For a frenzied, nearly 20-year period (1970s-1990s) when Hawaii’s football game with Brigham Young rolled around, Thelma P. “Toby” Chow knew to brace for the inevitable.

Whether it involved something as seemingly benign as a visit to the hairdresser or a passing encounter with the mail carrier, the retired school teacher from Palolo prepared to get an earful from people who knew her youngest son, Norm, was an assistant coach with the hated Cougars.

And not just any assistant, either, but the one who recruited so many Hawaii high school stars to play for the arch enemies in blue and had his finger on the trigger of the record-setting offense. It was the kind of notoriety that made Chow the only visiting assistant to get shrilly booed just walking up the Aloha Stadium steps to the press box.

Asked how she endured it all, Toby once told a reporter, “I’m tough … just like my son.”

Lately, Norm Chow’s toughness and resilience are being tested in deeper ways, perhaps as never before in his 69 years.

And it has only marginally to do with the arrival of the Wyoming Cowboys (3-2), who line up against his struggling Rainbow Warriors (1-4) this evening at Aloha Stadium.

Friday afternoon, the Chow family buried his No. 1 fan, Toby, who died recently, just shy of her 98th birthday. All the while, Chow’s wife of nearly a half-century, Diane, has spent the past week at the UCLA Medical Center, where she had surgery for a brain aneurism the day before last week’s game in Houston.

And some of us managed to think we might be having a tough month.

How Chow manages to keep it all together under the circumstances is a wonder. But, somehow, lips clenched and focus straight ahead shuttling between responsibilities in more than a few 18-hour days, he has. 

The coach who likes to say, “Nobody feels sorry for us,” when a player goes down with injury or UH loses a tight ballgame, presses on. Choked with emotion and, sometimes seeming a millisecond away from tears, he perseveres personally as well as professionally. 

There’s a lesson in that, one that surely goes well beyond the locker room and reminds us that football coaches are more than a sum of their X’s and O’s.

Whether you agree with some of his play-calling, his choice of quarterbacks or where UH’s record sits at the moment, there is no doubting that Chow has handled this challenge, as he has many others, resolutely and with grace.

There is something to be said for that. Quite a lot, really, which is why the hope is that whatever the turnout might be for UH’s Mountain West Conference opener it will recognize in decibels too loud to ignore all he has been through and how he has responded. The hope is that Chow’s positive energy will be requited several fold by his players and their fans.

When Chow finally came home to coach UH in 2012, Toby greeted the news excitedly and her son’s return hopefully. “Well,” she said, “I hope they treat him better there this time.”

When the ’Bows come out of the tunnel, how appropriate would it be for the Halawa faithful to greet Toby Chow’s son with a heartfelt understanding and warmth on this night of all nights.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.