Surviving and thriving in a daunting, haunting place
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- November 30, 2024
- 592
Here’s what you’d learn attending a sold-out Notre Dame game:
On football weekends, South Bend’s population swells, making it the second largest city in Indiana, trailing only Indianapolis.
Hotels routinely triple the usual cost of a night’s stay, and there’s a waiting list to secure accommodations at the Morris Inn, the only place on campus where visitors, families and alumni can get rooms.
Bars and restaurants take on extra help, but there are long lines everywhere, making the concept of a reservation almost irrelevant.
Game day traffic is heavy, and there is virtually no chance of driving onto the Notre Dame campus proper, meaning hikes of a couple miles or so can face those who park in distant grass lots.
Porta-johns are scarce, and most buildings are locked to the public, making answering the call of nature difficult, if not impossible, unless people in need of such facilities decide to unzip and let fly.
The stadium, which calls itself “The Cathedral of College Football,” is an ancient edifice whose concourse areas are reminiscent of Roman catacombs, dimly lighted and jammed.
Most seating is wooden-bench style, meaning fans are wedged in cheek-to-jowl as they deal with knees in their backs unless they choose to stand, which, when the wind is gusting, is not a lot of fun.
There’s an intentional and irritating overemphasis on sensory overload, which creates a cacophony of cranked-up aural and visual stimuli, making it impossible to just let the game breathe.
And finally, if you’d like to enjoy a cold beer while watching the Fighting Irish toy with an inferior foe, forget it. The stadium is as dry as Carrie Nation’s womb and just as unforgiving to violators.
These are just the facts as I observed them, plain, simple truths, and it’s certainly not my purpose to slag all over my alma mater.
On the contrary, the four years I spent there in the mid-’70s formed a good portion of the man I’ve become, and I treasure them.
But Notre Dame is not for everyone.
Faithful readers know that over the course of the more than 30 years I’ve been writing this column, my college experiences — the good, the awful and everything in between — represent a significant portion of the framework that informs and defines my perspective.
So it was with a delicate and cautious kind of optimism that I accepted an invitation to attend our game against the University of Virginia. That offer, a kindness extended by a former colleague at the North Carolina newspaper where I worked for eight years or so, came last summer, and ever since I’d been wondering what it would be like to revisit the place where so much stuff happened.
Here’s something I’ve pondered: Why is it I’ve never missed a high school reunion but haven’t gone back to ND for even one?
The facile and easy explanation is that because I don’t earn a six-figure salary, don’t own a showplace mansion or have progeny about whom to boast and brag, I’m a failure in the game of life.
But that’s my biography when I go back to high school gatherings too, and for some reason that doesn’t bother me at all … and there are plenty of former classmates who have built amazing fortunes and are living the kind of life I can’t do anything but applaud.
So that’s not it. There’s something about ND that creates the desire to protect and preserve my memories as they are, cozily intact, safe.
I’m reminded of a Simon and Garfunkel song titled “The Boxer”:
“When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers …
Running scared, laying low.”
To say I was unprepared for life as a college student would be an egregious insult to the definition of the word “understatement,” akin to opining Babe Ruth was a pretty good baseball player or Barack Obama understood how to get people to vote for him.
For as much as “Rudy” plays fast and loose with some facts, there is no denying the way the campus in general and the stadium in particular can cast a spell over those seeing it for the first time.
“This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen,” marvels Ned Beatty, as Rudy’s father, when he experiences it, and it’s a lovely moment in the movie: pure and authentic and true.
A great part of my responsibilities two weekends ago involved making sure my UVa friend, his sister and her husband got to see everything they wanted to on an overcast football Saturday in South Bend. I was more than a little nervous in that role because I hadn’t been back since 2018 and there were bound to be changes.
But they got to see the Grotto, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the Golden Dome, Touchdown Jesus and No. 1 Moses. I also guided them past the Law School, the Rockne gym, the art gallery and veered across the quad to show them Dillon Hall, the dormitory where I spent three years before moving off campus as a senior.
I also was vigilant for any tripwires, booby traps, landmines and claymores I knew were lurking beneath the surface, waiting.
In a place like that, where the past collides with the present with the force of nuclear fission, it’s best to not let your guard down, lest you fall victim to reliving painful things that are better left buried.
As the ghosts receded from view, I thought of “The Great Gatsby” and one of my favorite lines from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
It’s the curse of being an old English major — a faultless memory, one that is as much a burden as it is a gift, something you sometimes wish would let you off the hook but never, ever does.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where Notre Dame football retains a life of its own.