Notre Dame 1951-55

Talk about your party poopers. Here were all these revelers fixing to whoop it up, when a gang of intruders from Pittsburgh crashed the Notre Dame homecoming game and threatened to turn it into their celebration. Brushing aside the Irish bouncers, Pitt's gate-crashers had bullied their way into the fourth quarter and held a 17-7 lead. The party could not have been more somber if someone had spiked the punch with novocaine.

Was there no respect for tradition? For all the dramatic comeback victories that were preserved in the fuchsia prose of countless ND chroniclers? Had no one read of the old "do-or-die fighting spirit," that "special something that separates Notre Dame football from the rest"? What was at stake here was not losing a hard-fought battle to a superior foe. That was just a venial sin. No, what was being committed was the most grievous, Knute forgive them, of transgressions: the Fighting Irish—weren't fighting.

Or so it seemed to one Old Grad who had returned to the yellow-brick stadium for the first time since his mustering out in 1955. True, he was sp�iled; during his four seasons on campus the Irish lost only five of 40 games. And he was admittedly suffering from alumnesia, a convenient affliction that causes past defeats to fade from memory while the victories flower into the kind of rosy legends that no mortal team could ever live up to.

Still, there was no absolving the 1978 Irish. Just five games into the season the defending national champions had not only slipped out of the Top 20 rankings but also seemed bent on sliding to their third loss. Pitt, undefeated and ranked ninth, was favored, but that only made them an ideal patsy for the expected upset. After all, this was Notre Dame, guardians of all that is sacred in the game, the team ordained to wake up the echoes and shake down the thunder.

The Old Grad learned that lesson on his very first day on campus in 1951. They called it freshman orientation, but it was really a festival of fan training films. First, there were flickering newsreel clips of the Four Horsemen. No matter that the fabled four, whose average weight was 162 pounds, looked more like Shetlands. They were bigger than life, the stuff of legends, and if there were any doubters they only had to wait for the feature, Knute Rockne, All-American, and Pat O'Brien delivering the Rock's famous halftime speech: "Go out there and crack 'em! Crack 'em! Crack 'em! Crack 'em! Fight to live! Fight to win! Win! Win! Win!"

Not that even three-months-removed high schoolers had needed the tutoring. The ties to the storied past reached directly into the Old Grad's freshman dorm where, late of a night, his roommate, Chet Wynne Jr., would retell how his father scored the winning touchdown in the Gipper's last game. Sons of the Seven Mules lived down the hall, and there was never any doubt that everyone would graduate summa cum rah rah.

Like Trappists in white bucks, students were governed by stiff rules that required the electrical power in dorm rooms to be shut off at 11 p.m. Cars were forbidden. Dating was a rare luxury, and beer on the breath grounds for expulsion. The 10 p.m. bed check and compulsory attendance at mass were overseen by the jocks, and the Old Grad would forever recall the time he was awakened at dawn by Tackle Frank Varrichione. Looming in the doorway like a hairy avenging angel, he wanted to know why the "playboy" wasn't in the chapel. Within moments, he was.

The drill was simple: study on weekdays, scream on weekends. And scream everyone did, often led by Coach Frank Leahy, who liked to remind the "lads" that the "Lady on the Dome is watching us." When one student met Leahy, the walking legend, on campus, he was too awestruck to speak, so he did the next most natural thing. He genuflected.

The Old Grad, having later matriculated in the school of hard reality with a minor in cynicism, had a different reaction as he arrived in South Bend on the eve of the Pitt game: none of that gushy rah-rah stuff for him. Yet barely had the Old Grad traversed the quadrangle when it was clear that Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again. The Rockne Memorial, the Log Chapel, the Old Firehouse with the room Leahy once stayed in preserved intact—all the monuments of his youth—were just as the Old Grad left them.

In fact, like the historic fire escape that Paul Hornung, doing his Gipp number, used to sneak in after curfew, every landmark linked the past to a present that seemed reassuringly impervious to change.