The Green Revolution (2 page)

If there was a feverish recruiting of coaches, there was an equally feverish search for athletes who had made names for themselves on the high school level. A chasm grew between students and the athletes that represented an institution on the gridiron. On the campuses of many state universities, student athletes were sequestered into special dorms and offered classes that made few demands on their minds and presented little competition with their primary purpose, winning games. There emerged at places known as football factories the fact, dismaying to some, that a large, even a very large, percentage of athletes failed to graduate despite the easy academic paths that had been devised for them. Since only a small number of them were drafted by professional teams, many young men found themselves with neither a college degree, no matter how undemanding, nor the future of which they had dreamed: playing on Sundays.

*   *   *

On the South Bend campus there was an uneasy ambivalence. On the one hand, under Father Hesburgh, the drive for academic excellence strengthened. On the other, there was a continuing demand for a winning team. Compromises were made. Recruits were brought in from all points of the compass primarily on the basis of athletic ability, but there was resistance to the idea that special undemanding courses should be provided to them. For a time, the notion of student athlete was not an oxymoron at Notre Dame. True, an effective tutorial system for athletes was devised, but this was to help them weather the same courses taken by the rest of the students. Comparatively stringent standards of admission were retained despite the fact that many athletes had come to Notre Dame only as to a good springboard into the ranks of professional athletics. The situation was volatile. The administration sent out, in the phrase, confusing and incompatible signals.

There was continuing emphasis on academic excellence, but this did not diminish the desire for performance on the football field. There were dark days when a coach failed to fulfill expectations, but even the unlucky Gerry Faust had been retained throughout his contract despite a disappointing record. With the firing of Ty Willingham before his contract ran out, a Rubicon was crossed. This firing was difficult to explain. Notre Dame's first black coach, Willingham had a good if not outstanding record. But he lost bowl games, and he was said to be deficient in recruiting players, although he had brought in Brady Quinn and other greats who would haunt the memories of the fans of 2007. It seemed that he and his teams were not professional enough. He was unceremoniously sacked just before Christmas in the third year of a five-year contract. Like another December date, it was for many a day that would live in infamy.

The search for his successor verged on the comic. The new president flew to Utah and was televised by a hovering news helicopter on his pilgrimage to hire Coach Meyer. It emerged that Meyer had already been hired away by Florida. The spectacle of the president of Notre Dame apparently making the hiring of a winning football coach the top item on his agenda marked a historic first. The balance between academics and athletics had been symbolized by the fact that the president of the university kept aloof from hiring coaches. Now the line had been crossed, and with demeaning results. Damage control was called for.

This was the context in which Charlie Weis was brought to Notre Dame from the New England Patriots, where he had been a phenomenally successful assistant coach. A Notre Dame alumnus who had never played football, Weis was offered two million dollars a year to return to his alma mater and get Notre Dame football back on track. His first year bore out those hopes, but he, too, lost a bowl game. The second year was perhaps not as satisfying to the hopes of his employers. Then came his third season, 2007. All Willingham's recruits were now out of the picture; Weis was regarded as a legendary recruiter. The debacle of 2007 was accomplished by players of his choice.

2

In the apartment of Roger and Philip Knight, just to the east of campus, the fortunes of the football team had ever been a matter of eager interest on the part of Philip since their arrival at Notre Dame. Roger, the enormous Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, sympathized with his brother's enthusiasm, and from time to time even attended a game himself, despite the daunting logistics of getting his three hundred pounds to the stadium and settled on a seat designed for fans of considerably less avoirdupois, but his interest in athletics remained theoretical and remote. It had been only on the eve of completing his doctorate at Princeton that he had come to understand the feverish activity on campus and in town on certain autumn Saturdays. But it was less the commotion surrounding him than an essay of F. Scott Fitzgerald in
The Crack-Up
that had made him aware of Princeton football.

