People’s Choice

It was Friday night, Nov. 10, and the little big man of Notre Dame football, the one with David’s body and Goliath’s heart, was facing one of his toughest opponents.

Joey Getherall straightened himself up to his full 5 feet 7, set his jaw and realized that his emotions were tackling him.

“The whole thing had me in tears, and that was before I even started to speak,” Getherall said.

The senior wide receiver was facing the usual 15,000 people in the Notre Dame Athletic and Convocation Center. It was the night before the Irish were to play Boston College, and Getherall was there to speak at the pep rally, an Irish tradition legendary in college football.

Boston College would be his final home game, another landmark in a career that has inspired Irish fans and befuddled coaches of the teams who chose not to recruit him out of La Puente Bishop Amat High four years ago because they thought he was too small. He had chosen this night, rather than a pep rally at an earlier game, because he knew he would feel and want to say so much more.

But he got ambushed, by the moment, by the show around him and by his own emotions.

“I wasn’t going to try and fire up the crowd like lots of people do,” he said. “I was just going to speak from the heart.”

But before he had his chance, Paul Hornung, as big an Irish legend as the pep rallies themselves, spoke from the heart. He talked of one of his former teammates, Don Penza, who had been a team captain in 1953 and who had, in a key game that cost the Irish their unbeaten status, dropped two key passes against Iowa and had stood the next week to face the student body at the pep rally. Hornung said Penza used only two words to rock the place: “I’m sorry.”

Hornung’s Penza story rocked the place again, leaving Getherall shaken.

“I knew I was next, and I was so sure I would be able to handle this,” he said, “but I just couldn’t get myself composed. Thank God the band kept playing and people kept cheering, so I had some time.”

When he did speak, he told his teammates, all sitting behind him, that they were his family, that they’d been through everything together. He had to stop a couple of times to gather himself, before adding, “I love you guys.”

And then he carried things a step further, to the next day’s opponent, Boston College, which had beaten the Irish the year before, 31-29, at Notre Dame Stadium. A few Boston College players had torn out chunks of the turf and paraded around with clods held high.

“We’ll never forget how they dug up our turf and held it high like trophies,” Getherall said. “Tomorrow, they’ll get to see our turf again, and I don’t think they’ll like the taste of it.”

Hornung’s speech was now an afterthought. Getherall, the speedster from Hacienda Heights, who has had Irish fans in the palm of his hand ever since the opening game of his freshman year in 1997, had them again. It was not expected, not predictable, that a current player, just three days past his 22nd birthday, could wow them better than the old master, Hornung.

But then, not much about Getherall is expected or predictable.

*

When Getherall comes home for Thanksgiving this week, it will be a working vacation. Notre Dame has an 8-2 record and needs one more victory, Saturday against USC at the Coliseum, to land in a prestigious BCS bowl.

A few weeks ago, USC appeared to present more a speed bump than a roadblock to Notre Dame’s aspirations. But Saturday’s Trojan victory over UCLA, plus the history of Notre Dame-USC being a pick-’em game, no matter what the odds and records are, means that Getherall and gang face a formidable task.

It also means that the Getherall story becomes even more intriguing.

Among those in the crowd for the Boston College pep rally was a Notre Dame senior named Lindsay Sanford.

“I was crying when Joey spoke,” she said. “It was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard at a pep rally here. My dad would have loved to hear it. I called home and told him about it.”

Her father is Mike Sanford, current assistant coach for the San Diego Chargers and former assistant coach at, among other places, USC and Notre Dame. Mike Sanford was USC’s recruiting coordinator in 1996, when the Trojans were the only Pacific 10 Conference school to pass on recruiting Getherall, who had been a high school All-American, had 4.3 speed in the 40 and had led the state of California with a 25.2-yard receiving average.

Getherall’s father, Joe, now four years retired from a 28-year career as an LAPD detective, has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from USC and was an avid fan until his only son headed for South Bend.

“When I was growing up, it was all USC,” Joey said. “USC this and USC that.”

Unfortunately for Sanford and USC, Getherall had not grown up enough. His high school playing weight of 145, now all the way up to a Notre Dame listing of 170--”with marbles in his pockets,” wrote one sportswriter--was not going to be enough for many Division I programs.

USC indifference brought him to a day here not too long after Lou Holtz had departed and the new coach, Bob Davie, was scrambling around with his assistants to salvage recruiting files still on hand. One assistant mentioned Getherall, so Joe and Joey made the trip and soon found themselves face to face with Davie.

Davie asked Getherall what he thought he could do for Notre Dame. Getherall said he thought he could start in the ’97 opener against Georgia Tech, an honor not accorded a true freshman since 1983, and catch a touchdown pass. Joe Getherall played a special highlight film he had made of his son’s senior season at Bishop Amat, then Davie spoke.

“He started out by saying something like, ‘You know, you aren’t that big . . . ‘ “ Joey Getherall recalled, “and I thought, ‘Oh, oh, here comes the turndown.’

“But then he went on to say that, despite that, he was going to give me a scholarship and he even said that I was the kind of player that, someday, somebody would make a movie about.”

Davie said later that he’d had the same doubts as other coaches, but that on the day he saw Joe and Joey, they convinced him.

