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What: “Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame

Football”

Author: Steve Delsohn

The tough thing about writing an oral history is that history doesn’t cease on your publication date. In this case, Notre Dame oral history continued to yap its way in lurid detail long after the author put this book to bed.

It is the drawback to Steve Delsohn’s otherwise interesting inspection of Irish football, as told in dialogue chronology by former players, coaches and observers.

Ah, what the author would have given to add a last chapter on former line coach Joe Moore’s age discrimination trial against the school this summer, a tawdry soap opera that blew the Golden Dome off the Irish’s holier-than-thou image.

As it is, Delsohn interviewed almost all of the key characters--Joe Montana being the notable exception--in weaving this tale of Notre Dame since 1940.

Since 1940? OK, another setback. Oral history required interviews with the living, which pretty much ruled out the first four-tenths of the 20th Century and that fairly remarkable Knute Rockne era.

Still, there’s enough here to satisfy the devoted Irish fan and any outsider not interested in a sugar-coated account.

You’ll learn that coach Frank Leahy once reprimanded a kicker who missed an extra point by exclaiming, “You’ll burn in Hell for this,” and of the icy relationship between coach Dan Devine and Joe Montana.

Regrettably, the book was history before Moore’s lawsuit went to trial.