Trap Game: The Eagles Lurk Once Again

Last Saturday night the Clemson Tigers, the number 1 ranked college football team in the country, came into Notre Dame Stadium where they were upset by the fourth-ranked Fighting Irish in double overtime, 47-40.  The game was billed as the most important so far in the current college season, and was viewed by over 10 million fans on television and streaming devices.  For this season only, Notre Dame is a full member of the Atlantic Coast Conference ("ACC"), so the showdown's result has implications not only for the ACC title but also the College Football Playoffs, with the national championship as the ultimate goal.

The pre-game hype was off the charts.  Clemson had won 36 games in a row and was a 5 point favorite even though its All America quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, had to sit out per Covid-19 protocol.  Their second string QB, DJ Uiagalelei, was not exactly chopped liver (to coin a phrase).  The six foot five, 245 pounder was the USA Today high school player of the year two years ago.  The rest of the Tigers two-deep roster was filled with four and five star recruits.

Clemson's visit to The Bend marked only the fourth time in the last 32 years that the Irish have hosted the number 1 team in the country.  On October 15, 1988, the Miami Hurricanes were the defending national champion and ranked number 1 when they invaded Notre Dame.  This was the famous Catholics vs. Convicts Game, which has become so legendary that ESPN produced a documentary about it.  The Canes' "Convicts" sobriquet was well-earned, as some players on the Miami roster had run afoul of NCAA regulations as well as confrontations with the police.  Before the game Miami lived down to its reputation as thugs when they ran through the Notre Dame warm up line.  A rumble in the tunnel ensued.  Back in the locker room the Irish players were stoked.  Referring to his counterpart, ND head coach Lou Holtz famously instructed his squad, "Save Jimmy Johnson's ass for me!"   The Catholics pulled off the upset 31-30.  The final Miami play was an unsuccessful two point conversion attempt.  Momma Cuandito and I had seats on the twenty yard line, compliments of my cousin Louie.  That '88 season was the last time Notre Dame won the national championship.

Prior to last Saturday night's slugfest, the last time a number 1 opponent visited was October 15, 2005 when the Trojans of Southern California faced ninth ranked ND.  The game's most lasting memory was a quarterback sneak by SC's quarterback Matt Leinart from the one yard line with three seconds left in the game, resulting in a thrilling 34-31 victory.  On that play Trojan running back Reggie Bush pushed Leinart into the endzone after Leinart had originally been stacked up short of the goal line.  That play was almost immediately dubbed the "Bush Push" and is a sore topic among Domers.  Under the then-existing rules, aiding a ball-carrying teammate with a push or a pull was illegal, but admittedly that kind of infraction was rarely called.  There are two postscripts concerning that action.  First, a few years later the "no push" rule was taken off the books.  Secondly and ironically, in 2010 the NCAA vacated 14 SC victories in which Bush played because he and his family (and at least one other SC athlete) received improper benefits from or on behalf of the school.  [Note:  Who was the Southern Cal head coach who looked the other way?  None other than smilin' (but slimey) Pete Carroll who got out of Dodge (i.e., LA) right before the NCAA lowered the boom with severe sanctions, including reduction of scholarships, bowl bans and vacated victories. Carroll is now the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, which explains why I am always happy to see that team lose.]

In between the '88 Miami game and the '05 Southern Cal game was the November 13, 1993 showdown billed by the national media as "The Game Of The Century," the number 1 Florida State Seminoles vs. number 2 Notre Dame.  [Note:  The media likes to use the term "Game Of The Century" more than once every 100 years.  For example, the Domers of my vintage consider the famous 10-10 tie with Michigan State on November 19, 1966 to be the real Game Of The Century.  I attended that game in East Lansing.  It was my sophomore year, the only one of the four while I was an ND student when we won the  national championship.]  The Irish dominated Florida State until the fourth quarter when the Noles staged a comeback.  Trailing by 7 points, FSU's Heisman Trophy quarterback Charlie Ward marched his team down the field.  On the last play of the game, Ward's pass from the Irish 14 yard line was batted down and a 31-24 upset was in the books.  Pandemonium prevailed over the campus.  Two days later ND moved up to number 1 in the Associated Press poll while Florida State dropped to number 2.  Only one regular season game remained.  All the Irish had to do was beat the number 12 Boston College Eagles in South Bend to qualify for what would be the NCAA title game, the Orange Bowl.

We have at last arrived at the point where the title of this post comes into play.  What is a "trap game"?  The term generally refers to a contest where a heavily favored team takes its underdog opponent lightly, thereby through their own fault increasing the likelihood of an upset.  A narrower definition would be a game which either immediately precedes or follows a game against either an arch rival or a highly touted team.  That narrower definition applies to the last week of Notre Dame's 1993 regular season.  The Irish had just defeated Florida State and had replaced the Noles as the number 1 team in the country.  If ND could beat number 1, surely ND could beat number 12.

The Boston College contest did not prove to be the ho-hummer we Domers foolishly expected. Notre Dame led 39-38 in the closing minute of the game. BC quarterback Glenn Foley led a furious last gasp march down the field.  Just into Notre Dame territory Foley launched a long pass which an ND linebacker, stretching above his head, got both of his hands on, but he dropped the ball.  A play or two later on the last snap of the game, BC's David Gordon kicked a 41 yard field goal to upset ND by one point.  I was at that game.  Watching that kick sail through the uprights brought a tear to my eye, but I was not embarrassed; almost all the other 59,000 fans in the stadium felt the same way.  [The Irish linebacker who dropped the "sure" interception was Pete Bercich, an excellent player who went on to a five year career with the Vikings and is currently the radio analyst on Vikings' radio broadcasts.  I have never felt so bad for an athlete as I did for Pete, but obviously he has turned the page.  Good for him.  That's as it should be.]

Because of the loss, the AP poll dropped ND to number 4, and moved Florida State back up to number 1 and Nebraska to number 2.  Therefore ND never got to play in the Orange Bowl for the NCAA championship.  Instead the Irish played in the Cotton Bowl where they beat Texas A & M to finish the season 11-1.  Florida State beat Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, so they also finished 11-1.  The final AP poll gave Florida State the national championship title.  The ND fans cried bloody murder.  How could the AP rank FSU over ND when they both finished 11-1 and ND had won in the head-to-head matchup?  The answer was twofold.  First, the FSU loss was to a much better team (ND) than the ND loss (BC).  Secondly, the voters loved the Noles' head coach, folksie Bobby Bowden who, to that point at age 64, had never won a national title.  They also loved Lou, a young pup at the tender age of 56, but he had already coached two national championship squads including one at ND. 

****

Twenty-seven years after the heartbreaking trap game described above, the Irish, fresh off the huge win against Clemson, face another potential trap game tomorrow.  And wouldn't you know, the opponent is once again the Boston College Eagles.  This time the game is on the opponents' campus in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.  Notre Dame is a two touchdown favorite, but you can bet the coaches are telling them all about that '93 debacle.  The Irish coaches will also warn the team that beating Clemson last Saturday won't mean a thing if they don't take care of business tomorrow.  Beating number 2 ranked ND would make the BC season and probably send them to a good bowl game.

Here are some side bars to keep in mind during tomorrow's game.

