The Notre Dame Mystique

A YOUNG BOY fidgets in his pew at Sunday Mass on an autumn morning in the early 1970s, stealing glances at the clock on the facing of the choir loft. The sermon goes long, and then the pastor chooses communion prayer number two, which is painfully long when you're on your knees and especially when Notre Dame football highlights begin at 11:30. Finally the boy is sprung, and he desperately sprints more than a mile home through the streets of a small town in upstate New York, as far from South Bend as you can imagine. He throws himself across the sofa in a household in which nobody attended Notre Dame, and he lets the gold helmets cover the television screen and the voice of Lindsey Nelson fill the room, bringing the Fighting Irish to life.

The reach defies logic. From a Catholic university in north central Indiana to the corners of the United States and far beyond. But the reach is real. Many have been portrayed as America's Team, from the Dallas Cowboys to the Showtime Lakers to Duke to Michigan to any team with sharp colors, a championship ring and a marketing strategy. Yet only the Yankees come close, and even they come up short. Notre Dame football stands alone in American sport.

As the fall of 2006 arrives, the Fighting Irish ride yet another wave of emotion with yet another cast of characters, led by second-year head coach Charlie Weis, an alumnus who spent four years cheering in Notre Dame Stadium and returned in '05 to rescue the Fighting Irish from the failures of his predecessors.

The restoration of greatness is central to the mystique of Notre Dame football. The Irish have never been bad long enough to become irrelevant. Ara Parseghian won national championships in 1966 and '73, the former ending a 17-year drought. After Gerry Faust couldn't win, Lou Holtz did and gave the Irish their most recent title, in 1988. The faithful are kept on a tether by the promise of a return to glory that is eventually fulfilled.

The dawn of the Weis Era-- Notre Dame is that rare team that measures its history in the lofty language of eras--underscores the vast power of Notre Dame over all of college football. Nationwide interest is high, centering on the Irish. "When Notre Dame is on top, the entire sport is energized," says a high-ranking television executive at a rival network to Notre Dame's NBC. "When they're good, everybody in the game benefits."

The essence of Notre Dame's power is a mix of the ethereal--Win One for the Gipper, Rudy, Touchdown Jesus, the fight song--and the practical: deep, passionate roots more than eight decades old and a savvy business plan that has shifted with the whim of the culture and embraced its swiftly changing technology.

It started with Knute Rockne in the 1920s, that much is true. But Rockne was more than a halftime speechmaker. "When you mention Rockne, people think of the movie [ Knute Rockne: All-American]," says Murray Sperber, author of Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football. "In fact, Rockne was astute in many more ways. He was one of the first coaches to embrace speed in football, which became the foundation of Notre Dame's success in the 1920s. And he was a very good businessman. When some schools were selling their radio rights, Rockne gave away the Notre Dame radio rights. At that time, radio had great consolidating power in the country, and almost anywhere you went in America, you could listen to Notre Dame football."

Notre Dame football became the touchstone for a generation of ethnic Catholics through the 1930s and '40s. "Why was Notre Dame popular with ethnic families?" asks Sperber. "Because Notre Dame won. The winning is at the core of all of Notre Dame's popularity."

When Notre Dame played Army from 1923 through 1946, the game was among the most significant events on the U.S. sporting landscape. In those years the grandfathers and fathers of today's youth developed their love for Fighting Irish football. It is rooted not just in the winning but also in the religion, and perhaps most of all in the belief that Notre Dame football is more than just a game. It is also the symbol of higher ideals and doing it the right way. Whether all of this is true is debatable (and this self-congratulatory attitude is precisely why there is also no shortage of Notre Dame haters), but it fuels much of the emotion behind the Fighting Irish. "The whole Notre Dame football thing means so much more than just rooting for a college sports team," says Sperber. "It's deep and it's profound and often passed down through generations."

In 1991, long after Rockne first sent the Irish out on the nation's radio airways, NBC bought the rights to Notre Dame home games, making it the first--and still the only--college football program with an exclusive national broadcast television arrangement. The contract between the school and the network ensures that Notre Dame's home games will not be lost in the sea of televised college football offerings.