On college football, faith and the Elephant Man
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- September 14, 2024
- 519
I went to a small school that dreamed big.
Unlike football factories with enrollments nearing 50,000 students, Notre Dame accepted fewer than 10% of its applicants and had a student body of about 6,000, counting the law school.
My freshman year the Fighting Irish won the national championship, playing 11 games, winning every one of them.
In the Sugar Bowl, ND beat Alabama 24-23, putting a fitting bow on Ara Parseghian’s coaching career, one that spanned just over 10 years and created the legendary chant, “Ara, stop the rain!”
That happened during a pep rally outside Stepan Center, the only place to be on a Friday night before a home game. We were getting soaked and, knowing ND history backward and forward, figured that Ara, if he put his mind to it, could actually change the weather.
As I said, we dreamed big.
In the years that have passed since I left South Bend, I’ve followed the football team and its fortunes every step of the way, not in any real fanatical way, but I have my game day rituals: flying the flag, listening to the fight song just before kickoff, wearing my blue and gold jersey, sporting the number 83, a tribute to my favorite player, a tall, lanky, kind of goofy, always smiling, deadly talented receiver named Jeff Samardzija, pronounced Sa-MAR-ja.
One rule I’ve more or less taken to heart is I don’t want to be around anyone else — aside from my wife and fellow alums — when the game is being played. It’s not that I’m anti-social or snobbish … I simply prefer not to have outsiders inside my secure perimeter.
Notre Dame isn’t for everyone, and there’s no middle ground when it comes to loyalty/repugnance … you either love us or you hate us.
And we’re fine with that; in fact, it’s essential to our identity.
Consider this passage from the Book of Revelations:
“So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” I mean it’s right there in the Bible.
There’s a reason the library mural is called “Touchdown Jesus.”
The four years I spent under the Golden Dome were, curiously enough, the times I most seriously began to doubt my faith.
As a Cradle Catholic, I had no choice when it came to religion. I was baptized as an infant, studied my catechism, learned the Ten Commandments, became an altar boy, memorized the Mass in Latin — no easy task for a fourth-grader — and walked the path through the Sacraments, all the time being schooled by nuns and confessing my sins to priests. I went to church every school day and hardly ever skipped Sunday services, often serving as a commentator, reading the Scripture and prompting hymns.
You have to understand my little town had the only Catholic church in the county, making us not only a minority, but also a curiosity.
Later on I’d often feel like John Merrick, aka the Elephant Man.
“I am NOT an animal,” I’d howl (to myself), feeling isolated, studied and prodded, a specimen on a microscope slide, wondering just what it was that made me a stranger in a strange land.
Notre Dame helped me see the world and its vast, kaleidoscopic myriad of differences — not all of them theological — more clearly.
And from that experience, I grew into the flawed man I am today.
I did some pretty good writing as an undergraduate, a guy who chose to major in English, mostly because journalism wasn’t offered, but also because I didn’t see any real alternative.
Math and science were out of the question, business held no appeal, I wasn’t built for architecture, and theology was never in the stars.
I toyed with the idea of political science — my father’s Ph.D. specialty — with an eye on law school, figuring I could hide in the cocoon of academia for seven years before facing the real world.
But you know the old expression — people plan and God laughs.
Back then ND had just begun its great experiment, allowing women to be admitted for the first time since its 1842 founding.
That was an interesting time to be a student there, dealing with a 7-to-1 ratio between the sexes, meaning that for every guy who tried to connect with a girl, there were six others waiting behind him.
Odds like that weren’t exactly conducive to building confidence.
I did, eventually, get in the game of love, with some successes, but the best you could say was I learned how to live with losing.
Which brings us back to the anguish of Fighting Irish football.
Last Saturday, after my wife and I had attended our nephew’s wedding — a lovely ceremony, small but somehow big at its heart — we settled in to watch ND take on an inferior foe, expecting a win.
Instead, we got blindsided and flushed our season down the drain.
So much for dreaming big.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or at 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on his Facebook page, where college football season has suddenly ended.