The Notre Dame fan base has a somewhat weird outlook on Boston College.  Contrary to what many outsiders believe -- partly due to the gridiron meetings being labeled "The Holy Wars" -- the Irish faithful generally do not look upon BC as a main rival.  That designation is reserved for Southern Cal (especially among older alums) and Michigan.  It is often said, "Southern Cal is our arch rival; Michigan is our enemy."  The level of animosity toward BC does not quite rise (or if you prefer, sink) to that level.  Still, there is no love lost between the two schools.  An old Notre Dame joke: What do the initials "BC" stand for?  Backup college.  (Explanation: many BC students applied to ND but were not admitted.)       

Whatever aversion resides between ND and BC fans probably originated from one or two sources.  One of course goes back to that 1993 upset which arguably cost ND a national title.  It wasn't just the loss itself but the Eagles players and fans' reaction.  The old mantra "when you lose say little, when you win say less" has allegedly fallen on deaf ears at BC.  One year following a BC win in Notre Dame Stadium, some Eagles players  dug up the turf to take back to Boston as a trophy.  One of them, sad to say, was linebacker Chris Hovan who was a first round draft choice by the Vikings in 2000.

The other source stems from BC's desertion of the Big East Conference in 2004 to join the Atlantic Coast Conference.  At that time Notre Dame was a member of the Big East for almost all varsity sports except football.  Since BC was a charter member of the Big East going back to 1979, its jumping ship to go to a rival conference was seen by many as an act of betrayal.  To this day, ND fans like to call Boston College "Fredo," the Corleone brother in The Godfather who betrayed his family.

One final nugget of intrigue.  The starting quarterback for Boston College is Phil Jurkovec, a red shirt sophomore.  When Phil played high school football in Pittsburgh, he was one of the very top QB prospects in the country.  He turned down many scholarship offers to attend Notre Dame.  After sitting out (aka red shirting) his freshman year, he was thought to have a decent chance of being ND's starting QB his sophomore year.  But, he could not beat out the incumbent starter Ian Book.  This decision by the Notre Dame coaches was not popular with at least half of the Irish fans, many of whom do not consider head coach Brian Kelly to be a good developer of quarterbacks.  When Phil saw the writing on the wall last year, he transferred to BC, and the Eagles are mighty happy to have him.  Even those of us who are die hard Irish fans hope Phil has a good game tomorrow -- in a losing effort, of course.   

Dillon Hall Diaries: Kooch

I have been told that the most luxurious hotel in the state of Oklahoma is not really a hotel at all.  It's Headington Hall, the lodging facility at Oklahoma University where Sooner scholarship athletes lay their weary heads at night.  To call it a "dorm" would be an insult to the OU athletic department.  Check out these amenities: a study lounge and a laundry room on every floor, open 24/7; a commons area on every floor, where social and educational programs are hosted; a dining hall with many food options, a game room containing pool tables and ping pong tables; a media lounge with HD flat screen televisions and surround sound, plus blu ray machines; a seminar room, a reading room and private study rooms; an academic lounge, a performing arts theater and a technology center.  Most of the sleeping quarters are suites with quality furniture and kitchenettes.   

Many other colleges with huge athletic budgets follow a similar track, although OU is probably the most extreme example of a place where scholarship athletes are afforded accommodations which set them apart from most of the general student population.  We also hear a lot about practice facilities and how they play a major role in the recruitment process.  The one year old Athletes' Village at the University Of Minnesota, with a price tag of $166 million, is an example of how schools which wish to be competitive must keep up with the Joneses.  It's all part of the arms race.   Other perks might include training table meals, first dibs on "Easy A" classes, individualized tutorial help, and even an eased admission policy for prospective student athletes with subpar academic credentials.  Athletes admitted under such eased conditions are sometimes called "exceptions."  Heck, the University Of North Carolina even gave credit for non-existent classes to some of their "student" athletes, a scam that went undetected for years.  We'd better not get into the hiring of strippers to entertain basketball recruits at the University Of Louisville, alleged to have occurred under the watch of former head coach Rick Pitino.

***

You would be hard pressed to find an athletic dorm among the thirty residence halls at the University Of Notre Dame.  That's because no such thing exists.  The ND philosophy is that the student athletes should blend in with the rest of student body.  The athletes are sprinkled around campus and, to the extent their in-season team obligations allow, live much the same life as their "non-jock" classmates.

That is the background in which Bob Kuechenberg became my roommate in Dillon Hall during our senior year.  Well, okay, I'm guilty of a slight exaggeration; Bob was my suite mate, not my roommate.  It sounds a little more civilized to call him my suite mate than to say we, together with our roomies, Wayne and Mike, shared the semi-private bathroom which was between our two rooms.  Kuechenberg, better known as "Kooch," was a three year starter on the Irish football team.  This was the Era of Ara -- named for head coach Ara Parseghian -- when more often than not Notre Dame was in the running for the national championship, the only goal that mattered since we were (and remain) an independent.  (Mission accomplished in my sophomore season, 1966, and also 1973 under Ara.)

Kooch was born on October 14, 1947, making him sixteen days older than I.  He passed away unexpectedly a week ago today in Florida, where he had lived since 1970.  The family announced that he died in his sleep; a heart attack is suspected, although not yet officially confirmed.

Kooch was from Hobart, Indiana, a suburb of the rough and tumble steel city of Gary.  At six foot two and around 255 pounds, he was all muscle, and on the football field, all business.  When Kooch walked into your room it felt like the square footage of the space shrank exponentially.  He started his ND career as an offensive tackle.  In one of the most famous games in ND history, the 10-10 tie at Michigan State in 1966, he lined up across from Spartan All American defensive end Bubba Smith on virtually every snap.  As a junior Kooch moved to defensive end to fill in for an injured teammate, then back to starting guard on offense his senior year.  Kooch told a Miami sportswriter many years later that he thought his having to switch between O-line and D-line in college might have caused him to slip to the fourth round in the 1969 draft, especially since Ara then moved him from his old spot, tackle, to guard.  Admittedly, Ara had a valid reason for doing so.  The guy who'd slipped into Kooch's old spot was George Kunz, probably the best offensive tackle on any of Ara's eleven Irish teams, a consensus All American and the number 2 overall pick in the 1969 NFL draft (going to the Atlanta Falcons).

Kooch was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1969, and had a cup of coffee with the Falcons later that year.  He married his high school sweetheart the same year, and ended up playing for a semi-pro team in Chicago, the Owls.  After a tryout with the Miami Dolphins he signed as a free agent in 1970, and ended up playing fourteen years for the "Fins," all that time under the legendary Hall Of Fame coach Don Shula.

Kooch's accolades as a pro are too numerous to list in their entirety, but I would not be doing him justice if I didn't mention a few.  Most football fans of my vintage know that Kooch was a key contributor on three championship teams: Notre Dame's 1966 national champion, and the Miami Dolphins' Super Bowl champs of 1972 and 1973.  There is a little known but almost equally important fourth championship involving Kooch; I will describe it momentarily. 

Many NFL players have a career lasting ten or fifteen years and never reach the Super Bowl.  In the Dolphins' franchise history, they have made five Super Bowl appearances; Kooch was the starting right guard in the first four of them.   Kooch only had to wait until his second year with Miami to experience his first such start.  Unfortunately his team lost by three touchdowns to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl VI.  Kooch's mano-a-mano adversary that game was Hall Of Fame defensive tackle Bob Lilly.

