Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in our Winter 1985–86 issue when Lou Holtz was hired as the Notre Dame football coach. Holtz went on to lead the Irish for 11 seasons (1986–96), compiling 100 wins, capturing the 1988 national championship and guiding the program to a record nine consecutive bowl appearances. We are sharing this story again in remembrance of Holtz following his death on March 4.
I first heard of Notre Dame because of football — probably during the Kuharich era. I was watching my very first football game and my mother asked me which team I was for; I didn’t know. But my mother (whose father was a McPhee and whose mother was a Finnegan) said, “I’m for Notre Dame.” So I asked, “Are they any good?” To which she replied, “Not now, but they used to be the best.” Then she said, “But it’s still an Irish-Catholic school and we are Irish Catholics.” My loyalties were hence-forth set in stone.
The next game I remember was Ara Parseghian’s first against Southern Cal. The new coach from Northwestern had magically transformed Kuharich’s 2-7-63 team and was minutes away from a national championship. But a late-in-the-game pass spoiled the fairy tale. I can still remember listening to that game on the car radio, pounding my fist against the dashboard and wondering why my stomach felt so awful just because of a game. I never forgave USC for the heartbreak.
It wasn’t easy being an Irish fan growing up in north Louisiana. Football was not just a game. It provided the battlefield upon which to settle religious and regional differences. That wasn’t fair or right, of course, but that’s the way the game had been played since Rock and Dorais led unknown Notre Dame past powerful Army.
In the decades that followed, the Fighting Irish became a symbol of achievement for underdog Catholics struggling for a foothold in a harsh environment. Saturday’s heroes (Lattner and Lujack, Huarte and Hart, Savoldi and Sitko) became white knights championing Our Lady’s honor — God, Country and Notre Dame. Their stories were told and retold like fables. Win or lose, the moral was always the same. The folklore, the mystique, was inscribed into the national consciousness. Even those who hate Notre Dame and all it stands for can recite the myth.
Gerry Faust, a mere high school coach, was knighted on November 24, 1980. His lifelong dream had come true. He talked about growing up in Dayton, Ohio, singing the Victory March while riding his bike to CYO football practice. “Many applied,” said Moose Kraiise, legend, athletic director and tradition guardian. “But we were looking for another with the qualities of a Knute Rockne, a Frank Leahy and an Ara Parseghian.”
This fairy tale ended tragically. Faust managed in five years to lose more games than any coach in Notre Dame’s history. But it was not just the losses that doomed his quest; it was his teams’ inconsistency, the uninspired play, the disorganization. Of course, Faust will also be remembered as a man of honor and goodwill, as a coach who loved his players and worked incredibly hard, as a member of the faith who never flinched under the onslaught of adversity.
That was the rub that captured the imaginations of the nation’s sports fans: How would the Keepers of Camelot treat the gold-hearted knight errant who seemed to master every task but the important one — slaying dragons? What would the school that wants to embody the Right Stuff in college sports do with a coach who can do everything but win? Even those who don’t follow football watched the man: How does the prototype good person cope with the pressures of a job that is proving to be too much for him?
Like many other aspects of Notre Dame football, the story became bigger than life, a private human drama given public epic proportions. Notre Dame’s stature in the sports world became even more apparent last fall near the close of Faust’s tenure. As the Irish ground toward the season’s end, newspapers across the country were betting on possible successors. When Faust did the expected on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Notre Dame had a new man within 24 hours, the story became a media circus.
Newspapers from coast to coast ran news stories and editorials. The changeover received feature treatment in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. Over Thanksgiving weekend it was impossible to watch television without seeing Faust or his successor being interviewed. It’s hard to think of another job in America, except the Presidency, that would draw more media attention.
Enter Lou Holtz, a 48-year-old amateur magician, comic and quipster whose style just might help him cope with all that goes along with being Notre Dame’s 25th head coach. But he has other, more important, credentials.
