Suddenly, Dream Season Ends in Sorrow for Irish

At 4 p.m. Thursday, Coach Lou Holtz called together his national champion Notre Dame football team in an auditorium at the Loftus Center, the indoor practice facility where Fighting Irish teams ordinarily can escape the Indiana winter chill.

This time it was cold inside the meeting room. Cold as sudden death.

Everybody in the auditorium knew why Holtz was there. He was there to talk and hear about Bob Satterfield.

Bob’s father, Carl, could not attend the meeting. Carl was still traveling, from Encino to South Bend, Ind., to be where he was needed most, at the side of his beloved adopted son.

Lou Holtz looked the grim-faced players in the eye and told them a story. He told them how, on days when he is at an airport, he often spots some small child being escorted by a parent onto a plane. The plane takes off, and the parents are left crying. On the other end, though, happy grandparents meet the plane, and the child gets off, and everybody’s smiling.

That’s kind of the way it is, Holtz said. When somebody leaves, it is not as hard on that person as it is on the people he left behind.

There was a long silence in the room.

“So, don’t worry about Bobby,” the coach said. “He’s fine.”

The players understood. They tried hard to accept what had happened. Yet, they were still in a very emotional state. Two weeks before, Bobby Satterfield was with them at the Fiesta Bowl, on the night they won the national championship. One day before, Bobby Satterfield was with them at the White House, where the President of the United States shook their hands.

Now he wasn’t with them anymore.

Lou Holtz asked if anybody wanted to speak.

Slowly, George Streeter raised his hand. Streeter, a senior defensive back from Chicago, was probably Bobby Satterfield’s closest friend on the squad. He wanted to say something.

He just couldn’t. He couldn’t get the words out. Streeter nearly broke down. He wanted so badly to speak, but he couldn’t.

Finally, finally after trying so hard, Streeter said what he had to say. He said he wanted Bobby Satterfield’s father to know something. He wanted him to know that the players wanted to do something for Bobby, have a service of some kind on the Notre Dame campus. Even though Bobby wasn’t Roman Catholic, the players wanted to do something .

So, Thursday night around 10, at the Fisher Hall dorm where Bobby lived, a prayer service was held. Those who knew him spoke, and there were close to 200 in attendance. And Friday at 2 p.m., a wake was held at Sacred Heart church, with a memorial service an hour later.

Bobby Satterfield was a Notre Dame man, through and through. He attended Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, where he was student body president and a fine athlete. When he chose to go to college at the Notre Dame, there was no scholarship for him, but he enrolled anyway. He made the football team as a walk-on, and worked just as hard on his studies.

The coach called Bobby Satterfield into his office in August. The coach had a couple of scholarships to spare, and he wanted to reward somebody who had always made such an outstanding effort. For his senior season, Bobby Satterfield got his scholarship.

He was a defensive back/running back, 6 feet tall and 181 pounds, who didn’t get to play much. In fact, he only appeared in a couple of Irish games this season, and did not play in the Fiesta Bowl. He was part of the team, though. One of the guys. One of everybody’s favorite guys.

“He was the nicest guy in the world,” offensive lineman Tim Grunhard said. “It’s so sad. He didn’t even get to see his championship ring.”

Forever in Irish eyes, the players will remember Bobby Satterfield working hard in practice, making better players of those who played ahead of him, sometimes dressing up as an opponent, as when he wore a University of Miami helmet and towel and dared the Notre Dame receivers to beat him downfield.

“Those are the kinds of guys who make you a champion,” Chuck Heater, who coaches the Irish secondary, said on the phone Friday from South Bend. “He was such an engaging person, always a tremendous smile, always an encouraging word. He had great enthusiasm for life.

“You know, at a place like Notre Dame, where there’s such a sense of community, even someone like Bobby, who didn’t appear in many games, can touch so many lives. For the first time, I can sense somewhat what people must have felt around here when George Gipp died.”

Reggie Ho, the Notre Dame kicker, said of the meeting at Loftus Hall, “There were people crying, and guys were even fainting. Two of the guys fell right over. We just have to have faith in God at a time like this.”

George Streeter eventually composed himself enough to talk about his friend.

“He was my biggest critic and my biggest fan,” Streeter said. “I’d like to think I was the same for him. The saddest thing for me is that we don’t get to see him anymore. I know he’s in a better place now, but now we’re here without him. I wish I’d had another chance to tell him that I loved him. We all loved him.”

The first thing Lou Holtz told the players was not to be embarrassed to cry or show emotion. Go ahead, tell Bobby Satterfield you loved him, even now. “Isn’t it amazing that we can’t do that for people when they’re with us?” Holtz asked.

On the day after returning from Washington, where the national champions were recognized by Ronald Reagan, the man who played George Gipp in a movie, Notre Dame’s players returned to their everyday student lives. Tailback Mark Green, from Riverside, and defensive end Darrell (Flash) Gordon accompanied their buddy, Bobby Satterfield, to a nightclub in nearby Niles, Mich. They danced some, then sat at a table, listened to the music and talked.

Bobby Satterfield, 22, suddenly slumped in his chair, slid the length of it and collapsed to the floor. “It looked like he was having a seizure,” Gordon said. “When he collapsed, I looked around. I thought maybe someone had hit him.”

Doctors are not entirely certain yet what hit Bobby Satterfield. Cardiac arrest is their best guess. An autopsy indicated an inequality of the size of the coronary arteries and the presence of increased fluids surrounding the brain tissue. Maybe there was something else. Nobody is certain.

All anybody does know for sure is that Bobby Satterfield, a young man everybody at Notre Dame seemed to like, had lost his life, at a time when he was having the best time of his life. Wes Pritchett, a linebacker and classmate, said: “It does more than put a damper on the season. It puts a damper on life itself.”

Real life not only imitates art, it sometimes mocks it. The Irish won one for George Gipp once. Maybe they can win one for Bobby Satterfield sometime.

Bobby Satterfield

‘He was the nicest guy in the world. It’s so sad. He didn’t even get

to see his championship ring.’