COLUMN ONE : Lies, Lore and Irish Football : Notre Dame’s legendary program is glorified in a new movie and castigated in a new book. A century after taking up the game, this is still the college team that America loves--or loves to hate.

Two greats of college football, Knute Rockne and George Gipp, never even graduated from high school.

Before setting foot on campus at Notre Dame, Rockne worked three years at a Chicago post office. As for Gipp, he supported himself, on campus and off, as a card shark, pool hustler and gambler who bet hundreds of dollars on his own team’s football games, and eventually was expelled from Notre Dame for cutting class.

No one knew him then as “the Gipper.” And he made no request from his deathbed that Rockne encourage the other players to go out there and “Win one for the Gipper,” principally because Rockne wasn’t at his deathbed.

Yet the lore, lies and legends of Notre Dame football live on, more than 150 years after the founding of L’Universite de Notre Dame du Lac by a young, zealous French priest.

No fewer than three new books examine and analyze the school’s football program, past and present, including one, “Under the Tarnished Dome,” that is severely critical of Notre Dame’s current coach, Lou Holtz. A new motion picture, “Rudy,” the latest of Hollywood’s romanticized visions of the school, presents a more inspirational portrait about an ambitious squirt who realizes his fantasy of taking the field for one play for dear old Notre Dame.

Now, as ever, with the Fighting Irish, undefeated and ranked second in the nation--set for today’s game against USC and a Nov. 13 showdown with No. 1 Florida State--there is something about Notre Dame football that transcends all other scholastic ideals and makes this school, at once, the most loved and hated in the land.

There is the Notre Dame described by the Rev. Edward A. (Monk) Malloy, the university’s president, as having a “kind of symbolic role in the success story of American Catholicism.”

There is the Notre Dame immortalized by the “Gipper” speech originally recited in the movie “Knute Rockne, All American” and frequently re-enacted to political advantage by Ronald Reagan, of whom former aide Patrick J. Buchanan once said: “In his heart, that’s where he thinks he went to school.”

There is the Notre Dame attended at age 67 by Laurence Lewis of Jersey City, N.J., a manager of tunnels for the New York Port Authority who put three children through college here and then fulfilled his own dream by becoming a Notre Dame graduate himself, one year behind his granddaughter.

There is the Notre Dame whose athletic heritage transcends the ages. Derrick Mayes, 19, a second-string split end on this season’s team, has a pregame ritual that combines devout prayer with the music of “2 Legit to Quit.” When asked why he believes the Fighting Irish will be successful this season, Mayes replied: “That’s how it’s been since Rockne called the shots!”

And there is the Notre Dame revered by many for its success in football, yet reviled by some who believe this school gets away with actions that others cannot. Saying he grew up believing in Notre Dame as college football’s ideal, Don Yaeger, co-author of “Under the Tarnished Dome,” says that after speaking with dozens of former players there: “Now I know that ‘ND’ means ‘No Different.’ ”

Or, as Sport Illustrated’s Rick Telander would write: “How can you really like a school that has 300-pound linemen and God on its side?”

“There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters,” former Irish Coach Dan Devine said in a 1988 interview. “And, quite frankly, they’re both a pain in the ass.”

The link between fiction and fact has become increasingly blurred. When Murray Sperber, an associate professor at Indiana University, went to work on his new book, “Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football,” he discovered, to his great joy, in the subbasement of a university library the daily correspondence of Knute Rockne. About 14,500 items in all, they gave him insight into the life of Notre Dame’s most fabled coach.

During the course of his research, Sperber realized something: “I was startled by the discrepancy between the myths and the actual historical records in my hands.”

His tome puts to rest many of these myths, among them that the rivalry between Notre Dame and USC began as a result of Bonnie Rockne, wife of Knute, asking her husband to schedule a game in Los Angeles so she could see a friend who was married to a USC faculty member. Sperber writes that this story was perpetrated as recently as last year’s telecast of the Notre Dame-USC game.

Truth is, Rockne wrote to a friend in 1925: “The Southern California officials came to South Bend and offered the authorities such a fluttering (expensive yet risky) guarantee that they could not turn it down.”

