Get Ready, Europe, to Catch Past

News item: “Notre Dame on European TV. Irish sign agreement to televise their games to six European countries for three years , beginning this fall.”

Attention European football fans! To understand and appreciate Notre Dame football, it is not enough to know about Raghib (the Rocket) Ismail. You have to know about the rich and colorful past of this storied institution. This is not a team, it’s a haunted house. You will want to know about the cast of characters rattling around in it:

GEORGE GIPP--This fabled creature, half man, half myth, who roamed the campus (and the pool halls) at South Bend in 1917-1920 was the winningest player in Notre Dame history. At last count, he had won 371 games, most of them posthumously.

He never lost, but there was one tie in there.

Gipp was a master player who set rushing records at Notre Dame that lasted for 58 years, until they were broken by a player named--what else?--Jerome Heavens.

Gipp’s contributions to Notre Dame football cannot be overestimated. They were so heroic that, when they made a movie about him, Ronald Reagan, of whom you might have heard, played the part.

Gipp beat Army three times alive--and 14 times dead.

Gipp, a non-Catholic at this most Catholic of universities, was said to have made a deathbed conversion and then--a little violin music, please--was supposed to have risen and begged the coach, “Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.”

The team, of course, did better than that. To date, the boys have won 357 for him and, presumably, they’re not through yet.

Legend has it, Gipp, as a freshman, showed up at the Notre Dame practice field one day just as the team kicker landed a long punt at his feet. Gipp picked it up and drop-kicked it back over the punter’s head. You don’t want to check a splendid story like that too closely.

KNUTE ROCKNE--This is the coach who invented Notre Dame, the forward pass and, in effect, big-time college football itself.

Rockne was the most improbable character who ever strode a sideline, a wise-cracking, fast-talking, quick-witted student of the human race who spoke in staccato bursts like a machine gun. Pat O’Brien said it was the best role he ever played.

Rock out-Irished the Irish, even though he was born in Norway. He was a 23-year-old letter carrier when he went to Notre Dame, prematurely bald and sporting a broken nose he got in lodge fights around Chicago.

He looked 60 when he was 30. He had a face like an old catcher’s mitt and was one of the first to realize you didn’t get football players out of seminaries. It was said he won Gipp in a poker game.

He was a master psychologist who could coax performance out of a statue. Besides Gipp, whose shade he first evoked to pull an Army game out of the hat (some people swear he had used Gipp for an Indiana game a year before), he had a whole attic full of ghosts and out-patients he could call on in a pinch. If Gipp didn’t work, there was always Aunt Martha from Dubuque or the little boy in Cuyahoga who would be good for a fourth-quarter touchdown or two.

Rockne was the first to dub the team the Fighting Irish, even though there are probably more Irish in the House of Lords than on a Notre Dame squad. Rockne put the whole mystique together. He took a football and turned an obscure institution founded by French priests 80 years before into one of the most famous institutions of higher learning in the New World. He was shrewd, innovative, manipulative. He would have made a great Pope.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN--These were a modestly gifted set of undersized backs who made up the Notre Dame starting backfield in a game against Army one day in 1923, shortly after Grantland Rice, the most famous sportswriter of his time, had seen a Rudolph Valentino movie entitled: “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

In Granny’s lead on the game, Famine, Pestilence, War and Destruction became Stuhldreher, Layden, Crowley and Miller.

The label clung to them the rest of their lives. They barnstormed with it, headlined banquets with it and were affably joined at the hip throughout their careers. Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden and Harry Stuhldreher became moderately successful coaches--although Stuhldreher was the first to inspire student bodies to hang out “Goodby Harry” banners when one of his Wisconsin teams kept falling on its moleskins. Don Miller became a federal judge in Cleveland.

The Four Horsemen became part of the romance of sport in the Roaring Twenties, along with the Manassa Mauler, Jack Dempsey; the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth; the Galloping Ghost, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Big Bill Tilden, et al. They played together for three years, culminating an undefeated season and Notre Dame’s only appearance in the Rose Bowl with a 27-10 victory.

They were remarkable for the speed and precision of their play and the way they worked together on the field. And they were just as simpatico off it. They enjoyed each other’s company till the day they died. They had reason to be glad Granny Rice didn’t go see a movie called “Pony Express” that week of the game.

LOU HOLTZ--Lou is a guy who used to be a happy-go-lucky sort, the coach ready with a quip, wisecrack or the funny story before he went to Notre Dame. He looks a lot like Woody Allen and he has started to act like him--full of Angst, torment, paranoia, insecurity.

The Notre Dame job does that to you. Lou always looks as if he has a hat two sizes too big for him. He’s so thin, you could put a stamp on him and mail him. When he turns sideways, he disappears. With his shirt off, he looks like his own X-ray.

Believe it or not, he played linebacker in college, which should tell you something about the man. He never smiles. He hasn’t laughed since 1982. Even though he has been outrageously successful, he sometimes acts as if the job were two sizes too big for him, too.

You’re not a coach at Notre Dame, you’re a target. Notre Dame not only expects an annual national championship, it needs it. Holtz paces the sidelines like a caged, hungry lion, or a guy whose mother is being operated on in the next room. But despite his appearance, he is as hard-core as Gen. Patton. He may look like Woody Allen, but he acts more like Woody Hayes (for whom he once worked).

He shows no hesitation in throwing a star player off the team if he so much as misses a team meal. He doesn’t look as if he’s having any fun, though, which is too bad at an institution like Notre Dame, where the irreverent student body dubs the statue of one of the founding fathers with his arms upstretched as “Fair Catch Corby,” and the massive mural on the library overlooking the football stadium is said to show Jesus signaling a touchdown.

You can’t appreciate Notre Dame football without the lore. Without its ghosts, Notre Dame is just Michigan State.

In Europe, it used to be said that, whereas some countries had standing armies, in Germany, a standing army had a country. In some respects Notre Dame comes into focus that way. Some institutions may have football teams but at Notre Dame, a football team has the institution.

Any way you look at it, though, you’re getting more than X’s and O’s, first downs and slot-rights. With Notre Dame, you’re getting a little slice of Americana--the team that took college football out of park playgrounds and put it on international TV.