Cole Holcomb is about as tough of a human being as you will ever meet.
And that isn't a bad thing.
He is strong. He is resilient. He is rough and gruff.
But he is something else as well.
He is human.
And he couldn't suppress or hide that human side, couldn't hide his emotions, the last two years when he was dealing with one of the biggest challenges of his NFL career.
"There were times when there were tears, for sure," admitted Holcomb, talking quietly as he stood outside of the Steelers athletic training room, where he spent countless hours the last few years.
That time spent there has paid off, though, as Holcomb was honored today at the Art Rooney Courage House Luncheon at Acrisure Stadium as the Steelers 2025 Ed Block Courage Award winner.
The award, which was voted on by his teammates, is given to a player who has shown courage either coming back from an injury or a life-altering situation.
Holcomb came back from a devastating knee injury that might have ended a career for someone without his resiliency. But not for him.
"It does mean more when it's something voted on by your peers, because anybody can just go and see what happened to you and say, "Oh, that's the worst one. Let's give it to him.'
"When it's voted on by your peers, these guys are watching you, they're seeing everything. I did have a lot of teammates that came in there and they saw not just the good days, but the tough days. (Miles) Killebrew would come in, and he is going through it now. I was talking to him, and he said he was glad he came in there every day and saw what I went through because now he can prepare for that.
"There were days where him, Minkah (Fitzpatrick), other guys would come in my eyes were bloodshot. You could tell I had been crying.
"Tough days.
"One day Coach T (Mike Tomlin) thought I was getting tortured because he came in and said what's all this screaming for? It just means a lot more when it comes from your peers. Because they're seeing it firsthand."
Flashback to the 2023 season, a season that started off with promise for Holcomb.
After signing with the team in during the offseason free agency period, Holcomb was primed to have the season the Steelers expected when they brought him in.
Holcomb was a standout early on, showing his hard-hitting persona from Day 1, combined with this intelligence and football savvy.
Through eight games, all which he started, he had 54 tackles, 31 of them solo stops, four tackles for a loss and two passes defensed.
But it all came to a crashing halt in that Week 8 game against the Tennessee Titans on Thursday Night Football.
Holcomb suffered a severe knee injury that not only ended the 2023 season for him, landing him on the Reserve/Injured List not just for the remainder of that year, but the 2024 season as well.
"It was wild. Hurt, hurt bad," said Holcomb. "I knew I messed it up pretty bad. In that moment, they were coming out, running their tests and I just wanted to get off the field.
"I knew it was a bad injury. I was just telling them, get the cart out here and get me out of here so we can do it back, not in front of everybody."
He was right. It was bad. Really bad.
And the road back, it wouldn't be an easy one.
But Holcomb never faltered, even though there were times it was a challenge.
Times when the tears were real because it was an emotional journey as he spent a year and a half battling back from the injury.
"It's tough, because we play a tough sport," said Holcomb. "It's not something that's talked about a lot, the whole mental health side of the sport. I think people are starting to talk about it more now.
"Not every day is going to be great. My dad and I always talk. I think there was a three-day span where I texted him and told him they almost got a tear out of me. And then the next day it was, they got a tear out of him. And then, the next it was I had to make them leave the training room for five minutes so I could catch my breath.
"It's definitely hard. It's already very isolating being injured, separate from the team. Sometimes you don't feel like you have people to talk to. You don't have that outlet. I was blessed that the athletic training staff was great. They did a great job of allowing me to get anything off my chest if I needed to. They tried consoling me. That's why I had to tell them to leave the training room sometimes, because they felt bad. They were trying to console me. I was like, you're making it worse. You're making me cry more. I was blessed to have a good support system. I could call my parents, call my dad, talk to my wife.
"I had teammates who had knee injuries before, they weren't like mine. But you still can pull things from those people and their experiences. Being in this training room and having the guys see that, it makes the guys who had knee injuries, they were like, hey, I'm here if you need anything.
"I was just joking about it. You don't sign up for it, but you become part of a club of knee injury people when you have that. Because the injuries are tough. They're painful. They take a long time. You're going to have some days that are tough.
"You're going to have some days where there are tears.
"There were days when I just didn't want to do this. I'm about to go in here and get tortured. Then I'm going to go right back home and have to do it all over again. The physical side of things is very painful. The mental side of thing is you're trying to reach goals and hit goals on a certain timeline and hit this range by this point. And there were days where it's like, I'd have a huge gain of range of motion or strength or whatever it was, and then I'd have a couple of days where we would plateau. We're trying as hard as we can, but it's just not going. The mental side of it, you're trying as hard as you can and not doing what you want yet. That was tough."
But there were steps along the way, small achievements that all combined led to bigger things.
"I think that's what helped me stay on track," said Holcomb. "Instead of necessarily looking at the end, I was setting so many small goals. In the very beginning, it was all about range of motion. I wanted to just get a couple degrees of flexion. A couple degrees today, a couple degrees tomorrow. So, if I could hit those degrees, I'd be good with the day and how it went."
One of the big achievements came in 2024 when Holcomb was able to return to practice late in the season. Despite that significant step, he wasn't activated and remained on the Reserve/Injured List for the year.
The real reward came when Holcomb returned to the field for the 2025 season.
Back to full strength.
And overcoming the odds that were stacked against him to make the 53-man roster.
"It's great. It feels great to be back," said Holcomb. "It's great to be wanted back. It feels good to know that I did enough to prove to them that I'm worth keeping.
"But that was just one goal marked off, and now on to the next. I was joking with Coach Tomlin. I told him, if you think the goal is just to make the team and be happy with that, he's mistaken.
"The road is not finished. Good milestone. Great milestone, super excited, but the job is not done.
"It's about getting back to where I was. I want to prove that I can be a top linebacker in the league again.
"I love this game. I love playing all aspects of football. But I love playing defense, and I want to carve out a role on defense, as well as playing special teams again.
"It's just getting back to being a top tier linebacker."
Holcomb knows his road isn't complete. He knows there are steps he still has to take.
But he is also enjoying the moment.
"Sometimes I've got to stop myself and take a step back and be like, this is where you're at, we thought you would be here," said Holcomb. "Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in wanting things to be like they never happened. Sometimes I have to take a step back and say this is where I am.
"There's still a million things that I can keep working on, keep getting better at.
"There's also a lot of times on that field where you just have to sit there and soak it up, take it in and just be appreciative of what I'm blessed with."
