There May Be Good Reason for Some Irish Eyes to Cry

Cinderella works around the house all day, dusting, cooking, scrubbing, cleaning the filter in the Jacuzzi.

One day, she goes to a dance. Meets a really cute guy. Next thing you know, they are having a ball. He looks her up, squeezes her feet into a pair of glass Adidas and invites her up to the castle, where she signs a prenuptial agreement and they live happily ever after.

Rocky Balboa hangs around the gym all day, punching a bag, skipping rope, spitting into a bucket and saying “yo” a lot.

One day, a matchmaker asks him over. Asks him if he wants to fight the champ. Next thing you know, Balboa is bouncing Apollo Creed off the canvas. Eventually he wins the title, beats up Mr. T and a Soviet and lives happily ever after.

Gerry Faust coaches football at a Cincinnati high school, counting towels, patching uniforms, reassuring parents and giving interviews to the kid from the school paper.

One day, Notre Dame calls. The Notre Dame. Wants him to coach there. Wants him to be head coach there. Next thing you know, he is walking in Knute Rockne’s footsteps and mapping strategy for games against Penn State and Michigan and USC.

Everything was perfect, except for one thing.

He lived unhappily ever after.

Oh, Faust himself never uses sentiments like that. His parting company with the Irish Tuesday did not provoke him into fits of anger and sarcasm. He did not shake down any thunder. He did not tell the Irish what they could do with their shillelaghs. He did not take a brush and bucket at midnight and paint the golden dome black.

From the beginning, Gerry Faust has been a decent, honest, upbeat, God-fearing guy. When he saw that his departure was imminent, he retained perspective and remained cheerful. “My family is healthy, I’m healthy and I have good friends,” he said. “My life is a good one.”

Were there any justice in the world, were life full of storybook endings and eternal fairness, Gerry Faust would have gone undefeated in every one of his five seasons and been carried off the field so many times, his fanny would have shoulder burns. Every Irish eye would have been smiling, however it is that eyes smile.

Instead, Notre Dame kept losing the big games, blowing late leads, getting beat on national TV, looking so disorganized at times that twice the team had 16 men on the field.

In the meantime, other schools--Southern Methodist and Florida and Texas Christian among them--began to thrive, not with bad people but with unfair methods, and no alumnus complained because, after all, His Majesty Vincent Lombardi had decreed for all eternity that winning was the only thing in the universe that truly mattered.

Coach Faust sank to his knees and the buzzards circled. No amount of praying and good cheer and hard work could make the Irish successful. Each week they tried, but whenever the game was essential, they somehow managed not to win it. In five years, he won five games more than he lost.

The ultimate image of Gerry Faust will be the visions of him on the sideline at Penn State, getting soaked by a relentless rain while his players were getting mopped up on the field. There he was, wet and whipped, standing all alone, the picture of defeat. The rain on his cheek could have passed for tears.

So vivid is the memory of the day when he was hired. When Bill Gleason of the Chicago Sun-Times broke the story that Notre Dame, mighty Notre Dame, was about to ask a man from the Ohio preps to run the most famous college program in the land, many readers refused to believe it. The previous Notre Dame coach had come from the Green Bay Packers.

Faust got the job. A wonderful day for high school coaches everywhere. A wonderful hunch bet on the part of the university. To reward a man who represented everything Notre Dame believed in--family, faith and football--was more than just interesting; it was touching.

Telling a scholastic coach he could be coach at Notre Dame was like telling a young, black schoolgirl that she could someday be President of the United States. Maybe it hadn’t happened yet, but doggone it, it was possible.

There is a young man at Cincinnati Moeller High School, Gerry Faust’s old school, right now. His name is Rafe Barber. He lives on a small farm in Batavia, Ohio, and he is a 130-pound freshman. A kicker, he made 15 of 19 field goals and all of his extra points for the Moeller reserve team, and hopes to challenge next year for the job on the varsity.

Rafe Barber is legally blind. He can see out of one eye, but his depth perception is poor. His father put up goal posts in the yard at home, strung netting between the uprights and hung a cowbell from the net. When Rafe kicks the football from a distance, the only way he can tell if the ball went where it was aimed is if he hears the cowbell.

The great Lou Groza met Rafe Barber and encouraged him. The current Ohio State kicker, Rich Spangler, gave advice and worked with him.

“It was about the only sport I had left,” Rafe said. “I tried baseball, but all I did was strike out. I wanted to at least be good at something.”

He hopes to become good enough that the colleges will notice him. Maybe he can kick for a small school some day. Maybe he can kick for Notre Dame. He will keep on trying. If there is justice in the world, he will become another Groza.

Gerry Faust also will keep trying. He will keep trying to be the best human being he can be. If he can coach someone’s football team at the same time, or if he can help young men become better adults, or if he can just keep coming out of the rain expecting to find rainbows, that will be enough.

But no other high school coaches will get big-time college jobs soon. They will be penalized and stereotyped for the misfortunes of one man.

What we have here, you see, is a fairy tale that did not have a happy ending. And so ends the story of Gerry Faust, the hunch bet of Notre Dame.