Vardell Knew What to Do in South Bend

A 21-year-old college football player walking onto the field at Notre Dame Stadium is like a baseball player coming out of a dugout in Yankee Stadium or a golfer standing on the first tee at St. Andrews or a priest entering St. Peter’s.

It isn’t a stadium as much as it’s a shrine.

It isn’t who is there now but rather who has been there.

No football player, no matter how young, has gotten through high school and into college without hearing of legends such as Rockne and Gipp. They are as real in South Bend as the Golden Dome.

Onto this turf strode an athlete named Touchdown Tommy.

What a name.

Touchdown Tommy.

Square jaw. Wide shoulders. Powerful legs. Strong heart.

Hollywood would take one look at this guy, cast him opposite Brooke Shields and wait for the cash registers to go crazy.

Indeed, it is almost as if Touchdown Tommy was some fantasy character. He just couldn’t be real.

It had to be something like “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.” Our hero would have to take an underdog to the promised land and probably walk off with a fair maiden.

You want a story line?

Touchdown Tommy and a bunch of his pals from a private school out west come to Notre Dame as conservative 18-point underdogs. Naturally, Notre Dame would be unbeaten and ranked No. 1 in the nation.

The stands would be filled with 59,075 pilgrims to this shrine, all of whom fully expected the Fighting Irish to roll onward to bigger showdowns against bigger foes.

However . . .

Touchdown Tommy would punch over from the one-yard line for first one and then two and then three and finally four touchdowns, the last coming with 31 seconds to play. The Irish would lose, 36-31.

End of unbeaten season.

Also, end of fantasy.

Touchdown Tommy was a very real nightmare for the Fighting Irish last Saturday. He did, indeed, score four touchdowns to lead the visiting Stanford Cardinal to a rather gigantic 36-31 upset that will be remembered in Palo Alto long after they will wish they could forget it in South Bend.

To get more specific with the reality of this thing, Touchdown Tommy is Tommy Vardell. He spent his high school days doing the same thing in far less auspicious places for Granite Hills High School.

Like many local youngsters who choose to pursue their college careers elsewhere, Vardell has suffered a bit from the “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” syndrome. He was doing quite well at Stanford, thank you, but he had become almost as anonymous hereabouts as the 47th entry on page 211 of the telephone book.

They know him in Palo Alto . . . and South Bend.

Those touchdowns against Notre Dame were his eighth, ninth, 10th and 11th. Eight of them have come from the one-yard line. The others were cross-country jaunts from the three, five and eight.

No wonder his teammates took to calling him Touchdown Tommy.

As his coach, Dennis Green, said: “ You know he’s going to get the ball, they know he’s going to get the ball, now let’s see you stop him.”

Outrageous.

When Notre Dame is involved, you just don’t say stuff like that. You go to Notre Dame, and you have to run through 11 defenders and about 11,000 ghosts. Nobody scores four touchdowns against the Irish. Teams don’t score four touchdowns against the Irish. No one had this year and only one, Air Force, did last year.

Notre Dame itself does not know if any individual has ever run through its defense for four touchdowns. It does know Anthony Davis scored six for USC in 1972.

“I haven’t been able to nail down four or five,” said John Heisler, Notre Dame’s sports information director. “We’ve checked records back to 1980, and it hadn’t happened. I’d say the odds are probably good it’s never happened.”

In truth, the odds are probably good that someone scored four touchdowns in one afternoon against the Irish, but let’s just say that Touchdown Tommy cannot have too much company among ballcarriers who have gone to South Bend to battle those ghosts.

And maybe Notre Dame can feel a little better that it did not get knocked off its pedestal by any Dick or Harry or even plain old Tom.

An institution so steeped in its legends and myths and heroes has to feel a little more comfortable losing to someone named Touchdown Tommy.

In South Bend, he’s a fit.