Scarcely more than twenty years old when he had been dubbed a doctor of philosophy—in philosophy—he had long failed to find an academic berth because of his massive size and eccentric personality and then became almost inadvertently a partner in Philip's private investigation firm. During all those years his involvement in the fortunes of college football had been merely a matter of paying intermittent attention to Philip, who gave running comments on televised games and listened to the endless chatter about them by experts before, during, and after the contest. Engrossed in a book or busy at his computer, keeping up his contacts around the globe with correspondents sharing one or more of his many interests, Roger experienced the crescendo and decrescendo from the television room as merely a pleasant background noise. Then he had been offered a job at Notre Dame.

It would be too much to say that it was Philip who had accepted the offer, but his enthusiasm at the possibility of relocating in South Bend, with the prospect of all those teams to watch close up—his uncontrolled delight, in fact—would have been sufficient to overcome Roger's own predilection for inertia. The offer had been made on the basis of Roger's monograph on Baron Corvo, a legendary nineteenth-century convert, pervert, novelist, and eventual Venetian gondolier who continues to fascinate many. Roger would be an endowed distinguished professor floating free of any departmental involvement; he could teach what the spirit moved him to teach. His intention was to acquaint his students with forgotten elements of Catholic culture, writers, poets, architects, anything but musicians, the latter precluded by his tin ear.

In the fall of 2007, he was offering a course on Catholic involvement in the revival of interest in the liberal arts, and the concomitant rise of interest in the great books of the Western tradition, that had taken place in the 1930s. In this he was aided greatly by having as his friend Otto Bird, the founder of what was now called the Program of Liberal Studies. Otto had known personally many of the pivotal figures in that revival, and he had worked with Mortimer Adler at the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
editing the
Great Books of the Western World
in each volume of which he himself published a lengthy, impressive essay on one of those great books. To Roger's wondrous delight, two of those essays had been thorough yet compact studies of Aquinas's
Summa theologiae
and Dante's
Divina Commedia.
As it happened, Otto was visiting Roger when the 2007 season began its slow descent.

There were philosophical fans who could take comfort in the adage that you win some, you lose some. Philip Knight was not among them. There were fans who attributed misfortune on the field to biased officials, probably in the pay of the National Council of Churches. Philip was not among them either, although he sometimes sympathized with the sentiment. The group that included Philip looked beyond an undeniable defeat to the golden prospects of the next weekend when all would be made right, much as, until the eighth race is run, losing gamblers summon hope and throw good money after bad. It was precisely this eternally rising hope that proved to be all too temporary as the tragic season unfolded. And soon would come the games that even pessimists expected the Irish to win.

The sardonic billed it as the battle of the titans. Navy had not beaten Notre Dame since the days of the immortal Roger Staubach. Their 2007 season equaled that of Notre Dame in pathos, though less had been expected of the team from Annapolis. The bruised and battered Notre Dame fan felt, not without reason, that here at last, however equivocally and against a lesser opponent, something like redemption must come. Not even the prescient could have known that when the four regular quarters of the games had been played out the two teams would find themselves tied. Not even Cassandra could have foreseen that the Navy game would go into overtime. Into three overtimes, in the last of which Navy would score and hope would finally die in Philip's breast and in those of many others.

But all that lay in the future.

Otto and Roger were in the study leafing through an ancient folio volume, a product of the first generation of printing, the commentary of Thomas Aquinas on all the epistles of St. Paul. Otto was now in his nineties, his health not good but his mind clear and his zeal for learning unchanged. He was disposing of his considerable and valuable library.

“I want you to have this,” he had just said to Roger.

“If only I could afford it.”

“I meant as a gift.”

Roger's astonishment was as great as Philip's when he burst into the apartment, returning from the stadium where Notre Dame had just lost to Southern Cal, though that of one brother was the astonishment of pleasure, that of the other the astonishment of the betrayed.

“We lost!”

Otto Bird, one of the great figures on the Notre Dame faculty during the past half century, always impeccably dressed, easily one of the most learned men Roger had ever known, looked at Philip in surprise.