Getherall showed up Aug. 9 for Notre Dame’s opening practice. Two days later, he already had made history of sorts. At Notre Dame, freshmen traditionally wear black stripes on their helmets. The stripes don’t come off until a particular freshman performs so well, in practice or games, that the seniors recommend to the coaching staff that he has earned his way onto the full team. Only Rocket Ismail had been impressive enough in two days of practice to lose the stripes. Getherall matched that.

A month later, the Irish opened the new, expanded Notre Dame Stadium, capacity 80,232, with Georgia Tech. Starting at wide receiver was Getherall, true to his prediction that day in Davie’s office. He did not catch a touchdown pass, but did make the first reception in the new stadium, a 10-yarder on the second play of the game from Ron Powlus, and finished with five catches for 47 yards.

After the game, a new Notre Dame assistant coach was in the parking lot when Joe Getherall approached him. The coach had been an assistant at USC, but had been hired away by Davie. Now, he told Joe Getherall that he had made a recruiting mistake with his son at USC, but he was thrilled he had. His name was Mike Sanford.

*

Joe Getherall, the retired LAPD detective, is a former marine who earned the purple heart twice in Vietnam. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

In the second half of that Georgia Tech game in ‘97, Joey Getherall suffered a knee injury that took three weeks to heal. It probably would have healed faster had Getherall not stayed in the game after the injury. He told nobody about his knee until after the game was over.

When he came back, he dived for a pass in his first day of practice and hurt his stomach.

“It really hurt all the time, so much that I couldn’t stretch out and I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I just kind of went on adrenaline.”

He went the entire rest of the season with the stomach injury, winding up with three catches against Louisiana State in a 27-9 loss in the Independence Bowl. Finally, in April, doctors found an entrapped nerve in his stomach, an injury that would have kept most people from walking, much less playing football. It took surgery to fix it.

The injuries continued to slow Getherall, but they never really stopped him. His first three seasons, playing for a program that was struggling and for a coach under fire from alumni, Getherall caught 57 passes for 736 yards and four touchdowns. He also became a threat as a kick-return specialist and built a reputation for daring punt returns and disdaining fair catches.

This year, he has 16 catches for 305 yards and four touchdowns. He also has 23 punt returns for 375 yards and two touchdowns, and seven rushes for 60 yards and a touchdown.

The game that finally thrust him into the national spotlight was Notre Dame’s 34-31 squeaker over Air Force on Oct. 28. Getherall caught two scoring passes, then took the ball on a reverse in overtime at the Air Force nine-yard line with his team trailing, 31-28. He sprinted left, turned the corner and went airborne at the five, with a tackler hanging on, bouncing into the end zone with a season-saving touchdown for the Irish.

Before he could get up, he was mobbed by teammates. The first to get there was Mike Gandy, 315 pounds. Next was Jeff Faine, a skinny 292. Pretty soon, Getherall was buried under a pile of celebrating teammates who could be measured in tonnage, and, for maybe the first time in his athletic life, size did matter for Getherall.

“I kept telling them I couldn’t breathe,” he said. “After a while, I decided I better do something, so I closed my eyes and played dead. Pretty soon, I heard somebody calling the trainer. Somebody hollered ‘Joey is dead.’ ”

In minutes, he was being interviewed, and asked about the human pileup, by NBC’s Jim Gray. Getherall, of course, was far from dead.

*

Getherall is part Japanese. His middle name is Isamu. It was selected by his mother, Chieko, and it means “brave and courageous.” In downtown Los Angeles, there is a sports display in the Japanese-American Historical Museum, and one part of the display features Getherall.

There is a gentle side to this rough and tumble player that Joe Getherall said comes from Chieko.

Joey had a sport-utility vehicle at school, but he told his father he preferred a van. “You can get more people in a van,” he said.

What he didn’t tell his father, and what few people, even his teammates, knew was that one reason he wanted the van was to take a group with Down syndrome from their South Bend group home bowling once a week. When it became known what he was doing, Getherall shrugged it off.

“I get a bigger kick out of it than they do,” he said.

Before the Purdue game this season, Davie brought around a 13-year-old from San Diego named Scott Delgadillo. The youngster has leukemia and had asked, through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, to go to Notre Dame for a game, since the Irish were his favorite team. Among those shaking Delgadillo’s hand and spending some time with him was Getherall.

At the pep rally before the game, Davie asked the youngster if he would like to speak to the students and fans. And when he did, Notre Dame cap covering his shaved head, he started by saying, “Hi, I’m Scott.” He told of his disease and its treatment, and the hope and faith he has. When he finished, there were 15,000 pairs of wet eyes, some belonging to 300-pound linemen.

The account of Delgadillo’s adoption by the Notre Dame football team, including the teenager’s recent slip back out of remission, was told in a spellbinding story by Mark Ziegler in the Nov. 11 San Diego Union-Tribune.

Ziegler ended his story with an anecdote about Delgadillo receiving a picture of the winning touchdown in the Air Force game, and on the photo was written, in black ink: “To my hero, Scott.”

Carmen Delgadillo said that the photo and words from Joey Getherall, unsolicited and unexpected, had made her son cry.