“I’d have to say this is the happiest time of my life,” Holtz said after winning the 1988 national championship, a milestone he doubted he would achieve as a head coach. Associated Press/Rob Schumacher
The week that Beth Holtz qualified for sainthood once and for all, she knew something was up when George Kelly ’53 called. Kelly, a longtime assistant coach, administrator and beloved Notre Dame institution, was football’s version of an aide-de-camp to her husband. He was delivering an unusual request. The urgency of his request became clear when Kelly volunteered that Beth Holtz was the most wonderful person in the world.
She replied, “What does he want, George?”
This was November 1993 when the Florida State Seminoles were coming to town, No. 1 vs. No. 2 in that generation’s Game of the Century. Dozens of media members from across the country descended on South Bend for the week. Sports information icons Roger Valdiserri ’54 and John Heisler had created a work room worthy of a NCAA basketball tournament game in a Joyce Center practice gym. The problem was that getting there required navigating a dark, dusty, narrow hallway filled with discarded file cabinets and rolled up carpeting.
Lou Holtz, the legendary coach who died March 4 at age 89, was appalled. He was also inspired.
This is what he wanted: to invite about 75 reporters and columnists to dinner at the Holtz residence on the Thursday night before the game, gathering in their finished basement in the hope of making up for the obstacle course that led to the work room. So there we were, standing near a huge framed picture of Holtz and Joe Namath on the sideline when he was coach of the New York Jets — a surprisingly prominent memento of an unhappy season in the National Football League.
Holtz was the perfect host, greeting everyone, pouring beverages from behind the bar for the guests while a Thursday night game played on a television.
During the halftime show, all the talk was, of course, about Notre Dame and Florida State. Holtz appeared on the screen in a soundbite from his Tuesday press conference, saying Florida State was capable of scoring 50 points every time the Seminoles took the field.
Everyone’s eyes shifted across the room, from the Lou on the TV screen to the Lou holding a bottle of wine behind the bar.
“I said they were capable of it,” he said evenly. “I didn’t say they would.”
Holtz had just given all of us the gift of glimpsing how his thinking evolved from the start of the week to gameday. All those references to being worried about special teams units of hopeless opponents were just a part of the process.
His methods restored Notre Dame’s status as a national football power, leading to 100 wins and a national championship in 11 seasons from 1986 to 1996.
And for all the laughter he inspired along the way — making Friday luncheons and pep rallies mandatory football weekend events with his polished speaker’s panache — if you were very fortunate, you could glimpse how the pressure of his chosen profession affected him.
I had made that discovery in 1976, the day after his second game with the Jets, a 46-3 loss at Denver. Holtz’s team had a record of 0-2 with a combined losing margin of 64 points. During the game, Phil Iselin, president and part owner of the Jets, suffered a heart attack, and Holtz blamed himself.
The day after the Denver game, back at the team’s training facility on Long Island, Holtz compared the circumstances to what he considered the worst day of his life.
At Fort Benning, Georgia, where he had been stationed for nine months, he had been out on maneuvers one rainy night in April 1959 until 2 a.m., with an inspection scheduled for 6 a.m. Holtz had asked a friend to pick up clean clothes, but the friend had forgotten. When morning came, he was covered in mud and unprepared for inspection.
“I said that someday if I ever laughed again or if I was ever happy again, I would never allow myself to be totally depressed again,” he said. “And I did laugh again. But when I found out about Mr. Iselin’s ailment, I think I was lower than when I was in the Army. Not because of the game, because of Mr. Iselin.”
Iselin suffered a second heart attack and died later that year. Holtz would leave with one game remaining in a 3-11 season with a conviction that he belonged in college football.
Nearly a decade later, after stops at Arkansas and Minnesota, that path would lead to Notre Dame and, at the 1988 peak, the narrow victory over Miami, the spot in the Fiesta Bowl, and the national championship. When the title was secured with the victory over West Virginia, Holtz had discovered another emotional milepost.
“Although it hasn’t registered, I’d have to say this is the happiest time of my life,” he said after the game. “There have been basically two experiences that I’ve had in my life that I’ve looked on as being the most depressed times I’ve ever had. And whenever I get down or get depressed, I think back about those two times and I say, ‘Were they as bad as those two?’
“When I’m happy I think I will have to look and say, ‘Professionally, was I as happy as this time?’ Because I am so happy for our players who dreamed of winning a national championship. I said that I dreamt about winning, wanted to win it, but I’ve got to be honest with you. I didn’t think there was any way in this world that I was ever going to be a part of it as a head coach. I’ve got to be honest with you. You think, ‘Man, that’s for other people. That’s for movie stars.’”
The room was silent as everyone processed his startling admission. Finally, there was another question: “How would you feel next year, coming in, if you were ranked No. 1 in the preseason?”
Laughter broke the silence as the reporters began to anticipate what Holtz, back at work, would say next.
“We’ve really got some real problems on our team,” he said amid the howls.
Another season had already begun.
Malcolm Moran is the director of the Sports Capital Journalism Program at Indiana University Indianapolis. He spent more than 30 years as a reporter at publications including The New York Times and USA Today.