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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Four
Chapter 1
Epilogue
Also by Ralph McInerny
Copyright
For Charlie Callahan
In memoriam
PROLOGUE
At the Notre Dame Grotto, which is a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, votive candles cast flickering light on the statue of Mary. Before her kneels St. Bernadette in prayer. On this Saturday evening, she was joined by bands of bewildered fans who had crept down here from the stadium seeking spiritual consolation in their gloom.
“We could have won.”
“We should have won.”
Strange remarks in a sacred place? Prayer is a many-faceted thing—petition, thanksgiving, repentance. Why should sharing one’s disappointment with the patroness of Notre Dame after one more loss not find entry on that list?
Many had not laughed when Trooper Tim McCarthy, in the closing minutes of the game, told his awful joke and urged them to drive carefully home. Some were not even in the stadium at that time. Did fellow Christians linger in the Coliseum while their friends were fed like lunch to the lions? Nittany Lions.
The pain that follows the loss of a game in which one’s favorite team has played would not, for many, rank high among the sorrows of the Western world. There are always philosophers among us, measuring our joys and griefs on a scale that diminishes both. But philosophers are often wrong. Some of them speak of language as a game—but can you lose it? The grim either/or of an athletic contest, win or lose, is tolerable before the game begins, but who can take comfort from that disjunction when the final whistle has blown and another loss has been recorded? For centuries, men and women have gone on pilgrimage for less, and so these fans have come to the Grotto.
Elsewhere, tailgaters gathered around their vehicles, no remnant of the elation they had felt before the game visible. Some of the kids—ah, the resilience of youth!—were passing a football back and forth. The football is an oddly shaped object, meant to travel in a spiral when thrown. A ball tumbled through the air, end over end, and was caught. A cheer went up. The mourning adults looked sadly at their offspring.
The parking lots began to empty; tens of thousands of cars were expertly directed by the local constabulary and sent on their way. In a few hours most would be gone, back to Chicago, to Detroit, to all points on the compass. When they reached the toll road, they could look back and see, in the waning light of the day, the great statue atop the golden dome, Mary standing tall and unbowed, looking south. It might have been the direction in which the team had been headed since the beginning of the season.
In Holy Cross House, the residence of retired members of the Congregation that had founded Notre Dame, an old priest read his breviary. “How long, O Lord, how long?” He might have taken it as the psalmist’s desire for refuge. He might have taken it more personally, as a reference to his own approaching death. His eyes lifted from his book to look across the lake at the now illuminated golden dome. He sighed.
Yet another loss.
How long, O Lord, how long?
PART ONE
1
The 2007 season began with a loss, never a good sign, but what prophet or pundit could have predicted what lay ahead for Notre Dame? Mark May of ESPN excepted, of course, but then a constant Cassandra, like a stopped watch, is bound to be right once in a while. Student sportswriters on the various campus publications ranked the initial performance of the team and found it wanting, yet all were ready to accept and expand upon the excuses that emanated from the athletic department. This was a young team. Too many starters from the previous year were gone. Brady Quinn was gone. Three different quarterbacks were tried in the first game! Not to worry, once that problem was settled and a starter chosen, things would fall into place. Well into the consecutive losses, these loyal sportswriters were predicting Notre Dame victories in the next contest.
Hope is a fragile thing, trust less so, but the two become linked in the minds of football fans. As the losses mounted, at home and away, every game televised nationally, thus giving the collapse of the Notre Dame program maximum coverage, criticism began. The first demand that Charlie Weis must go appeared in the letters column of the Observer. Surely a band of loyal and affluent alumni could be found to buy out Weis’s contract and bring in someone who would restore the fortunes of the storied team.
Already, summer soldiers in the stadium had expressed their discontent with a play, a halted drive, a missed tackle, sometimes in other than colorful language. This was standard fare, and these were fans whose emotions swung easily from elation to gloom even in the best of seasons. Criticism from students expressed days after a game when presumably reason had reestablished itself suggested a more serious problem. The appeal to the alumni had not attracted the millions necessary to buy out the coach’s contract, but it did elicit rumblings from the far-flung Notre Dame family.
It would be difficult to explain to someone from another planet or even another country the role that football plays at the University of Notre Dame. Once incoming freshman had been shown Knute Rockne, All-American, starring Ronald Reagan and Pat O’Brien, to orient them. More recently, Rudy improbably served the purpose of instilling in incoming students, should they need it, an understanding of the mystical significance of Notre Dame football. During their four-year stay, most will respond to this message. The student section in the northwest curve of the stadium, recognizable by the identical T-shirts worn, is always full, and the students stand throughout the game. Win or lose, after the game the team comes to stand before this section, helmets aloft, to salute their fellow students and thank them for their support.