The following season begat one of the greatest teams in NFL history, the Dolphins, who ran the table for a perfect season, 14-0.  That team remains the only one which has ever gone undefeated throughout both the regular season and the playoffs, including Super Bowl VII, a seven point victory over the Washington Redskins.  You have probably seen pictures of Kooch and his old teammates lighting up cigars each year when the last remaining undefeated NFL team suffers a loss, thereby preserving the '72 Fins' place in history.

Then there was Super Bowl VIII, an easy 24-7 demolition of the Minnesota Vikings.  The Vikings featured their supposedly unstoppable defensive front four known as the Purple People Eaters: Carl Eller, Alan Page, Gary Larsen and Jim Marshall.  Page, a fellow Notre Dame alum (Class of 1967), lined up across from Kooch and never got a whiff of the Miami QB, Bob Griese.  The Dolphins' offense was so dominant that Griese only had to pass seven times during the entire game.

Finally there was Super Bowl XVII following the 1982 season.  The Dolphins came up short, losing to the Redskins by ten.

Despite his prominent role in helping Miami reach four Super Bowls, plus being a six time selection to the Pro Bowl and an Associated Press All-Pro three seasons, Kooch was never elected into the NFL Hall Of Fame.  It was little solace to him that he was a finalist for Hall induction eight times.  One explanation offered by many so-called experts is the fact that three of his Miami offensive line mates, Larry Little, Jim Langer (a product of Royalton, Minnesota High School) and Dwight Stephenson, were all voted into the Hall, thus diluting his chances.  Here is what Coach Shula had to say: "I've coached a lot of Hall Of Fame Players, including a number of offensive linemen, and Kooch was as good as any of them.  He gave everything he had on every snap."

The highest honor bestowed on Kooch occurred on December 15, 1995 when he was added to the Dolphins' Ring Of Honor.  At the time, he was just the eighth player so anointed, and the only one of them not enshrined in the Hall Of Fame.  He retired after the 1984 season after having played in 196 games, the third most in Dolphins' history.  An amazing Kuechenberg stat:  In his entire career, he was called for holding a mere 15 times.

***

And now for a description of that fourth championship I promised.  In the spring of 1969, a movement was started in Dillon Hall to conduct a beer drinking contest.  In order to appreciate the atmosphere, you have to realize that out of the dorm's 325 residents, aka Dillon Dirt Bags, more than 225 of us no doubt considered ourselves quite proficient in the art of beer drinking.  After all, what else (besides studying) was there to do when the cold March air was cutting across campus from nearby Lake Michigan?  [Note: That's a rhetorical question.  For a real answer check out my post from September 9, 2014, Dillon Hall Diaries: Kiwi Can Contests.]

The Dillon beer drinking contest had just one rule.  You had to drink a shot of beer every 30 seconds.  My friends and I scoffed at the leniency and ease of such a regulation.  Surely we could stick with that program for hours.  We were wrong.  When forced to drink beer at that rate, pretty soon it doesn't go down the hatch before it's time to quaff another.  I felt so humiliated when I had to throw in the towel after nine shots.  I didn't even feel a buzz, but my esophagus was about to rupture.

I was surprised Kooch was talked into participating.  Between football commitments and Vomit Comet trips home to the Gary/Hobart area, we didn't see a lot of him on weekends.  But once he signed up for the contest, it was almost inevitable he'd be crowned the champ.  As I recall, he put down 237 shots, one every 30 seconds.  The number sticks in my mind first of all because he beat the second place finisher by over 100, and secondly because I remember talking about his remarkable feat when I came home shortly thereafter for spring break.

***

Following his death, Kooch's family requested that memorials be forwarded to The Buoniconti Fund To Cure Paralysis, a non-profit organized to assist The Miami Project. The Miami Project is a spinal cord injury research center owned by and located at the University Of Miami.  The Project was co-founded by Nick Buoniconti thirty-four years ago following a spinal cord injury sustained by Nick's son, Marc, in a college football game.  Nick Buoniconti played football for Notre Dame, Class of 1962, and was Kooch's Dolphins teammate for six NFL seasons.

I have sent a check for $67 to the Buoniconti Fund, the significance of that dollar amount matching Kooch's Miami jersey, number 67.  If he and I ever meet at that Big Senior Bar In The Sky, he'll probably ask why I didn't make the dollar amount 69, the year we graduated from Notre Dame.    

Dillon Hall Diaries: The Four Reasons You Pray, & The Grotto

I had a buddy in high school who became a priest. I talked to him right after he was ordained, and I remember he told me that in the seminary they taught the seminarians that the ideal homily was seven minutes long. Anything longer risked losing the congregation's attention; anything shorter was too light weight. I often wish he had never revealed that "secret" to me, because nowadays when I'm in church I just can't bring myself to give the homilist more than those seven minutes of my undivided attention. To be honest, I usually make a judgment about three minutes into his sermon, and if what he has to say hasn't grabbed me by that time, I tune him out. Shame on me! (By the way, if the homilist is reading a canned sermon, shame on him!) I'm sorry to report that at my church, my "stick with the sermon to the end" record is rather poor. But... here is where my rationalization comes into play. In those circumstances when I'm not into the sermon, instead of using that time to mentally DCE the Notre Dame football roster or think about what I'm going to eat for Sunday brunch, I use that time to pray.

I went to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school. Somewhere along the way we were taught that there are four stages of prayer: adoration, thanksgiving, contrition and petition, and they MUST be done in that order. If you start asking God for favors as soon as you hit your knees, your prayer request has little chance of being granted by The Man Upstairs. On the other hand, so said my religion teachers, if you first take the time to give a prayer of love/adoration, then thank God for all He has given you, and follow it up with an act of contrition, only THEN are you in a position to ask for favors.

This morning at Mass was one of those "tune out the sermon early" kind of experiences, so I did a little praying. As I was praying, my mind drifted (again!) to my visitations to the Grotto at ND when I was a student. I was there quite a lot. What better place to do some serious thinking, if not praying? I must admit, when I visited the Grotto I totally blew off what I had been taught in grade school and high school about prayer. I hastily skipped the first three stages and launched directly into my all-important petitions. I particularly needed some supernatural help first semester freshman year. About two weeks before leaving for ND in the fall, my high school girl friend and I broke up. Emil T's chemistry class was causing me too many sleepless nights. I was a little homesick. I had virtually no spending money. I wasn't pulling down the "A's" that I used to get in high school. Lots of things to worry about and pray for.

Things started to turn around for me in the latter half of freshman year. I firmly believe that year would not have had a happy ending without my visits to the Grotto. Now when I'm back on campus for a football game or a reunion, I make a point of stopping by there, but I do a little more thanking and a little less asking. The area surrounding the Grotto is much the same as it was forty years ago. (One huge difference: Brother Duck is no longer doling out bread to his favorite web-footed creatures treading water in St. Mary's Lake.) On the morning of game day there are usually hundreds of people visiting the Grotto, many of them sporting attire for our opponent. When I look at the throng I wonder how many of them are ND alums thinking back to their days of invoking help there as students. It's probably a safe bet that most of them went right to Prayer Step # 4 then, just as I did.

