the legend of notre dame

by john u. bacon

NWA WorldTraveler magazine / http://www.nwaworldtraveler.com/ME2/Default.asp

There are college football teams, and then there is Notre Dame, which seems to transcend the sports page to reach deep into the American imagination. What secret ingredient does Notre Dame have that the others lack?

"I can't put my finger on it, but all I know is it's here," says Father Theodore Hesburgh, who served as president of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987. "You gotta call it spirit. Notre Dame is both a mystery and a miracle."

If you look at Notre Dame's history, it makes more sense. When Knute Rockne took over the Notre Dame football program in 1918, store signs reading "Irish Need Not Apply," were still common sights. Rockne longed to give his team a measure of respectability by joining the Big Ten, but the conference not only refused him, it banned member schools from playing Notre Dame at all.

Rockne could have licked his wounds, but he realized that, without being tied to a regional conference, the Irish were free to play teams all over the country. So he scheduled games against the best talent in the nation's largest cities. It so happened that most Catholics lived in the immigrant sections of those cities, so when the Irish came to town, local Catholics got to see an unapologetically Catholic university dominate that most red-blooded of American games-football.

So many immigrants listened to Notre Dame games on the radio, you could walk down the street in the Catholic section of any big city and not miss a play. What Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson did for African Americans, Notre Dame did for Catholics.

"Independence has meant so much to us," says Father Edmund Joyce, Notre Dame's legendary athletic director for 35 years under Father Hesburgh. "It made us into the only school with a national following."

Rockne sparked the Notre Dame spirit, but the coaches who followed have kept the fires burning brightly. Notre Dame players have won more national titles (11), Heisman trophies (7), and All-America honors (93) than players from any other school.

"Because kids feel they're in a mystical place, they out-do themselves," Hesburgh says. "It's not the kind of place where you feel okay turning in a second-rate performance-and that, of course, is most evident in sports."

But titles and trophies can't fully account for the Notre Dame aura. The untimely deaths of George Gipp in 1920 and Rockne in 1931, and the school's long-running relationships with the national media and Hollywood (another pleasant byproduct of playing bi-annual games in New York and Los Angeles) generated films like Knute Rockne: All American, The Spirit of Notre Dame and Rudy, none of which let the facts get in the way of a good story. No matter how inaccurate those movies might be, however, the mystique surrounding Notre Dame feels real enough to the people who go there and follow the team.

[John U. Bacon's work has been ranked in The Best American Sports-writing, and he is the co-host of "Off The Field" on Sunday mornings on WTKA 1050 AM in Detroit].

More information on Knute Rockne is available on the following links:  

Excerpt from Rockne: The Coach, The Man, The Legend by Jerry Brondfield

The Official Knute Rockne Website

An Unofficial Knute Rockne Website

Irish Musing's Photo Display, The Kansas Turnpike Authority's Knute Rockne Memorial