COMMENTARY : Irish Are Back to Fighting

Notre Dame seems to be carrying this “Fighting Irish” thing a bit too far, don’t you think? Five unsportsmanlike conduct penalties -- four in the final two minutes when they were up by 21 points -- in the Fiesta Bowl back in January against West Virginia; punchouts with Miami (you’ll recall the “Catholics vs. Convicts” T-shirts) and last week’s pre-game brawl in the tunnel with Southern California. Maybe it’s not enough to be ranked No. 1 in the NCAA, maybe Notre Dame is aiming for the top 10 in the WBA and WBC.

What does the N.D. stand for, No Decision?

Who’s their offensive coordinator, Angelo Dundee?

Embarrassed by the notoriety, the athletic director has apologized to USC, and the head coach, Lou Holtz, has vowed to resign should something like this occur again -- a vow not everyone is taking seriously. “If he does quit, it won’t be for the Kansas job,” jokes ESPN’s Beano Cook, a Holtz fan.

You didn’t see this kind of behavior under Gerry Faust. Faust’s teams didn’t hit anybody; that’s why he’s in Akron. On the other hand, when Faust was coaching, who was watching Notre Dame so late in the season? By now, Notre Dame was hovering around 4-4, out of bowl contention, and on the UHF channels.

Under Holtz, Notre Dame quickly got back on top. In fact Notre Dame is so strong, one of the planks in Paul Tagliabue’s platform calls for the Irish to play a parity schedule when they join the NFC Central in 1990. It’s tempting to sketch a connection between their leap in the rankings and the swagger of their players.

Notre Dame must have been institutionally distraught by Faust’s teams. South Bend is no place for nondescript football. We’re talking about America’s University of Football here. If the team is bad, the bowl money dries up, maybe alumni donations dry up, maybe TV and radio rights shrink. Notre Dame football isn’t merely a sport, it’s a fund-raising machine. Holtz was hired to win, baby. Which he has. You can’t get through the weekend without them. Beano Cook says, “Notre Dame’s on TV more than ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”

And so when Notre Dame suddenly and uncharacteristically gets involved in a spate of unpleasant incidents, questions arise whether in his zeal to return Notre Dame to the glory days, Holtz has fostered an atmosphere where winning is everything. Has Holtz recruited players who sense that and are more likely to fight? Is Notre Dame just Gleason’s Gym with gold headgear?

“Their players now are more committed to winning than in the Faust years,” says CBS’s Pat Haden. “Lou Holtz prepares his team better than Gerry Faust did. But they are not caged animals spoiling for a fight. Of all the athletes I’ve been associated with, hands down, Notre Dame players are a cut above the rest. They’re more committed to their school, to their tasks at hand, to doing their absolute best no matter what the circumstances. They’ve always been that way.”

What makes this recent behavior so discomfitting is that Notre Dame always has seemed a special place, where winning was demanded, but cheating wasn’t tolerated. This wouldn’t be such a scandal if the school involved was Oklahoma or Miami. Bad manners are commonplace there; Michael Irvin once bragged about his bad-boy Hurricanes: “Yeah, that’s us, Miami, No. 1 UPI, No. 1 FBI.” Notre Dame can’t claim the exclusive moral high ground anymore. They sign Proposition 48 kids. They redshirt. They’ve had disciplinary problems. Holtz is a fabulous after-dinner speaker, but his whiny poor-mouthing of his team is tiresome. The reality is that Notre Dame is a bully now.

“I think that’s what embarrasses Notre Dame so,” says Haden. “They feel it shouldn’t happen there.”

Fighting is not uncommon among football players. “There’s something about the nature of the game -- different from baseball and basketball -- there’s seemingly so much more significance about one game,” says Haden. Week after week, year after year, football players are told that this one game is the most important of their whole lives, that they’ve got to be willing to pay any price to win; they’re pumped up, and sent out of the locker room encouraged to kill their opponents. Given the volatility, it’s not hard to predict that if they should actually confront those opponents, elbowing past each other in the same tunnel, there might be an extracurricular smackaround.

(By the way, Notre Dame doesn’t have to risk losing Holtz -- and who is Holtz kidding with this preposterous vow to quit if another fight breaks out; what’ll he do if his players stick out their tongues at Joe Paterno, dock himself from the Orange Bowl? -- nor do they have to hire an Einstein to come up with a formula to prevent teams from brawling in their tunnel: build another tunnel.)

On the broader subject of tunnel fighting, ESPN’s Lee Corso says: “You just have to set up a procedure for coming onto the field. A lot of the old stadiums have one tunnel, like Michigan. First the Michigan band comes through the tunnel, then their football team. In 1967 I was an assistant at Navy, and we had to play at Michigan. I went to Columbus, Ohio, to Woody Hayes’s favorite restaurant, The Jai-Alai, to ask him how to beat Michigan. He told me, ‘Don’t get caught in the tunnel with the Michigan band.’ They have 18 million people. Your quarterback can get bumped by a tuba player, he won’t be able to raise his arm. Your fullback can get poked in the eye by a clarinet. I made sure the band wasn’t anywhere near us, and we actually won at Ann Arbor (26-21). ... When I was head coach at Indiana, I used to send five or six of my reserves out ahead into the tunnel. The Michigan band would pour in and beat up on them. I kept my good players in the locker room so the band couldn’t get them. It’s a procedural thing, that’s all.”