The windchill had cratered to around minus-45 degrees, Carson Hinzman remembers, when the young man who is now
Ohio State football’s starting center was a boy pulling his truck into his grandparents’ driveway in the middle of the night.
This is not a story about a teenager sneaking home in the middle of the night. It’s about a 10-year-old showing up for work at 4 a.m. on the family dairy farm outside Spring Valley, Wisconsin. Hard work had been the rule, not the exception, in that family for decades. By the glow of his headlights, young Hinzman watched the embodiment of that work ethic crawling across the icy, sloping driveway.