Dillon Hall Diaries: Angst About Angers

I have never set anyone's cleats on fire, put peanut butter or Ben Gay in anyone's jock strap, or shaving cream inside anyone's cap.  Therefore, as a prankster I am not in the same league as someone like Bert Blyleven.  For the most part my shenanigans were more juvenile, like short-sheeting a bed, hiding a text book or leaving a fake phone message.  However, in all humility I must further state that I was the mastermind behind one of the best pranks ever executed in the fabled history of Dillon Hall.

 

You might recall from my September 9, 2014 post (Kiwi Can Contests) that during my junior year at ND, my roommate, Wayne Cuchna, and I occupied one of seven "doubles" in an isolated wing on Dillon's first floor.  The band of fourteen guys living there was comprised mostly of juniors and sophomores, with a sprinkling of freshmen, also known as "freddies."  I wouldn't go so far as to say the fourteen of us were like brothers, but because of the proximity of our quarters, we ate many meals together, often studied together, borrowed each other's records -- I am still waiting to get my Paul Revere & The Raiders album back from my next door neighbor, Rich "Rinny" Reinthaler -- knew each other's families and friends, engaged in dozens of bull sessions together, and generally supported one another through the highs and lows of the long and arduous school year.  And of course, as you already know, there were always the Kiwi Can Contests.

 

One of those "freddies" was Ed Beck, who lived at the far "dead" end of our wing.  The other three or four freddies, including Ed's roomie, Bill "The Bird" Powers, were low key, rather humble guys, who more or less recognized the unwritten pecking order amongst the fourteen.  No one actually thought that the upperclassmen among us were any smarter or wiser than the underclassmen, but still, there was some deference shown by the younger guys to the oldsters.  There were no big fish in our little pond, but if, indeed, there had to be small fish, that role was fulfilled by the frosh.  There were certain things, particularly those relating directly to Notre Dame the institution, for which the juniors would have a better feel or a deeper understanding, if only for the fact that they had more experience as a university student than did the underclassmen.

 

Good ol' Ed did not see it that way.  Perhaps he couldn't help himself, being a native New Yorker and all (tip o' the cap to Salinger for my usage of those last two words), but any outsider with an overview of the entire scene would easily observe that Ed was the proverbial know-it-all.  His most distinguishing characteristic was rubbing folks the wrong way.  Regardless of the topic, be it current events, football, girls, politics, professors, music, what have you, Ed knew best and was not bashful about sharing the wealth of his knowledge with the remaining underprivileged thirteen.  He gave me a pain where I sat down, and I was not alone with that sentiment.  Ridicule, confrontation and avoidance did not work; he'd dig in even more.  Avoidance, by the way, was hard to accomplish, given the logistics of our wing.  But what really gored our collective ox was Ed's incessant referral to his acceptance into Notre Dame's Angers Program for the following school year.

 

Angers (pronounced "ahn-ZHAY") is a mid-sized city in western France and the home of a handful of colleges and universities.  During the years I attended ND, the University of Notre Dame had a program affiliated with Universite Catholique de I' Oust  located in Angers.  Participants in that program were usually sophomores who desired to spend one or two semesters across the pond.   In those days, studying abroad was not nearly as common as it has become during the last few decades.  Almost every one of my contemporaries dreamed throughout high school of some day attending Notre Dame, so why would we want to leave?  Even if we had that inclination, most of our families could not afford to send us overseas for even a semester, let alone a year.  The thought of applying for the Angers Program never crossed our minds.

 

Ed, on the other hand, did not think along those lines; just the opposite.  From the moment (probably around February) that he was accepted into the Angers Program, that is all he talked about or cared about.  We could be talking about dining hall food, Major League Baseball, South Bend crime or an upcoming kegger, and without fail Ed would manage to get Angers into the conversation.  He had a knack for slanting the discussion into a comparison between how much better off he would be in France versus us slugs stuck in The Bend.  At first it was funny, as Ed was turning into a caricature of himself right before our eyes.  But after enduring his patronization for weeks on end, retaliation was in order.  Luckily, two separate ingredients fell perfectly into place, enabling me to pull off my caper, which I prefer to refer to simply as "The Letter."

 

The first ingredient was the fragile social status and simmering mood of the US, and elsewhere, in 1968.  That year has been called by many historians and political scientists the most tumultuous year in US history.  The Cold War was in full swing, the civil rights movement was surging, Viet Nam War protesters dialed up their demonstrations several notches, especially following the Tet Offensive, and the US presidential election, including the intra-party nomination campaigns, was no holds barred.  The Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4 of that year, and race riots ensued.  Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles nine weeks later.

 

But the US was not the only place of social unrest.  In May, 1968, France was the scene of violent protests and strikes carried on predominantly by students and laborers.  That country almost came to a standstill, as students occupied campus buildings and workers shut down industry.  The police were outnumbered.  Demonstrations turned into riots which got out of hand.  It would take several weeks, and an actual dissolution of the French Parliament, before order was restored.

 

The second ingredient, strange as it may seem, was what we found in the practice space used by my band, Lemon Oil Mahogany.  LOM had "inherited" from my first band, the Dark Ages, a postage stamp size storage room located at the bottom of an extremely narrow stairway near the front of Dillon.  Apparently the room had not been used, or even visited, in many years.  Dust, mold and cobwebs were everywhere.  It could have functioned as a chamber of horrors from a Stephen King novel.  The guys in the Dark Ages made a deal with our rector, Father James "Flash" Flanigan, that in return for our cleaning the place up, he would let us practice down there.  Now, a year later, LOM was the beneficiary of that arrangement.

 

Originally we just cleaned out enough space to squeeze in our equipment and ourselves.  Subsequently one late spring day after practice we had a little more time, so we started clearing shelf space.  The books on those shelves were so old that the bindings gave way when we opened them.  But then, pay dirt!  Tucked away in a corner was a box of official Notre Dame stationery, with letterhead designating "Administrative Offices" and a beautiful etching of the Administration Building (aka the "Gold Dome Building") above it.  This was like finding gold.  My scheme to prank Ed Beck was hatched!

 

Father James Riehle (pronounced "really") was the no-nonsense Dean Of Students in those days.  The main responsibilities of the person holding that position were to oversee the conduct of the student body, and to enforce the multitude of rules and regulations which ND men were expected to follow.  If you're inclined to think that the incumbent in that office would, necessarily, be tough as nails, you would be correct.  Father Riehle, although only in his mid-forties, was one of those guys who appeared to be many years older than his actual age.  A cigar-chomping, gruff ex-hockey player, he was surely cut out to be the Dean Of Students.  No news from Father Riehle was good news for all Domers under his figurative thumb.  An aside:  My first sophomore year roommate,  Mike "The Ripper" Rippey, was called on the carpet by Father Riehle on many sad occasions before finally getting the heave-ho after the first semester.  The Ripper's downfall was mostly alcohol related; he was a well-known fixture in after-hours South Bend.  Every time he got called in to the Dean's office he'd say to me, "John, this time I'm Riehle in trouble!"