“We lost again!” Philip's voice had dropped to a horrified whisper, his expression that of the devout when they repeat a heretical phrase.

“What was the score?” Roger asked, his pudgy hand moving reverently over a page of the volume he had just acquired, feeling the imprint the letters had made centuries ago on the paper.

“We should have won!”

Otto's interest in the athletic fortunes of the university to which he had devoted a long lifetime was, not to put too fine a point upon it, minimal, but he had become accustomed to outbursts such as Philip's over the years. He had found that sympathetic silence was the best response, a silence that could be interpreted as acquiescence in the burden of the outburst. His benign expression had not altered on autumn Mondays when all around him in the faculty lounge each play of the previous Saturday's game was subjected to professorial if not professional analysis. Well, why not? Noncombatants write the history of battles, outwit Napoleon while comfortable at their desks, say yea or nay to Churchill's plan for a second front in World War II, not across the Channel but up through the “soft underbelly of Europe.” Wars are more easily waged in retrospect, and games that had been lost on Saturday are turned into possible victories on Monday. Otto did not condescend to such colleagues. After all, what is teaching but a long retrospective conversation about the achievements of others?

It was clear that Roger and his guest were not to be let off easily. A thoroughly disenchanted review of the game followed.

“We could have won it if only…”

The sensible course Philip outlined had not been followed by the coaching staff. How could their decisions be attributed to misfortune? Only inepititude on the sidelines could explain such a failure to win the game and winning was the expected ending of every Notre Dame game.

Eventually Phil fell silent, and into the silence Otto introduced the games Aeneas had scheduled for his crew, bringing their ships ashore and letting the contests begin. Afterward, there was a massive feast for the contestants.

“I have often thought,” Otto said softly, “that we are unwise to reverse that order. Our feasting and burnt offerings come before the game.”

“There will be no feasting and celebrating tonight,” Phil said. He rose and wandered off, and Roger and his guest returned to a discussion of the early days of printing, with especial reference to the folio volume that Otto had given Roger as a gift.

When the phone began to ring, Roger did not answer, assuming that Phil would take the call. Many rings sounded before Roger picked up the phone to hear Father Carmody on the line. Father Carmody, a more eminent figure on the campus than even Otto Bird, had been Roger's champion for the Huneker Chair, and since he had connections with the Philadelphia family that was putting up the money, his wishes had overridden those of a faculty committee that had been formed to offer advice on potential occupants of the chair. The name of Roger Knight had not been on their list. It was unlikely that any members of the committee had even heard of the author of the monograph on Baron Corvo. Thus it was that Roger had arrived on campus with a sizable number of unknown enemies who resented his hiring. Meanwhile, Father Carmody had become a friend of the Knight brothers. From time to time, he had also availed himself of Philip's role as private investigator.

“How is Phil taking it?”

“He's upset.”

“So were we.”

3

In the Psalms that Father Carmody read daily, old age was accounted one of God's blessings. For Charles Carmody, it had come to seem a mixed blessing. Throughout his long career in the congregation of Holy Cross, much of it spent on campus, some of it in Rome when he served as right-hand man to the superior general of the order, he had relished the role of the man behind the scenes. Long before his reddish hair turned white, he was known as an Èminence grise, a kingmaker but never a king. And long after his coevals had disappeared from the scene, called to God, or debilitated, drooling denizens of the final station in the life of a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Father Carmody remained active, playing a discreet role, advising a series of presidents he had difficulty taking completely seriously. To the old, the young inevitably seem mere parodies of the giants they have succeeded. Still, when his advice and counsel were asked for they were gladly given. The personnel changed, but the university to which Charles Carmody had devoted himself wholeheartedly remained. The first time he had come along Notre Dame Avenue and seen the great golden dome lift above the trees, he had fallen in love as other men fall in love with mortal women. He became a champion in the service of the Lady atop the dome.