A RUN FOR NO. 1 : They Couldn’t Ward Off Irish

Sorry, Charlie.

What else was there to say to the quarterback from Florida State in the quarters of a football team in pain, amid the quiet that accompanies defeat? He had almost made it happen, Charlie Ward had, throwing up a prayer and coming within 14 yards of a miracle, and somehow he could still manage a wistful smile, could still say: “We kept them in their seats, didn’t we? We had them good and scared.”

Florida State gave Notre Dame a game here Saturday, as good as games get. Not until Ward’s last pass was batted away on the day’s last play did the Seminoles know for sure that they no longer were the No. 1 team in the land, that a score of 31-24 was as final as scores get. And their despair afterward took many forms.

Off by himself sat Ken Alexander, 247 pounds of linebacker in a brightly colored T-shirt that read: SEMINOLES vs. FIGHTING IRISH--THE TOUGHEST TICKET YOU’LL NEVER GET. Again and again he shook his head, his tone soft and sorrowful, muttering: “I’m disgusted. I’m disgusted with everybody in this room. I’m disgusted with myself. We never should have played as sorry a game as we played.”

Twenty feet away and twice as loud, Matt Frier, a much smaller senior who catches Ward’s passes, stood calling for a rematch like a prizefighter who lost a split decision. His voice becoming shrill, Frier kept saying and repeating, the words rarely varying: “You just saw the two best football teams in the country play one of the greatest football games of all time! You wouldn’t want to see them again?”

You would, yes.

You wonder what would happen next time, if the Fighting Irish could again contain Ward this way, if they could again pull away from an opponent this strong by as many as 17 points, if they could again pull tricks out of the cap that Coach Lou Holtz pulls down practically to his ears. One Notre Dame touchdown Saturday was scored by its punter and two more by a free safety, all on snaps from scrimmage.

You also wonder whether Florida State might approach a rematch with an adjustment in attitude, having swaggered into town wearing green caps, all but mocking Notre Dame on the eve of the game. Such haughty indifference was ascribed to self-confidence, but by game’s end, the Seminoles surely did seem guilty of arrogance not yet earned.

“That’s Florida State football,” Ward said later. “We live and die by being risky.”

That’s why sometimes they throw passes to the halfback, why sometimes the halfback throws passes right back to the quarterback, why sometimes the center snaps the football directly to the fullback and why Florida State razzled and dazzled its way to 42, 45, 57, 33, 51, 28, 40, 54 and 49 points over their first nine games. In Ward they have as gifted a player as there is in uniform and in Coach Bobby Bowden they have an agreeable, anything-goes kind of feller who describes a game such as this as “a big ‘un” and is willing to gamble wildly to win it.

Had his team scored with no seconds remaining, Bowden said, there would be no kicking of the extra point to knot the score at 31-all simply to preserve the No. 1 ranking of a team that would have deserved applause for rallying from 17 points in arrears on the road. No, suh, Bowden said. We’d-a gone for them two points. We’d-a gone for that vic’try.

The coach was so amazed by what happened in the first half, he was practically speechless by the second. “It was a danged nightmare,” Bowden said long after the game, by himself after the Seminole locker room had cleared out. “To me it looked like one team didn’t deserve to be out there, and that was Florida State.”

He said at halftime he did the best he could, pep-talking the team with reminders that Florida State had trailed before with only one quarter to play, let alone two, and that if Notre Dame could score 21 points in a half, then by gum, so could the ‘Noles.

Bowden grinned his best aw-shoot grin.

“Told ‘em the same thing Knute (Rockne) would’ve,” he said.

And danged if Florida State didn’t almost pull it off. The conditions weren’t ideal for a comeback, not with a wicked wind sweeping across the plains and not in surroundings populated to capacity by fans so obsessed with seeing the game, hundreds of counterfeit tickets and press credentials had to be confiscated. Furthermore, the Irish were moving the football with ease down the field while the Seminoles attempted to plug a gap vacated by their best defender, linebacker Derrick Brooks, who was off wrapping tape around his sprained left ankle.

Normally a punter, Adrian Jarrell ran a reverse 32 yards with a flying wedge in front of him, all the way to the end zone. And later Jeff Burris, who starts in the Notre Dame defensive secondary, lined up twice in the backfield, took handoffs and lugged them across the goal. The Seminoles were stopping nobody while their own unstoppable quarterback, Ward, was running for his life, dumping passes in the flat and even being intercepted for the first time in 160 flings.

Like the man said, a nightmare.

“We waited till halftime before we even started to play,” Alexander said, seething now. “This is my last year. I’m a senior. I can’t afford no letdown. I ain’t got time for no letdown. Notre Dame shouldn’t have scored a point on us, not one point, we were so well prepared for this game. Then we go out there and play like that, no cohesiveness, no nothin’. I’m embarrassed.”

Yet even to the end, the linebacker said, he believed Ward would win him the game. Kneeling on the sideline, afraid to look, Alexander said: “I waited for the crowd to tell me the news. If it was silent, I’d know Charlie won us the game. If it made noise, we were done. I heard the noise and I can’t even verbalize for you what that was like. There was emptiness in my heart and emptiness in my mind.”

Florida State had lost the big one. “I finally found out once and for all what ‘the big one’ is after hearing about it for all these years,” Bowden said. “It’s the one you lose.”

The coach wanted to do his Rockne impression, one more time. He called the squad together, minutes after the game.

To tell them what?

“I don’t know if I want to tell you our secrets or not,” the coach said. “Oh, OK. It had something to do with us playin’ ‘em again.”