Poetic license has been responsible for much of the truth-bending in Notre Dame’s case, but so, Sperber notes, has sloppiness.

The author includes a 20-year-old quote from Father Frank Cavanaugh, a priest of long standing at Notre Dame. He describes as “sheer garbage” the 1940 film made about Rockne and takes historians and journalists to task by saying: “I can’t understand why a newspaperman with nothing else to do but drink and go to football games can’t occasionally check a fact. One man makes a mistake in print and the thing is repeated for 50 years.”

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Notre Dame began playing football in 1887, a full 45 years after ground was broken by the French cleric Edward Sorin. His superiors in the diocese donated a tract of land here, near the Michigan border, after Sorin was rebuffed in his attempt to build the college near Vincennes, Ind.

By 1905, Notre Dame was surgically efficient in football, in fact defeating the American College of Medicine and Surgery that season, 142-0, after a second half shortened to eight minutes because, as the next issue of the student newspaper reported, the doctors had to get something to eat before catching their train. (“And anyway, the score suited them as it stood.”)

Five years later, University of Michigan Coach Fielding Yost called off the next day’s game because, he said, it had come to his attention that several Notre Dame’s players had played a considerable amount of collegiate football elsewhere. One of them, a tackle named Ralph Dimmick, not only had completed his career with a small college in the Northwest, but afterward had worked as a cowboy in Argentina.

The big-business aspect of Fighting Irish football came about little by little. In 1911, a game against St. Bonaventure netted the school a tidy $86.20. Nearly 80 years later, Notre Dame would have an arrangement with NBC to televise its home games worth $37.5 million. Notre Dame’s exclusive 1990 agreement came at the expense of 63 other colleges that had expected the school to be its strongest ally and top television draw in a profitable new football federation.

ABC reportedly offered a package worth $210 million to the College Football Assn., but reduced it to $175 million after Notre Dame’s withdrawal. ESPN pared its bid from $140 million to $125 million.

“It is impossible to fathom any greater exhibition of greed or arrogance than what the University of Notre Dame perpetrated on the college football world in February, 1990, when it announced, in effect, ‘We’re Notre Dame and you’re not, so screw you,’ ” write Yaeger and co-author Douglas S. Looney in “Under the Tarnished Dome.”

The authors quote Dan Hampton, a former National Football League player turned TV analyst, as calling Notre Dame “the 29th pro team.”

Officials from the university take considerable umbrage at some implied connection between good business and poor sportsmanship. Viewing the NBC contract as fiscally sensible, Athletic Director Dick Rosenthal said in an interview: “We did not see the CFA deal as in our best interest.”

Of far more concern to the school is the nature of the criticism of Holtz that the book’s co-authors have voiced in interviews nationwide. Yaeger on a radio talk show recently referred to Holtz’s behavior as “despicable” and Looney, on another show, said bluntly that Notre Dame embodies everything bad about college football.

At first reluctant even to acknowledge the book, Holtz said: “It’s sad to see the way some people distort the truth.”

Several of the 84 former Notre Dame players who gave interviews to Yaeger or Looney were contacted by school officials--intimidation tactics, the authors say--and asked whether the quotes attributed to them were accurate. Many denied the remarks or recanted, Notre Dame officials say.

The authors call this spin control, something at which Notre Dame excels. After a 299-page litany of alleged improprieties, illegal loans, steroid use by players, and violent and turbulent behavior by the coach, they conclude: “When Notre Dame took on Lou Holtz, it got wins, but at what price?”

Joe Theismann, a quarterback at Notre Dame from 1968-70 who later played for the Washington Redskins, said he is not sure which is worse, cynics looking to dig up dirt on a school they do not appreciate or snitches who blame their own failures and disappointments at the school on some misguided theory of conspiracy.

“These crybabies who don’t get their way, they make me sick,” Theismann said. “Instead of looking at themselves as responsible for why Notre Dame or a Notre Dame coach may have treated them a certain way, they have to stick it to somebody else. They go ratting on one or two isolated things and get some other joker to turn it into some kind of national scandal. It’s sickening.