When these young men and women go out into the world as alumni they do not, as the graduates of other colleges may, lose touch with the Saturday doings on fall afternoons in South Bend. A contract with a national television network ensures that every game will be brought to them wherever they may be. Often they gather under the auspices of the local alumni club and renew that sense of mystic solidarity that was theirs when as students they followed the game inside the stadium. Indeed, the sense of solidari
ty with the university and the team—a distinction without a difference in the minds of many—increases as graduates age away from their days on campus. Even those few who had been less than enthusiastic fans of the team as students find the true faith entering them in later years. There are homes from coast to coast, otherwise indistinguishable from others in the neighborhood, that are gripped in gloom in the days after a Notre Dame loss. And, it must be said, there are triumphalist alumni who stud their lawns with leprechauns, fly green pennants from the corners of their garages, and sometimes even rush into the street to shout and cheer, doubtless to the mixed reactions of the Purdue and Michigan and Southern California alumni in the neighborhood. These enthusiastic souls would be put to a grim moral test during the historic 2007 season. Many did not pass it.
* * *
The symbiotic connection between the American college and football goes back into the dim past of the nation. Institutions of learning, most of them founded under religious auspices, accepted the ancient maxim of mens sana in corpore sano. Games, unorganized at first, were encouraged on those modest campuses of yore. Our prestigious institutions of higher learning all had modest origins: sectarian, local, their faculties far from the stellar quality that many later would achieve. The rivalries between them were seldom of an intellectual sort; rather, they were sectarian, regional, even social. The members of the Ivy League grew from unprepossessing seedlings, and the games played on their campuses evolved from intramural exercises to contests with rivals; the annual games with Yale or Harvard or Princeton slowly became legendary. Universities founded later mimicked this tradition, and then, one fateful day, hitherto unnoticed Notre Dame beat the invincible West Point team and the Fighting Irish became a national phenomenon.
The Catholics of the country, particularly Irish Catholics, saw the team as their champion in a WASP world, a mode of upward mobility. The subway alumni, more passionately partisan than those who had actually attended Notre Dame, were born. The schools of the Big Ten and then other regional conferences arose and soon eclipsed the Ivy League. Athletic activities were no longer more or less happenstance manifestations of school spirit but the planned and public manifestations of these institutions. Professional football, at first a poor cousin of college leagues, began a steady climb to prominence that was sealed by the advent of television. Once-local clubs, like that sponsored by the packing industry in Green Bay, outgrew their modest beginnings. Professional football was soon big business, with profound consequences for the college game.
College athletes became a recruiting pool for professional football, and the once self-contained campus activity, a four-year involvement sufficient unto itself, came to point beyond, to a career, eventually to a very lucrative career. It was here that a divide occurred. Under this new dispensation, the teams of the Ivy League faded from importance. It was seldom that student athletes from these schools sought or were sought by the prospering members of professional football leagues. In those historic institutions, the game was played as before, with little or no interest in a continuation of the activity after graduation. The storied rivalries among them continued but took on the quaint air of the superseded. Some, like the University of Chicago, abandoned organized athletics entirely and withdrew from competition. The surprising suggestion was made that colleges and universities were chiefly aimed at the acquisition of knowledge and culture. Academic excellence became a watchword. Elsewhere, it was different.
Two truths, once held in precarious balance, came to seem almost contradictory. On the one hand, the aim of a game is to win; on the other, a salutary reminder, a game is only a game. On some historic campuses the latter truth prevailed, on most the former, and these began to professionalize their athletic programs. Coaches were no longer, as in the long ago, simply plucked from the faculty, as Knute Rockne had been taken from the chemistry department; now there were national and public searches for coaches who could ensure a winning program. Television upped the ante. There was money, lots of money, to be had from college football. The bowl games, a story in themselves, became paramount, brooding over the regular season like its ultimate end, a promise of millions more as the old year turned into the new. The professionalization of college football was in fact a fact.
If there was a feverish recruiting of coaches, there was an equally feverish search for athletes who had made names for themselves on the high school level. A chasm grew between students and the athletes that represented an institution on the gridiron. On the campuses of many state universities, student athletes were sequestered into special dorms and offered classes that made few demands on their minds and presented little competition with their primary purpose, winning games. There emerged at places known as football factories the fact, dismaying to some, that a large, even a very large, percentage of athletes failed to graduate despite the easy academic paths that had been devised for them. Since only a small number of them were drafted by professional teams, many young men found themselves with neither a college degree, no matter how undemanding, nor the future of which they had dreamed: playing on Sundays.