 

It took me a few days to compose The Letter to Ed.  I went through several drafts on notebook paper before I was finally satisfied.  Once I had crafted my masterpiece, I borrowed The Bird's typewriter under the pretext of having to submit a research paper, and hunted and pecked my way through.  Of course, I typed The Letter on my newly found Administrative Offices stationery.  It has been over forty-six years since I composed The Letter, but to the best of my recollection, it read something like this: 

 

Dear Mr. Beck,

 

I regret to inform you that, due to the civil unrest in France, including Angers, the University of Notre Dame has decided to cancel the Angers Program for the coming school year.  Please know that this was a very difficult decision to make, as the administration is well aware of the eagerness with which many of our students, including yourself, looked forward to the opportunity to study in Angers.  We will revisit the situation toward the end of the current calendar year, and if circumstances merit doing so, we will consider reinstating the Angers Program for the 1969-1970 school year.

 

The safety of our students is always our foremost responsibility.  Thank you for your understanding.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

James L. Riehle, C.S.C.

Dean of Students 

 

I did my best forgery job of Father Riehle's signature, stuck the letter in a regular ND envelope which was available in the bookstore, and mailed it to Ed on a Thursday, using an intra-campus postal box.  I knew it would reach his Dillon mail slot the next day, Friday, the hardest day of the work week to get ahold of anybody in the Ad Building.

 

The rest is history.  Ed did, indeed, receive the letter on that Friday.  I can still hear his wail, like something out of The Hound Of The Baskervilles.  His whole reason for being was gone.  There was no one else nearby in the dorm heading for Angers with whom he could commiserate, so he tried to get ahold of Father Riehle by phone.  I knew that would be next to impossible, especially on a Friday afternoon.  Ed was beside himself as he ran over to the Ad Building, letter in hand.  I did not see him for several hours.  My guess is that it took that long for many phone calls to go back and forth to ascertain whether the Angers Program was in jeopardy and if Father Riehle had actually sent that letter.

 

When Ed finally entered the South Dining Hall, barely in time for the swill they called "dinner," he was totally exhausted, yet evidently relieved that he had merely been the victim of a hoax.  We didn't hear much from Ed about Angers for the rest of the school year.  The Angers Program was not cancelled, and as far as I know, Ed was there as planned for the '68-'69 school year while I made the best of things on campus my senior year.  I have not seen nor heard from Ed since the spring of '68.

 

Other than my roomie, whom I swore to secrecy, I have never admitted my prank to anyone -- until now.  As much as I wanted to take credit for the caper, the price of being found out was too much to risk.  Of course, the guys in our wing figured the culprit was one of our group, and their level of enjoyment was almost equal to mine.

 

The Statute Of Limitations has long since expired, and Father Riehle passed away in 2008.  I think I am safe. If you ever watch the movie Rudy, keep an eye out for the man playing the role of the Notre Dame football team chaplain.  That guy is no Hollywood actor; it's Father Riehle who, in addition to his day job as Dean Of Students, was the football team's chaplain in real life.  I wonder if he will read this post from that great cigar lounge in the sky.   

Dillon Hall Diaries: Kiwi Can Contests

I polish my black, dress big boy shoes twice a year, whether they need it or not.  But whenever I do, I think back to the Kiwi Can Contests we used to have at ND in Dillon Hall.

Dillon is situated on the South Quad, and runs east to west between Alumni Hall and the South Dining Hall (the emporium of haute cuisine).  From an aerial view, Dillon would resemble a capital H turned over on its side, with the vertical line, connecting the two long stems, a little left (east) of center.  Now picture a short offshoot corridor running south from the main east-west line near the southeast corner of the building.  That corridor, approximately fifty feet long and six feet wide, housed seven rooms, each a double, including Room 158, my junior year home.  That corridor was the scene of some of the best "killing time" moments for the fourteen of us who were residents of that den of iniquity. It's where we held our Kiwi Can Contests.

Rumor had it that Dillon's in-house rules supposedly called for quiet time between the hours of 7:00 and 10:00 p.m.  To say that decree was loosely enforced would be an understatement.  Nevertheless, for those of us who chose not to make the long, often cold trek to the library to do our studying, we did maintain some semblance of decorum in the evenings.  That is, until 10:00.  Then it was Kiwi Can Contest time!
 

One of the beauties of the Kiwi Can Contests is that it was free entertainment, meaning more money to spend on beer when the weekend finally arrived.  The only equipment needed were two cans of Kiwi shoe polish (color optional) and a frisbee. I don't take credit for inventing the Kiwi Can Contests; it was more of a collaborative effort from our band of fourteen.
 

Here is how the Kiwi Can Contests worked.  Two cans would be placed upright on the floor, thirty feet apart, in the center of our corridor.  Each contestant would toss a frisbee toward the can on the far end, attempting to knock it over. One point was awarded for each successful toss; first to get to fifteen points was the winner.  Just like ping pong, you had to win by two.
 

Sometimes we'd play doubles, to shorten the waiting time for the non-participants.  (The queue was always long.)  And, there were a couple of other wrinkles, such as periodically placing a barrier (usually a stack of books) a few feet in front of the target.  The upshot of that practice was to force the participants to carom their frisbee tosses off the wall. Even without the barriers, knocking down a Kiwi can thirty feet away with a frisbee is not as easy as you might think. Oh, we were so proud of ourselves when we became expert marksmen!
 

Of course, the concept of wagering on the Kiwi Can Contests would be the farthest thought from our minds.  Well, not really.  It didn't take too many nights before our little corridor resembled a raucous casino.  Guys from all over Dillon, at that time the largest residence hall on campus, came down to our corner of the building.  We were the South Quad's version of Vegas.  After this had been going on for a few weeks our rector, Father James "Flash" Flanigan, came around to check it out.  We took the fact that he didn't shut us down to be the same as receiving his blessing.  That would not have been the case with Cavanaugh's Black Matt.  (See my December 16, 2012 post, Black Matt Lowers The Boom.)

When I was in grade school at St. Joe's, one of our favorite pastimes was pitching pennies.  By the time I was a junior in college, I had graduated to Kiwi Can Contests.  What further proof needs to be offered as evidence of the furtherance of my education? 

Dillon Hall Diaries: Personal Prophecies And Yellow Caps

It is my understanding that Facebook members have Throwback Thursday every week.  I do not participate in Facebook, but I do post occasionally on ND Nation, a discussion board for Notre Dame alums and fans. Throwback Thursdays have not made an appearance on NDN.  Instead, we have Confession Fridays.  If a poster feels guilty or embarrassed about something personal, such as liking the Backstreet Boys or drinking foo foo cocktails, he can get it off his chest by coming clean on Fridays with a confessional post.  He may get ridiculed or drilled with some replies that are zingers -- his penance, you might call it -- but he'll go forward with a clear conscience and a sense of relief.

Since today is Friday, I thought I might employ a similar approach for this post.  I hereby confess that, over the years, I have continued to get a kick out of what could be labeled the "Personal Prophecy Game." Hopefully that does not make me a bad person, but if it does, so be it.  No one is perfect, least of all me.

The Genesis: My first exposure to the Personal Prophecy Game was in the winter of my sophomore year at Notre Dame.  Our basketball team had a road game against Michigan State on a weekend night, and five of us decided that the Irish needed our support in that hostile environment.  There was no love lost between ND students and Michigan, only in those days it was the Spartans, not the Wolverines, that got our hackles up.  So, we piled into a friend's car to make the round trip to East Lansing, a distance of approximately one hundred fifty miles from The Bend.  As we were driving through Niles, Dowagiac or some other small burg in southwestern Michigan, we saw a bedraggled guy stumbling along the sidewalk with a bottle of cheap wine in his grasp.  "Hey Sully," one of my companions called out to our friend riding shotgun, "that's you in five years!"  Thus, the Personal Prophecy Game was born; group hilarity ensued.