Growing up in industrial East Liverpool, Ohio, Holtz learned the myth at an early age. He is of German-Irish-Ukranian stock — and Catholic. “I’ve followed Notre Dame football since 1946,” he says, “when I listened on the radio and Johnny Lujack tackled Doc Blanchard in the open field to preserve a 0-0 tie. I’m a guy who marched to lunch to the Notre Dame Victory March every day at St. Aloysius Grade School.” Being hired, he says, “was the dream of a lifetime.” His son is a Notre Dame student.
More importantly, Holtz has proved himself a capable coach at the major-college level. “Lou’s the equal of any coach in America,” says Frank Broyles, the ABC commentator and Arkansas athletic director who hired Holtz to succeed him as head coach there. Holtz is respected for his offensive genius, his demanding style and his organizational ability. He has 16 years’ experience as a head coach (with a 116-65-5 record at William & Mary, North Carolina State, Arkansas and Minnesota). And as Parseghian repeated for every reporter who asked his opinion of Holtz: “I had 14 years’ experience before I went to Notre Dame and I needed every one of those years.”
Holtz has also succeeded on the field while running programs free of any hint of recruiting violations. That was paramount, says Notre Dame Athletic Director Gene Corrigan, longtime Holtz acquaintance. When Corrigan announced Holtz as his choice, he used words like “character” and “integrity” to describe him, and said such qualities are as crucial as coaching ability.
Just prior to the 1978 Orange Bowl, three Arkansas stars were found in a dormitory room with a partly clad coed. Holtz suspended them for breaking his “do-right” rule. The trio threatened a lawsuit and their teammates vowed to boycott the game. Holtz stood firm, quelled the walkout and led his Arkansas team to a 31-6 pasting of Oklahoma. In subsequent years Razorback fans criticized Holtz for failing to bring the best recruits to Arkansas. After leaving for Minnesota, Holtz indicated that being honest put one at a disadvantage in the Southwest Conference. His one real shortcoming, he says, is that he doesn’t compromise.
Despite these qualities, Holtz will find the tradition a weighty mantle. The standards are high; the ghosts are constant companions. When he first saw the records of Rockne, Leahy and Parseghian, he says, he figured them to be misprints. He knows opponents play with added intensity against Notre Dame; they think they’re playing more than a football team.
Holtz will find himself bound by uncommon limitations governing academic requirements, redshirting and junior college transfers. He will find, warns Dan Devine, that first-team players will miss practice because of a lab or a test. He faces a 1986 schedule which includes Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue, Alabama, Pittsburgh, Air Force, SMU, Penn State, LSU and USC. And he inherits a team diminished by graduation and five years of losing.
The revival challenge Holtz faces is similar to the one that awaited Parseghian two decades ago. Holtz has predicted no such turnaround. He is not a miracle worker, he repeats; the day is gone when Notre Dame can dominate the sport. Notre Dame fans, burned by the enthusiasm surrounding Faust’s appointment and still stinging from last season’s six losses, are similarly guarded. Eight and three, most agree, would be a fine first season.
This attitude may indicate that the campus climate is less fanatic these days than depicted by the media. After all, it’s the outsiders who still point to Touchdown Jesus and joke about God making Notre Dame Number One. Ronald Reagan talks more about George Gipp than any Domer. Most people associated with the University — its alumni, students, faculty and staff — no longer equate Notre Dame with those who represent the institution on the playing field.
These days football is viewed more as a diversion, as one facet of the University, as a conversation piece for alumni, students or the physicists and theologians who jog around the lakes together. That’s not to say the University no longer demands excellence from those who represent it. But the day when the hopes of an ambitious University ride upon the fortunes of the Fighting Irish are over.
Of course, maybe they said things like that in the decade between Leahy and Parseghian. Maybe Notre Dame fans really do harbor visions of an occasional national championship; perhaps they even daydream of being the best again. I bet in the minds of most Notre Dame fans — even those who think the lore is quaint and say football is brutish, mercenary and overdone — rests the secret desire that glory should be returned to Notre Dame . . . where it belongs.