* * *
On the South Bend campus there was an uneasy ambivalence. On the one hand, under Father Hesburgh, the drive for academic excellence strengthened. On the other, there was a continuing demand for a winning team. Compromises were made. Recruits were brought in from all points of the compass primarily on the basis of athletic ability, but there was resistance to the idea that special undemanding courses should be provided to them. For a time, the notion of student athlete was not an oxymoron at Notre Dame. True, an effective tutorial system for athletes was devised, but this was to help them weather the same courses taken by the rest of the students. Comparatively stringent standards of admission were retained despite the fact that many athletes had come to Notre Dame only as to a good springboard into the ranks of professional athletics. The situation was volatile. The administration sent out, in the phrase, confusing and incompatible signals.
There was continuing emphasis on academic excellence, but this did not diminish the desire for performance on the football field. There were dark days when a coach failed to fulfill expectations, but even the unlucky Gerry Faust had been retained throughout his contract despite a disappointing record. With the firing of Ty Willingham before his contract ran out, a Rubicon was crossed. This firing was difficult to explain. Notre Dame’s first black coach, Willingham had a good if not outstanding record. But he lost bowl games, and he was said to be deficient in recruiting players, although he had brought in Brady Quinn and other greats who would haunt the memories of the fans of 2007. It seemed that he and his teams were not professional enough. He was unceremoniously sacked just before Christmas in the third year of a five-year contract. Like another December date, it was for many a day that would live in infamy.
The search for his successor verged on the comic. The new president flew to Utah and was televised by a hovering news helicopter on his pilgrimage to hire Coach Meyer. It emerged that Meyer had already been hired away by Florida. The spectacle of the president of Notre Dame apparently making the hiring of a winning football coach the top item on his agenda marked a historic first. The balance between academics and athletics had been symbolized by the fact that the president of the university kept aloof from hiring coaches. Now the line had been crossed, and with demeaning results. Damage control was called for.
This was the context in which Charlie Weis was brought to Notre Dame from the New England Patriots, where he had been a phenomenally successful assistant coach. A Notre Dame alumnus who had never played football, Weis was offered two million dollars a year to return to his alma mater and get Notre Dame football back on track. His first year bore out those hopes, but he, too, lost a bowl game. The second year was perhaps not as satisfying to the hopes of his employers. Then came his third season, 2007. All Willingham’s recruits were now out of the picture; Weis was regarded as a legendary recruiter. The debacle of 2007 was accomplished by players of his choice.
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2
In the apartment of Roger and Philip Knight, just to the east of campus, the fortunes of the football team had ever been a matter of eager interest on the part of Philip since their arrival at Notre Dame. Roger, the enormous Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, sympathized with his brother’s enthusiasm, and from time to time even attended a game himself, despite the daunting logistics of getting his three hundred pounds to the stadium and settled on a seat designed for fans of considerably less avoirdupois, but his interest in athletics remained theoretical and remote. It had been only on the eve of completing his doctorate at Princeton that he had come to understand the feverish activity on campus and in town on certain autumn Saturdays. But it was less the commotion surrounding him than an essay of F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up that had made him aware of Princeton football.
Scarcely more than twenty years old when he had been dubbed a doctor of philosophy—in philosophy—he had long failed to find an academic berth because of his massive size and eccentric personality and then became almost inadvertently a partner in Philip’s private investigation firm. During all those years his involvement in the fortunes of college football had been merely a matter of paying intermittent attention to Philip, who gave running comments on televised games and listened to the endless chatter about them by experts before, during, and after the contest. Engrossed in a book or busy at his computer, keeping up his contacts around the globe with correspondents sharing one or more of his many interests, Roger experienced the crescendo and decrescendo from the television room as merely a pleasant background noise. Then he had been offered a job at Notre Dame.
It would be too much to say that it was Philip who had accepted the offer, but his enthusiasm at the possibility of relocating in South Bend, with the prospect of all those teams to watch close up—his uncontrolled delight, in fact—would have been sufficient to overcome Roger’s own predilection for inertia. The offer had been made on the basis of Roger’s monograph on Baron Corvo, a legendary nineteenth-century convert, pervert, novelist, and eventual Venetian gondolier who continues to fascinate many. Roger would be an endowed distinguished professor floating free of any departmental involvement; he could teach what the spirit moved him to teach. His intention was to acquaint his students with forgotten elements of Catholic culture, writers, poets, architects, anything but musicians, the latter precluded by his tin ear.
The Green Revolution Page 1