Since that initial joke went over so well, we kept it up every time we spotted some down-on-his-luck, oddly dressed or erratically acting Michigander.  Sometimes, in the interest of good sportsmanship, I suppose, the jokester would make himself the butt of the wisecrack by proclaiming, "That's me in five years," as he pointed out a clueless target.

That good natured (although certainly unchristian, not to mention juvenile) ribbing reoccurred all the way to the Michigan State campus.  In our defense, it's important to point out that no one outside the confines of the car was aware of our Personal Prophecies.  Of course, that didn't make it right, but we were quite pleased that we were able to entertain ourselves for the duration of what would otherwise have been an uneventful ride.

The Middle Stages: Notre Dame hosts a reunion weekend every year in early June.  The classes that have graduated exactly five years, or a multiple of five years, prior to the reunion year are invited.  The first one I attended was my twenty year reunion in 1989.  The two most memorable things about that weekend were the beer tents stationed on the North Quad until 2:00 in the morning, and Lou Holtz making the rounds to talk to each of the ten or more classes which were separately assembled for their class dinners throughout campus.  This was the year after Lou's football team had won the National Championship in just his third season at the helm.  As Lou spoke he had all of us wrapped around his little finger, and believing that, finally, the gridiron glory days of Fighting Irish football were now permanently restored.

One reunion tradition is that members of the class celebrating its fiftieth year as alums are presented with yellow ND baseball caps.  (Why they are not gold, to be consistent with the university's colors of blue and gold, is an unsolved mystery.)  Thus, another recollection from that twenty year gathering was watching the fifty year guys, who (if my math is correct) graduated in 1939, donning their yellow caps.   Although my classmates and I were in our early forties, far removed from our crazy college years, the fifty year gents seemed borderline ancient.  We thought they certainly appeared to be much more than thirty years older than us.

Even at the second reunion I attended, which was ten years later in 1999, the guys in the yellow caps clearly bore little resemblance to us.  They moved more slowly, had less hair, drank less beer, didn't seem that impassioned about the football team, and went to bed a whole lot earlier than my fellow '69ers.  Many of them never even made an appearance at the beer tents!

Nearing The End:  Earlier this month I attended my forty-fifth year ND reunion.  Although many of my classmates have never missed any of our eight previous reunions, this year's gathering was only the third time for me.  The fifty year "boys" and their spouses were lodged in the Morris Inn.  (An aside: My two "wish list" items regarding campus visits are to stay in the Morris Inn and to watch a football game from the press box. To date, I have done neither.)  The next oldest class, mine, was given the honor of being housed in the newest dorm, Ryan Hall, built in 2009.  Ryan, which happens to be a women's dorm during the school year -- none of the twenty-nine residence halls at ND is coed -- bears little resemblance to the guys' dorms of yesteryear.  Elevators, air conditioning, a beautiful lobby/sitting room, cushy hallway carpets, brightly lit and nicely tiled lavatories, wood paneling in the common areas; this place makes Dillon look like a quonset hut.

Our class Mass was celebrated by a classmate, Father John Sheehan, SJ, in the Ryan Hall Chapel.  After introducing himself, Father John assured us that even though there would be no collection basket making its way through the pews, what followed would, in fact, qualify as a bona fide Mass.  He also thanked the class reunion organizers for deciding to dispense with singing (although we did end up singing the Notre Dame Alma Mater as an ad hoc recessional).

The most sobering moment of the Mass occurred when the list of the names of our deceased classmates was read from the pulpit.  I was expecting maybe a dozen, or at most a couple of dozen.  No; if only we'd been that lucky. Instead, one hundred fifty names were recited.  One hundred fifty!  I was stunned.  That number represented over ten percent of the Class of '69.

Although mortality, especially my own, was the farthest thing from my mind when I'd set foot on campus earlier that Friday afternoon, the litany of our departed mates brought such thoughts to the fore.  Memories of the Personal Prophecy Game crept into my head.  When we were young, the unlikely connections between the game's jokesters and the targets were absurd.  There was a direct correlation between the level of absurdity and the degree of humor. Now a mere five years separated us sixty-niners from the gents in the yellow caps.  Where did the absurdity go?  We could no longer pretend (or hope) that we were so far removed from the museum pieces. Maybe in the eyes of the young alums, we were the museum pieces! Taking a good look at those guys hobbling out of the Morris Inn gave us a reasonable forecast of how we'd look at our next reunion, if, indeed, we make it that far.  I looked at some of them and said to myself, "That's me in five years."      

Dillon Hall Diaries: The Tom Tom Thumper

When I attended Notre Dame I was the drummer in two rock bands.  The first was the Dark Ages, which covered a lot of British Invasion tunes.  Our lead guitarist, Chicago South Sider Rich ("Gink") Downes, was a big Keith Richards fan.  Consequently we came pretty close to replicating It's All Over Now, among other Rolling Stones chestnuts.  Day Tripper by the Beatles and the Hollies' Bus Stop were always on our set list.  Our repertoire also included several tunes from the large catalogue of hits by Chicago-based bands like the Cryan' Shames, the Buckinghams and the Shadows Of Knight.  The latter's smash Gloria (itself a cover of the Van Morrison original) was one of my two favorite songs to play because of the drum roll at the end.  If I hadn't consumed too many cold ones by the time we performed it, I went for the rim shot on the last stroke.  My other favorite, the Surfaris' instrumental hit Wipe Out, was a song I'd been playing since high school.  Nothing but tom tom thumping.  (I always thought the song should be titled Work Out.)   Despite our preference for the British and Chicago sounds, the song we performed best was not in either category.  Rather, it was Time Won't Let Me by an underrated outfit from Cleveland called the Outsiders.  The only song on which I sang lead was The Kids Are All Right.  I was probably given that responsibility because none of the other four guys knew the words to that classic by the Who.  Otherwise the lead singer's role went to Sal Santino, a versatile Italian Brooklynite who could dance and sing simultaneously.  Sal had great stage presence, and was a real charmer.

The heyday of the Dark Ages was my sophomore year, 1966-1967.  We played gigs both on and off campus.  Live music was huge then, and it was fun to be a part of that scene. Our big moment in the sun was being selected to play on the South Quad before ND's homecoming game against Army.  We set up right in front of Dillon Hall and drew a big audience.  It may well have been the only gig we ever played without imbibing.  At other shows we were usually up there trying to keep pace with the swilling crowd.

As I have admitted more than once to my son Michael, an extraordinary guitarist who has devoted hundreds of hours to his craft, neither I nor any of my bandmates considered ourselves to be serious musicians.  In all honesty, we were simply "in it" to meet girls and drink (usually) free beer.  The demands of studying were too time consuming to practice more than occasionally.  We shot for once a week, but that was a loosely enforced regimen.  Since we did not write music -- a truth having more to do with talent (or lack thereof) than time -- we were relegated to playing covers.  Sadly, we were playing mostly the same twenty-five or thirty songs in the spring that we'd been playing the previous autumn.  It took time to learn new songs, and time was a luxurious commodity none of us possessed.  Thus, our repertoire became stagnant.  Some weeks it was even hard to find the time to listen to new music, let alone play it.  Things started winding down as we approached the end of the school year.

