Irish Musings
Season 2005 Issue #2
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Outlined against a blue grey sky………..
Whoops!!
Fast forward 81 years to the Spring Game of 2005………
Outlined against a grey black sky……………
With gusting winds up to 36 miles an hour
Temperatures in the low 30s
Wind chill announced at 23 at kick off in Notre Dame Stadium
Some 23,000 souls braved the snow, which fell during a good bit of the game!!!
(I have been to over 100 ND games in 21 stadia, and had never been snowed upon, nor have I ever been as cold in ND stadium—the only worse game for me was the Liberty Bowl.)
Tried to figure out why so few concession stands were open
Tried to stay warm any way…………
I even drank hot cocoa, which to an Irishman at a football game is near blasphemy!!!
I never saw so many blankets!!!!
Lots and lots of older alums—where were the younger folks??
Some of the older alums are even older than George Marr!!!
(Sorry George, I could not resist it—but I know you love the attention from any IRISH publication and especially from Musings!)
Later I learned that we had 5,000 more fans than last year (for Tyresome’s last Spring Game), when it was 64 and sunny throughout the afternoon!
The difference is that a whole lot more folks came from far away—they had to as no townie would have braved the weather we had on THAT Saturday!
My five year-old grandson, son-in-law and I sat behind a couple from Wyoming!!!
For this couple the weather was a cocktail party!!!
Before we get started, permit me to set the stage.
Sometimes I think none of us really are as grateful and thankful for the little things in life that make all the difference.
I guess this one could be anywhere and it could be about any school and about any sport and about any group of brothers and sisters, but this is about us and the Notre Dame Family!!
Last year I had to miss Universal Notre Dame Night for the first time in twenty years. The only time I missed Universal Night at our club venue was when I had the privilege to be THERE ON THE CAMPUS FOR THE FUNCTION, FOR THE FIRST TIME WHEN FATHERS TED AND NED RETIRED in 1987!!!
In 2004 missed it because I was at the Mayo Clinic recovering from a prostate cancer operation. George Marr, my dear friend whom I helped nurse through a bypass operation about 12 years ago, was most unforgiving and could not understand why I could not get back to Memphis in time for the dinner and the Joe Thiesman speech!! I don’t know, but what should I expect from my greatest critic??
The operation was on Monday and the dinner on Tuesday night!! George is a tough man, whom I have had to answer to lo these many years, but I did think him a bit unreasonable about this one this time, much like he became so unglued at an innocent remark I made at the 1991 Tennessee game.
What do you think? I mean, after all, he was laid up for about eight weeks after his open heart and here he does not want to give me one night in the hospital!!!!
But I digress!
While I was recovering in Rochester, MN not knowing if I would ever take my grandson to a Notre Dame game, and not knowing if I would ever see my grandchildren grow up and not knowing if I would ever see our beloved Fighting Irish win another national championship, or even contend for one, I was told that about fifty of the dearest friends anyone could have in life have sent me a get well card, the Notre Dame of Memphis guys and girls I love so much, but signed over all of their names is one Joe Theisman, whom I had met, but on a plane briefly once, and of course he did not know me personally!!!
Wow, am I excited and with that I progress to an amazing recovery with no follow up treatment, which means to youse guys out there, no hot flashes and all of that and no debilitating radium treatments. None of any of that and thank God for that!!!
So, fast forward to the day of the Spring Game and who do I see in the restaurant of the Marriott in South Bend, but one Joe Theisman. So, I had my second meeting with Joe, and was blessed to be able to thank him for the get well card. He was gracious and all of that and thanks to him the entire weekend was enhanced.
We began the day on the campus with a walk down Notre Dame Avenue with my son-in-law, Jon, and my five year old English speaking grandson, Ethan!!
Oh, I forgot.
I mean “raised in England” and speaks with the cutest little English accent…
Poor boy
He plays soccer
He grew up for the first four years of his young precious life in England.
He thinks football is played with a round ball.
So, my mission was to introduce him to the egg shaped pigskin we love so much!
But his eyes were elsewhere. His first comments had to do with “the little mean guy!!!”
Who or what do you suppose that was all about??
Yes, you got it!
It is the Leprechaun!!
As we are freezing our way down Notre Dame Avenue, we meet one of those guys wearing a yellowish-gold rain jacket, yes, an usher, who tells us he has flown into this madness all the way from sunny California and has done so for every game for the past ten years.
