhouse, Alex found himself in need of financial aid. Drew had gone to the public Ohio University, but Mount Union — located in Alliance, Ohio — is private and offers no athletic scholarships. As part of Alex’s scholarship application, he was required to write an essay, and wrote it about the ways his mom inspired him. Kathy only knows that because Kehres later told her.

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But little did Alex know that around the same time, an Alliance High soccer star named Becky Blaser also was writing a Mount Union scholarship essay about a remarkably similar subject.

The former Becky Blaser lettered multiple years in basketball, soccer and track at Alliance High. She was a hoops star, but she was utterly dominant in soccer. At the time of her 2003 induction into the ASH Athletic Hall of Fame, she ranked first in school history in nine soccer statistical categories. Becky went on to become a star on the pitch at Mount Union, too, and also is in its Hall of Fame.

“She’s the only Hall of Famer in the family,” Alex Grinch said of his now-wife.

Becky’s scholarship essay centered on how her two big brothers, Chris and Scott, were inspirations to her. Both were diagnosed as young boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. They are seven and five years older than Becky, respectively. Both attended and graduated from Mount Union but struggled to maintain careers.

Their father died two years ago. Chris, 46, is married and lives down the street from Scott, 44, who lives at home with their mother, Karen.

“They need a lot of care,” Karen Blaser said. “They’re both on ventilators. That restricts them a little bit more. Their computers are pretty much everything.”

There was a chance Becky could have been afflicted by the same disease, but genetic testing when she was older showed that she was not a carrier.

Alex and Becky were at Mount Union a couple of years before they started dating. It didn’t take long for them to realize what they had in common, especially considering Becky’s family lives just off the Mount Union campus in Alliance.

A big reason Alex left Washington State for a co-coordinator job at Ohio State following the 2017 season is so that Becky could be closer to home. The Ohio State job didn’t include defensive play-calling duties — which he had at Washington State — and Grinch said that it paid less money than other offers he had at the time. But he’s happy to have had that year for Becky to be within driving distance of her family.

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“Just tough, man,” Grinch said of his brothers-in-law. “They’re fighters. Not to minimize what my mother has gone through, but what my brothers-in-law have trumps just about everything. But it is so interesting that both of us grew up with something like that.”

The hardest thing for football coaches and their families often is the moving, the inability to settle in one city — or even in one region. It’s why Alex and Becky have lived in New Hampshire, Wyoming, Missouri, Washington state, Ohio and now Oklahoma, all since 2005.

The opportunity to resurrect Oklahoma’s defense — and be a defensive play-caller again — was too good to turn down. So just a year after moving to Ohio, the Grinch family moved again.

“The difficult part of this profession is that it’s so hard to circle just one area or one state and say, ‘We’re going to spend the rest of our careers there,’ ” Grinch said. “You just try to make the best decision you can. Area is part of it, but it can’t be the only thing. And we’re kind of well-versed in getting on a plane and going to visit.”

Drew Grinch moved to Columbia, Mo., nearly two decades ago to pursue a marketing career. He and his family are settled here. Gary Pinkel, of course, has been here since 2001, when he became Missouri’s coach. He retired after the 2015 season as the Tigers’ all-time winningest coach and still lives in the area. The volatile, unpredictable nature of Alex’s career — and the sheer number of times he’s already moved — made living near him tough. So it made sense four years ago for Greg and Kathy to relocate here from Grove City.

Kathy stays at the senior center and Greg lives in an apartment nearby. It is far more economical for him to stay in a separate place, although he is with Kathy most of the time when he isn’t volunteering at the local food bank or at Mizzou athletic events.

Gary keeps busy with his “G.P. M.A.D.E. Foundation” — which, in part, exists to serve young people with physical disabilities — but he visits his sister often, many times popping in unannounced. Drew and his family see Kathy most weekends.

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The senior center allows Kathy to have medical and other assistance nearby 24/7, as well as an accessible apartment. It’s hard these days for her to travel, so she’s experienced much of Alex’s coaching career the past several years on TV. She still hasn’t been to Norman, but Greg has and expects to travel for a couple of games.

And, really, that’s one of the most impressive things about Kathy. It wasn’t until she was almost 70, Drew noted, that her disability caused her to miss out on anything.

That manual wheelchair remains in her living room. She hasn’t given up on it just yet.

“I think when you have a model like that — and when it’s modeled so well — maybe you don’t always appreciate it as much as you otherwise would,” Alex Grinch said. “There aren’t really any grand moments of her acting a certain way to remind you of how lucky you are.

“It’s just how she lives her life every day, and continues to live her life.”

Kathy Grinch, in other words, deals with what she deals with. And when she wakes up, she gets out of bed.

(Top photo of Kathy and Greg Grinch: Jason Kersey / The Athletic)

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