When I returned to The Bend for the beginning of junior year, I did not even bring my drums with me.  I had spent my summer vacation working the second shift at a sweaty tool and die shop, Olsen Tool Company in Richfield, and as a result I was too pooped to practice much during those three months.  The way things had tailed off in the spring with the Dark Ages, I figured we would not reunite in the fall of '67.  You might say I was correct, but with an asterisk.

Some time in the late autumn of junior year, Gink and Maverick (the Dark Ages' bass player) approached me about a new band they were trying to put together. Gink had formed a friendship with one Kevin Mahoney, an older (mid-twenties) guy who, as I recall, had previously attended Notre Dame but had not graduated.  He had some kind of sales job in The Bend, a perfect match for a person who came across as a big talker and a wheeler dealer.  Kevin definitely had local connections, obviously helpful if not mandatory for landing gigs.  He also had what Gink described as a "common law wife," which in those days simply meant that he lived with his girlfriend, Terry.  (Legally, Indiana has never been a common law state.)  That in itself was pretty cutting edge for 1967, at least in the semi-sheltered culture of Notre Dame, but the icing on the cake was that Terry was black.

Kevin had lined up a high school kid named Drew Lattimore to play lead guitar.  Kevin, Gink and Maverick told me that Drew was lights out, the best guitarist in town.  I figured that had to be hyperbole, since there were many very good bands with very good guitarists in the area.  They also wanted to add an ND underclassman, Bob Daily, as lead singer.  At first I was not all that interested in the proposal.  By the time this initial conversation took place, I had readjusted to life as a totally committed student without the responsibilities that come with being a band member.  Except for a handful of isolated times, I had not even played the drums in over six months.  But the biggest negative for me was the omission of Tom Beamer, one of my best friends at ND, who was the rhythm guitarist in the Dark Ages.  Being in the Dark Ages was a lot of fun.  Playing with Sal, and especially Tom, was the main reason.

Beamo was a pre-med major from Broadview, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago.  With the exception of my cousin Louie, he was and remains the funniest guy I have ever met.  Tom and I lived a few doors away from each other in Cavanaugh Hall freshman year, and escaped the clutches of its rector, Father Micheli, by fleeing to Dillon sophomore year.  (Check out my December 16, 2012 post, Black Matt Lowers The Boom.)  Tom's Dillon roommate and mine were brothers, Ron and Wayne Cuchna, and the four of us hung out together quite a bit.

I have conveniently deleted from my memory most of what Tom and I discussed surrounding the demise of the Dark Ages and my invitation to hook up with Gink and Maverick in a new band.  In retrospect my decision to eventually accept the invitation was misguided, but thankfully Tom and I have remained good friends for almost fifty years.  In fact, I was a groomsman in his wedding, circa 1971, and he was my best man in 1976.

After wrestling with the decision I did decide to give band membership another try, and threw in my lot with Gink and Maverick.  There were probably more (and better) reasons not to do so, including my friendship with Tom and the omnipresent time-budgeting problems.  The Dark Ages was fun; the new band would be more business.  But what twenty year old hasn't made a few dumb decisions?  Part of my rationale was that I missed playing the drums, and I wanted to try to get back into that "hobby" to take my mind off of school for a few hours a week.  The other part, I'm a little embarrassed to write, is that I was flattered when "Salesman Kevin" and my two former bandmates started singing my praises about my "talent" on the skins.  It just goes to show that, under certain circumstances, flattery might get you somewhere.  I knew Kevin was excellent at slinging the BS, yet when he used it on me I fell for it like a real rube.

We decided to have a practice or two with all five band members before anything became official.  That was the first time I met Drew and Bob.  Drew was just a seventeen year old kid, but he was everything I'd been told he would be.  You might say he was the Jonny Lang of South Bend.  Whoever coined the phrase "the hand is quicker than the eye" must have seen Drew work the frets; lightning fast.  The piece de resistance was that he could play We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet by the Blues Magoos, one hit wonders who had reached # 5 on the Billboard charts earlier that year.  We became the only band in The Bend whose guitarist could play that break, so naturally it became our signature song.

I don't remember much about Bob except that, for a lead singer, he was quiet and kind of on the shy side; just the opposite of Sal.  They were both good singers, but with two different styles. Sal was the visceral Levi Stubbs to Bob's smooth Smokey Robinson.  Somehow both techniques worked well in a rock band.

During that musical era there were a number of bands which had goofy but catchy, sometimes nonsensical names: Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Electric Prunes, Vanilla Fudge, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, 13th Floor Elevators, etc.  The guys decided it would be hip to pick a name along the same vein for our new band.  We kicked around a few, and finally settled on Lemon Oil Mahogany.  It would be a better story (and name) if there was some hidden meaning to that choice, but alas, it came out of nowhere.

Kevin may have been full of bluster, but I will admit that he did, in fact, earn the one-sixth cut we agreed to give him to be our manager.  He got us as many gigs as we could handle, which, given the fact that we were up to our eyeballs in school work, amounted to only one or two a month.  We played at some clubs, house parties, bars (if they didn't ask if we were of legal age), and fraternal lodges around South Bend.  Terry was our biggest fan.  She never missed a show, and always showed up with a bunch of her friends.  Kevin always worked the room, passing out business cards with our band's name and his contact information.

Ironically, the most memorable gig we had was the one we never performed.  LOM was booked to play at a union hall in The Bend on Saturday night, April 6, 1968.  As you might know, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis two days before, April 4.  There were riots all over the country, and South Bend was no exception.  I remember Kevin getting ahold of us the next day and telling us that the situation in South Bend was not safe, and that he was going to cancel our booking.  I wouldn't be surprised if that was Terry's idea, but in any event, that's what he did.  Who knows, the venue may have cancelled the show anyway, even if Kevin hadn't himself.

Like many cities in the country, South Bend took awhile to recover from the riots stemming from the King assassination.  The tension was still in the air when we all went home for the summer. Needless to say, we did not book another show during that two month period.

After another summer grind of working at Olsen Tool, I was back at ND in the fall of '68, ready for my senior year.  With studying, going to class, reading and worrying about the Viet Nam war every day, and realizing graduation was on the horizon, Lemon Oil Mahogany took a back seat in our collective minds (at least in the minds of the three of us who were seniors, i.e., Gink, Maverick and me).  We decided that we had had a good run, we'd entertained a lot of people, and we mostly got out of the band experience what we had hoped for originally.  After the Christmas break, LOM never played together again.

***

In the year 2000, Momma Cuandito and I went on a road trip with Jill (The Minnow) and her friend Susan Martinson.  The water parks at Wisconsin Dells and lodging at an Amish farm in central Ohio were two biggies on our itinerary.  The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland was on my must-see list.  As the four of us presented our admission tickets at the door, Jill went up to a uniformed concierge and asked him with a straight face, "Could you please tell us where the Lemon Oil Mahogany exhibition is located?"  The poor guy answered that he didn't know.

Take The Ten, Bet On Green

You didn't really think I was going to pick the Crimson Tide in tonight's BCS National Championship Game, did you? The wise guys in Vegas have the Irish as nine and a-half point underdogs, and usually those oddsmakers are very accurate. Should the Irish even bother to show up tonight?

Is the Pope Catholic?