“To me, Notre Dame is still the finest academic and athletic school in the world, without question.”

Like thousands before him, Theismann, of South River, N.J., heard about Notre Dame long before he went there. Joe Montana, who played quarterback for the Irish from 1975-78, said he had so many acquaintances from western Pennsylvania who enrolled at Notre Dame that it had always seemed to him the thing to do.

And freshman linebacker Melvin Dansby, from Birmingham, Ala., recalled that after a recruiting visit, “People were asking: ‘What’s it like at Notre Dame?’ It’s just something because you’re never asked: ‘How’s it like at Georgia?’ or ‘How’s it like at USC?’ You just tell them it’s a special thing. You have to be a special person to come to Notre Dame.”

Daniel E. (Rudy) Ruettiger, 45, is feeling pretty special these days as the hero of the movie “Rudy.” The former steelworker from Joliet, Ill., wanted to play for the Irish from his childhood years on: “To us, Notre Dame represented the underdog. They went out and beat the rich kids from the East.

“I really thought Notre Dame was in heaven,” Ruettiger said. “I thought God made these special dudes and put them on Earth to make it a better place.”

Too small, too untalented, Ruettiger nevertheless became a teammate of Montana and got to play 27 seconds of football for Notre Dame in November, 1975. He has spent the years since trying to get the story of his experience told on film, has succeeded and now appears intent on extending his 15 minutes of fame to at least 16 minutes.

When the world premiere of the Tri-Star Pictures movie was held in South Bend last week, Ruettiger dressed in a tuxedo and paraded to the theater accompanied by Notre Dame cheerleaders and a 100-piece marching band. The audience viewed a film that, like “Knute Rockne, All American” before it, sacrificed the truth, on occasion, to make for a better story.

Few seemed to care, in more ways than one. Yes, customers did enjoy it, including cheerleader Ryan Roberts, who appears briefly in the movie. “We were sitting in the theater and we got tears in our eyes, just like when we got our acceptance letters (to Notre Dame),” he said. Yet opening night at the Town & Country theater was half-filled at the 7 p.m. showing, according to theater manager Wendy Eklund, and previews that day were three-quarters empty.

“We expected more,” Eklund said. “Everyone kept calling and asking if it was going to sell out, and we said yes. So I think a lot of people held off to a later date.”

Attending was no problem for the star. Rudy lives five blocks from campus.

Undaunted as ever, whenever Ruettiger reads that this film might be more light entertainment than one of Oscar stature, his reaction is to keep that tuxedo handy.

“Who knows? Everyone told me I couldn’t get into Notre Dame, and once I got in, they told me I’d never make the team, and once I did that, they said I’d never dress for an actual game,” Ruettiger said. “The next thing I heard was that this movie would never get made.

“So, you see, some pretty unlikely things have already happened to me. Keeping that in mind, I’m going to hang on to my new dream and hope that maybe I’ll be one of the fortunate ones ‘dressing’ for the Oscars next year.”

Yes, who knows?

Maybe they’ll win one for the Ruder.

* RELATED STORY: C1

Irish Lore

Some key football moments at the University of Notre Dame:

* First game: Nov. 23, 1887, an 8-0 loss to Michigan.

* Knute Rockne: The coach associated with bringing the Irish into national prominence, his teams won 105 games in 13 seasons. He died in a plane crash in 1931, en route to Los Angeles after the 1930 season. He was 43.

* The rivalry: In their first meeting, Notre Dame defeated USC, 13-12, on Dec. 4, 1926.

* The movies: Pat O’Brien played Rockne and Ronald Reagan played George Gipp in the 1940 film “Knute Rockne, All American.”

* The experiment: Gerry Faust, an outstanding high school coach but without college experience, was hired to replace Dan Devine after the 1980 season. He resigned after five years and a 30-26-1 record. Current Coach Lou Holtz replaced him.

* Television: In 1990, Notre Dame signed a five-year, $37.5-million deal with NBC Sports to televise all its home football games. Notre Dame became the first school in the 64-member College Football Assn. to make a national television deal of its own.