All That Winning Comes at a Price

News item: “South Bend, Ind. -- Football Coach Lou Holtz today apologized to the University of Southern California’s football team for a pregame brawl that erupted in the stadium tunnel before Saturday’s USC-Notre Dame on the Irish’s home field.

“We take full responsibility for that thing occurring,” the coach said in urging a written apology from his team. “We were completely out of line.” You can bet the Notre Dame coach is quick with an apology.

It is, of course, easy to be magnanimous in victory. But, the issue goes deeper than that.

You would never think it to look at them, their image in films and television and story books and the rich lore of collegiate football being what it is, but the Fighting Irish often skirt the thin line between ostracism and adulation.

Their crime is evident: They win too much.

If you think this sits well with their victims, you don’t know college football.

You see, you don’t have to play Notre Dame. The Irish don’t belong to your conference. They don’t belong to any conference. You don’t have to get through them to get to a bowl game.

They are the bully boys of the Midwest. They annually have 80 or 90 of the best football players on the planet in their gold and blue (or, sometimes, Kelly green). They are the darlings of the subway alumni and the Cadillac Catholics everywhere.

Other sectors of the population are able to restrain their enthusiasm. In fact, the powers that be in the church have pretty much de-emphasized football at other major Catholic schools--Fordham, the Loyolas, Holy Cross--at least partly because their success tended to exacerbate anti-Catholic sentiment, polarize prejudice.

It was all very well for Notre Dame to reign supreme when the Irish had Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen, Hollywood films with Ronald Reagan playing the Gipper. They were part of the era of wonderful nonsense. Schoolboys hummed the fight song. Outlined against a blue-gray sky was the original America’s team.

Rockne was a publicly jovial showman and salesman, a canny old Norwegian who looked a little like Santa Claus and had an almost Churchillian wit and charm. It was darn near a pleasure to lose to Rockne.

His successors were something else again. Fortunately, Hunk Anderson and Elmer Layden didn’t win too much. Sometimes, not at all.

But then along came Leahy--and all the latent anti-Notre Dame sentiment surfaced. He gave it an excuse.

Frank Leahy was no Rockne. He didn’t charm anybody, he just beat them. Teams began dropping off the schedule like rats leaving a burning building. The storied Army series, the games that gave the country the legend of the Four Horsemen, the rivalry that filled Yankee Stadium and Soldier Field, was unceremoniously ended after 34 years. Michigan gave Notre Dame a wide berth. Woody Hayes at Ohio State wouldn’t be caught dead--or alive--playing Notre Dame.

There was a very real fear that Notre Dame would become the pariah of intercollegiate football. So they fired Leahy as a sop to those who contended that it was not the college that ticked them off but the coach. They even de-emphasized football, which was a mistake for Notre Dame. Their varsity began to look less like next year’s Chicago Bears than this year’s California Bears.

I remember going to USC Coach Jeff Cravath in the critical period before Notre Dame dumped Leahy. The concern in South Bend was that they would lose Southern Cal, as the West Coast school was always identified in Hoosierland, and this would be a catastrophic public relations blow for the school that Rockne built.

Cravath acknowledged that his colleagues were jumping off Notre Dame’s schedule and trying to talk him into joining them. SC would not join the parade, he said.

“You can’t be the best if you don’t play the best,” Cravath told me.

If you don’t think Notre Dame was relieved, you underestimate the value they put on their Southern California connection, with its proximity to show business, sound stages, networks and swimming pool alumni.

Ara Parseghian won just enough to keep the alumni happy--and lost enough not to make the competition unhappy.

Now, it’s Lou Holtz’s turn. He has Rockne’s jokes--but Leahy’s teams. So, it’s back to the tightrope.

It’s all very well to get in a pregame donnybrook with, say, the University of Miami. Notre Dame prizes the series but Miami’s image, rightly or wrongly, is that of a bunch of thugs in pads. Harvard, it ain’t.

Southern California is something else again. Lou Holtz knows it. Notre Dame knows it. Ugly brawls between the two squads do not serve the image of the rivalry. Taunting does not serve Notre Dame’s image. Too many people worked too many years to make the Irish-Trojan game what it has become, an American institution, to see it dissolved by a hoodlum rumble.

An apology is a nice start. A cleanup of their act would be more to the point. Notre Dame has beaten up SC seven times in a row now. It would seem that the Irish could wait till the kickoff. Or, Holtz is afraid, they won’t have SC to kick around anymore.