A Little Checking Led to Big Story

George O’Leary’s hours-long career as Notre Dame’s football coach began to unravel early this week, when a veteran New Hampshire sportswriter started making phone calls for his Sunday notes column.

John “Doc” Hussey, 59, a retired high school Latin teacher and part-time reporter for the Union Leader of Manchester, wanted to get some local reaction to O’Leary’s hiring.

“We’re a small state,” Hussey said Friday from his New Hampshire home. “How often is a New Hampshire graduate going to become a coach at any major thing except for ice hockey?”

What Hussey ended up getting, however, was information that set off a chain reaction that led to O’Leary’s resignation.

O’Leary’s biography indicated he was a three-letter winner as a fullback at New Hampshire. Hussey wanted to embellish his column with anecdotes from O’Leary’s playing career.

Hussey called Joe Yukica, who was New Hampshire’s football coach during O’Leary’s years at the school. Yukica said he did not recall O’Leary, but Hussey knew there were plenty of former players still living in town who could corroborate O’Leary’s claims.

But they all told the same story.

“No one ever remembered seeing him play in a game,” Hussey said. One former player recalled that O’Leary might have attended practice.

Hussey passed the information on to his bosses.

The paper assigned staff writer Jim Fennell to investigate, which led to a story reporting that O’Leary had provided the inaccurate information on a biographical form he’d completed three months after his hiring as a Syracuse assistant coach in 1980.

The Union Leader’s investigation sparked an inquiry at Notre Dame, which ultimately led to O’Leary’s resignation late Thursday night. It was subsequently learned that O’Leary had also lied on his resume about receiving a master’s degree from New York University.

Unlike O’Leary, Hussey does have a postgraduate degree. He is known as Doc around the newsroom because he received his doctorate in classical literature from Tufts University in Massachusetts.

“I just stumbled into it,” Hussey said of the O’Leary story. “It happened so fast. Tonight, I’ll be back doing high school basketball games.”

John Tucker, the Union Leader’s day sports editor, said the newspaper’s scoop boiled down to basic journalist instincts.

“I think ol’ Doc smelled a rat,” Tucker said. “Too bad, but that’s the way it goes. If you lie, and get caught, you pay the price. This case, it’s a really huge price.”