Pittsburgh Pit Bull: Family man Donovan Hinish returns home to fighting father a proud Notre Dame team captain

The elementary school bus is often a scary place for kindergarteners taking it for the first time. That is, unless your name is Donovan Hinish.

Kurt Hinish, Donovan’s older brother and a former Notre Dame defensive tackle like Donovan is now, was in fifth grade and had been fending for himself on the bus for years when his younger brother was finally of age to join him. Someone said something foul to Kurt, who brushed it off having learned to pick and choose his bus battles, but Donovan, fresh as a puppy — and comparatively young as one, too — wasn’t having any of it.

“My mom jokes around and calls Donovan her pit bull,” Kurt told Blue & Gold. “Donovan just jumped on this kid and tore this kid up. And he’s always been that way. He’s a very loving kid, very nice kid, but as soon as you get on the wrong side of Donovan, he’s a pit bull.”

A Pittsburgh pit bull.

Not Getting Beat

That’s where Donovan’s roots stretch from, all the way to South Bend, where he’s in his fourth year at Notre Dame. He arrived for the 2022 season, just after Kurt departed after his fifth season in 2021. For a full decade, the Hinish name has been synonymous with Fighting Irish football.

Back home in Pittsburgh, it’s synonymous with fighting. Period.

The fighting is not always of the scuffles on the bus variety but of the general order. In life. Everything worth having is worth fighting for. Life itself is worth fighting for. Nobody knows that as well as Kurt and Donovan’s father, Kurt Sr. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer not long after Donovan stepped on the bus for the first time. Doctors told him he’d be on borrowed time after five years.

It’s been 14. Kurt Sr. is still kicking.

That level of willpower is not lost on his youngest son. Donovan derives strength from watching and knowing what his dad has been through fighting a deadly disease for roughly two-thirds of Donovan’s life.

“If I were to sit here and tell you guys about all my memories, we’d be here for an hour and a half or two hours,” Donovan told reporters in South Bend.

The most poignant of those are all the times Kurt Sr. woke Donovan up for weightlifting sessions at 5:30 a.m. He didn’t just drop him off at the gym, either; he went in and worked out with him. Then he took him home and made protein shakes and breakfast — all while Donovan caught another sleep cycle. After taking Donovan to school following his extra snooze, Kurt Sr. went to chemotherapy sessions. Then straight to work as a concrete contractor and landscaper.

Manual, intensive labor, all day, even after starting early and enduring grueling life-preserving treatment most people couldn’t begin to imagine.

“Not once did you see him flinch or complain, no matter how many surgeries he went through,” Donovan said. “He’s always straight back to work, always head down going to work because he wants to set an example to us that he’s not going to get beat. No matter what gets thrown at him, he’s not going to get beat.”

Defending The Family Name

Donovan has always taken his father’s example to heart.

“To see my dad and the stuff he went through, it was hard not to be gritty for him,” he said.

The football field is a medium for him to unleash that grit. The sport isn’t life or death, but it might as well be. Every time Donovan gets between the lines, he isn’t just doing it for himself. He’s doing it for the 10 guys he’s on the field with. For the 11 guys on the other side of the ball whose job is to back the defense up, and vice versa. For Notre Dame as a whole. For Kurt. For his two other siblings. His mom. His dad. Oh, absolutely, his dad.

He’s doing it for family. That’s the Pittsburgh way.

“And that’s the bottom line,” Kurt Sr. told Blue & Gold. “What does that family name mean to you? To me, it means everything. If your name’s garbage, you don’t get no respect. You don’t get no respect. It just means everything.

“When people hear our name, they know who the boys are. People know our name, they know who my wife is, they know who I am, they know who my brother is. We’re a no-nonsense family. To have pride in your name and your family history, it means everything.”

Kurt Sr. practices what he preaches. If the bus scene way back when wasn’t evidence enough of a Hinish defending his name, another fracas that occurred in the stands at Alumni Stadium on the campus of Boston College when Notre Dame was there to play the Eagles Nov. 1 sure was.

Kurt Sr. nearly had his foot amputated because a side effect of one of the types of chemo he’s been subjected to is deterioration of the dermis. Or, as Kurt Sr. put it, “it eats a hole in your skin.” It compromised his foot so badly to the point of him breaking bones while trying to work through the debilitating dilemma.

There’s been less work for Kurt Sr. since then, much to his chagrin, but he still gets around. He went to Boston College for the game, and he likes to stand while watching Donovan play. But he can only stand for so long with the state of his foot, so he was back and forth through the aisle to get from the concourse to his seat and back. Eventually, a few BC fans sat on the steps in Kurt Sr.’s path.

“So I said, ‘Hey, can you please go?’ And I was real nice about it,” Kurt Sr. said. “I said, ‘Take your seats’ or whatever. And he’s like, ‘C’mon, dude. We’re just trying to watch the game, bro.’ And it got to a point where they were either going to get beat up or they had to leave. That’s the way it goes.”

Don’t like it? Leave.

Embodying The Lifestyle

Donovan caught some of the commotion from the sideline. He wasn’t completely sure his father was at the forefront of it, but he had a feeling. Sure enough.

Is the whole thing worth bragging about on the surface? Probably not. But is there something to be said about sticking up for yourself and not taking anything from anybody? Absolutely. If you don’t stick up for yourself as a Yinzer, a common term for someone from Pittsburgh, you’re not really a true Yinzer in the first place.

Donovan doesn’t have that problem.

“He embodies it,” his brother Kurt said. “But I think it’s one of those things where you either are that way, or you aren’t that way. You’re not going to teach someone to be that way. You either are that way or you aren’t that way. Everyone from my mom, to my cousins, to my other brother, my sister, my nephew, everybody with the last name Hinish is like that.”

Having coached both Kurt and Donovan at Notre Dame, Fighting Irish head coach Marcus Freeman is well indoctrinated in the Hinish family’s ways. Freeman said for all that Kurt Sr. has been through, he still thinks it’s the kids’ mother, Tawnie, who is the toughest of the bunch.

She has a special connection with Donovan, him being her youngest. She doesn’t just call him her pit bull; she calls him her bear cub, too. Donovan has a tattoo of two bears on his shin with a moon hanging over them. It’s scripted, “I love you to the moon and back.”

It’s not that Donovan is some big softie. (Well, he sort of is, in a way; his brother said if there’s one thing you need to know about him it’s that he is “a very, very, very, very loving and protective family member.”) Moreover, it’s that he knows where he came from and that if it weren’t for his mom doing all she did for her children when Kurt Sr. couldn’t be there because he was at the hospital or one of the many doctor’s offices he’s been forced to frequent, the odds of him simply being at Notre Dame — let alone being a team captain — would be much slimmer.

Much slimmer, but not nonexistent. He was always going to find a way.

That’s what a Hinish does.

“I think he is a consistent person and high achievers are consistent, right?” Freeman said. “He consistently chooses hard. When I think of Donovan Hinish, I think of a guy that, just from where he’s from, how he was raised, from his parents, his brother and sister, he is a guy that, that’s who he is. He’s a guy that consistently chooses hard. And when you do that enough in practice, then all of a sudden it happens in a game. That becomes who you are.

“And he’s a tough, tough guy battling through injuries and continuing to put team first. Every week his role might change a little bit, but he puts team first while battling through tough injuries. I’m glad we have him. And his brother was another great example of that. That’s how he does it, right? He’s not a big, rah-rah talk guy. He’s ‘a go about my business’ every single day. And Saturdays are no different.”