This man is a retired airline pilot. He flies jump seat through about four airports before he gets to South Bend. He does this for every game!! Man, this subway alum is passionate and it makes me wonder how many wusses (I HAD TO ADD THIS WORD TO MY WORD DICTIONARY ON THE COMPUTER) we have who do not and would not do what he does to follow his true love!!
Can you believe this? That by the time we get parallel to the Visitor Center, we are already ready for an Indian blanket and so we go into the Center and little Ethan gets an eyeful of the big lit up campus map and to my great satisfaction asks a whole lot of questions. I tell him all about where I lived on campus and where his Auntie Erin (that would be his mommy’s younger sister) lived, but he did not comprehend. Hey, he is only five!!!!
Well, the next person I meet is really special. She is Eleanor McCracken, former secretary to Moose Krause and Gene Corrigan, essentially the den mother to the athletic program for a quarter of a century or more. She asks me to say hello to her old friend Bud Dudley. She is such a breath of fresh air and it is just wonderful to meet her and to see the love and devotion to Notre Dame that exudes from her pores. She is the best Ambassador Notre Dame could ever have in any context and I feel privileged for having met her.
Then we get to the tent—God this thing is going to blow over, and it nearly did a couple of times. What tent you say??
Well, it is the tent, where the first annual Knute Rockne Memorial Fund banquet is being held. Can someone tell me why they thought that they could do this in a tent?? In 36 degree weather, with Lake front gusts threatening to kill all of us??
Nevertheless, this was a magnificent surprise, because they actually fed us real food. We had no idea, because they did not tell us, that we would be fed!!! So we feasted on lemonade, cold but very good mashed potatoes, cold gravy, mostly hot green beans (that is if you had the wisdom to stir them up), rolls and butter, cold corn on the cob, and barbecued blackened chicken. Ziggy, the dining hall cook master in the 1950s and 1960s, would have been proud, as this meal, even though most of it had icicles cradling it, was infinitely better than any of the hot mush the class of 1963 had thrown at by Ziggy it for four years!!! But then Ziggy had nowhere to go but up!!!
We heard Charlie Weis and Kevin White speak, and were impressed by what they had to say, but not by how they said it. I thought Charlie was a smidge off his speaking game. Nonetheless, be quipped about German Catholic coaches and German Catholic popes and the like and said he had ordered the weather to toughen up the Lads.
We ambled over to the Joyce and then the real freeze began to set in!
Man, was it cold, windy, piercing cold blowing right through all of us. Small consolation that we were on the fifty yard line in the ninth row, club seats with backs, nonetheless it was so damn cold and what is worse, much worse, is that it is windy with a really bad cutting chill. So, little Ethan did just fine for the first half but then he was chattering so badly that he and his dad left the stadium to meet me in the University Club after the game. What amazed me was that this Pilgrimage was more than worth its weight in gold because little Ethan not only tracked the “Little Mean Guy” all through the Stadium but he also asked some really great questions about the ball as it went through the uprights and stuff like that that seemed far more advanced than his granddaddy could ever have hoped for him to be!!!
So, how the hell did the Irish do, you ask!!
Well, damn fine, thank you very much!!
Here are the salient points from the game:
This is the seventh Spring game that I have been privileged to see and can say that I have never seen such organization and overall preparedness to play the game! Considering that this is Charlie’s first game at ND ever, it is really remarkable that the team looked like one—team that is!! The Blue Squad made no mistakes. There were no instances of seventeen men on the field or Chinese fire drills on pass defense. There were no fumbles, not even any that the White Team recovered. There were no interceptions and there were no penalties!!!! The play calling was Super Bowl caliber. Brady looked better than ever and about five new stars emerged.
We got it going on fans. That is all there is to it. Charlie has brought something to the program that we have not seen since……………………………………well it is difficult to say or think this, but I want to tell you this: not Lou nor Ara ever presented the program like this and for it to be in his first Spring Game after the Tyresome One, the only conclusion we can draw is that Charlie is building the Foundation of Greatness, which will return the Irish to the Place that We Deserve and should Own in the Pantheon of College Football.
The next day I bought little Ethan an ND blue jacket with the little mean guy on the front. He was proud as punch. And in 2018, he will be off to college!
The pre-season issue is on its way.
Charles T. Kenny, Ph.D., President
Class of 1963
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