I have read a lot of the pre-game analysis and listened to the talking heads. In general there are a half-dozen main reasons why Bama is such a heavy favorite. I have listed them below, along with the degree to which I buy into the prevailing theory plus the Irish answer to the problem.

Reason # 1. Give Alabama head coach Nick Saban several weeks to prepare for a game and he will out-coach the opponent. I rate this pearl of wisdom at about 75%. Saban has already won the national title three times (once at LSU and twice at Alabama). There is a reason he is the highest paid coach in college football. However, ND head coach Brian Kelly is a formidable offensive strategist himself, and ND boasts a defensive coordinator, Bobby Diaco, who won the Broyles Award as the best assistant coach in the college ranks. ND's biggest wins this year were built upon the team's defensive performances. As the saying goes, offense puts fans in the seats, but defense wins championships.  Saban is not the only coach who's been scheming over the past several weeks.

Reason # 2. Alabama's offensive line is possibly the best unit in the history of college football. My "truth rating" here is 90%. It is pretty hard to argue against the merits of a line that features two first team All Americans (LG # 65 Chance Warmack and C # 75 Barrett Jones) and a second team All American RT, # 76 DJ Fluker. All five of the Tide's offensive linemen are road graders. The Irish antidote is simply this: Notre Dame has the best front seven in the country, and therefore will be the stoutest opposition the Bama behemoths will have faced this season. The three ND players who are most important here are first team All American ILB # 5 Manti Teo, second team All American DE # 7 Stephon Tuitt, and NG # 9 Louis Nix. One of the key mano-a-mano battles will be Nix against Jones. If Jones needs help from his guards to keep Nix at bay, the Irish linebackers will be spending a lot of time in the Bama backfield.  I put the over/under on Teo tackles at 11.  He will be a whirling dervish all over the field tonight.

Reason # 3. ND's secondary will not be able to keep up with Alabama's super freshman WR # 9 Amari Cooper. This statement rates a veracity score of 60%. I agree with the football gurus that Cooper will be the best wide receiver on the field tonight, but is he better than Southern Cal's two speed burners, Robert Wood and Marqise Lee? ND's defensive backs were able to hang with those two Trojans.  One of ND's cornerbacks, # 26 KeiVarae Russell, is a true freshman who last year was a high school quarterback.  I expect Alabama to attempt to pick on Russell.  Hopefully Russell can keep up with Cooper.  If not, one of the Irish safeties will have to help out with a double-team.  That will open up the running game for Bama. If the Irish can force Alabama quarterback # 10 AJ McCarron to get rid of the ball within three seconds, that will negate Cooper's speed to a certain extent. Look for lots of blitzes ordered up by Coach Diaco out of ND's 3-4 alignment.

Reason # 4. Alabama's first team All American cornerback # 28 Dee Milner is a shut down corner and will take away half the field from ND's passing routes. My buy-in: 40%. Although Milner is a great DB, he can only cover one guy at a time, and I do not believe he will be able to prevent ND's second team All American TE # 80 Tyler Eifert from catching the ball. Although Eifert is a tight end, ND frequently uses him more like a wide receiver, splitting him out to the far hash mark and sending him on deep routes. Eifert, at six feet six, has a five inch height advantage over Milner. ND also likes to use RB # 6 Theo Riddick as a pass catcher out of the backfield. When ND has the ball in the red zone, look for ND quarterback # 5 Everett Golson to try at least one alley-oop to Eifert, even if Milner is manned up against him.

Reason # 5. Alabama's quarterback # 10 AJ McCarron is a wiley veteran who won't make the mistakes that have plagued ND QB Golson. My merit rating for that observation is about 75%. McCarron is a pro-style passer who is not asked to carry the team on his back. He is good at making pre-snap reads of the defense, and usually benefits from several seconds of protection which his stellar offensive line affords him. Golson, by comparison, has been more mistake-prone, although he has improved immensely during the last third of the season. Unlike McCarron, who is not a threat to run by design, Golson is a very mobile quarterback who must be accounted for by the Alabama defense. Golson is the kind of quarterback that Bama has had its problems with recently, e.g., Johnny Manziel from Texas A & M (the only team to defeat the Tide this season) and Jordan Jefferson from LSU last season. If ND falls behind early, I think Kelly will be willing to take more risks with vertical pass patterns, and hope that Golson has brought his A game to Miami.

Reason # 6. Alabama is from the SEC, and has therefore faced better opposition than ND. I have a hard time giving this theory a credibility rating of more than, say, 20%. Anybody who thinks the SEC is not the best of the BCS conferences is not thinking clearly. The national champion has come from the SEC for the last six years in a row. But consider the fact that this season was not one of the usual great ones for that conference. The biggest upset of the bowl season was Louisville, a two-touchdown underdog, clobbering Florida in the Sugar Bowl. Most football writers considered Florida to be at least the third best team in the SEC. Georgia, which almost beat Alabama in the SEC Championship Game, looked a little shaky for awhile against a ho-hum Nebraska in the Capital One Bowl. Three of Alabama's wins this year were against non-conference foes Western Kentucky, Florida Atlantic and Western Carolina, all patsies compared to the teams ND faced in 2012. (Well, okay, Wake Forest was pretty weak.) ND had to beat Oklahoma and Southern Cal on the road, and took care of business in overtime against a very formidable Stanford team under a South Bend monsoon. The Irish will not be in awe of playing a team from the SEC, nor will the bright prime time lights give them the jitters. More than half of ND's games were in prime time, and all were nationally televised.

My sister Michele and I were at the famous ND-Alabama Sugar Bowl Game in New Orleans on New Year's Eve 1973. No one except the Irish faithful gave them much of a chance to pull an upset against the top-ranked Tide. The hero of the game was a second string tight end, Robin Weber, who caught a desperation pass by Irish QB Tom Clements out of his own end zone, enabling ND to run out the clock for the one point victory. It was only the second pass Weber had caught all year. This year, Notre Dame's second string tight end is a six-seven sophomore from Fullerton, California named Troy Niklas (# 85). His main role is that of a blocker in Notre Dame's goal line/short yardage offensive package. He has played in every game, but has caught only five passes. Wouldn't it be something if history repeats itself tonight?

When you are a Domer you can dream with the best of them. My dream is ND 24, Alabama 23, just like the '73 Sugar Bowl.

Dillon Hall Diaries: Black Matt Lowers The Boom

You already know from my two previous posts labeled Dillion Hall Diaries (February 6 and April 15) that during my last three years at Notre Dame I lived in Dillon Hall, the residents of which were sometimes referred to as "Dillon Dirt Bags." Yes, we wore that appellation proudly. But my first ND roost was Cavanaugh Hall, a "freshman dorm," during the '65-'66 school year. The rector of Cavanaugh then was Father Matthew Miceli, a no-nonsense middle-aged Italian Holy Cross priest, equipped mentally and physically to handle the unenviable job of keeping over 250 college freshmen under his roof in line. I write this post in memory of him.

I came to Notre Dame from Bishop Ryan, a Catholic high school in Minot, North Dakota, where the priest who was the principal, Father Blaine Cook, ruled with an iron fist. I realized this from the very first day I met him, when he bragged to my parents that the student body had recently overwhelmingly voted to compete at the Class B (small school) level in athletics, but that he had decided unilaterally to disregard that mandate and keep the school at the Class A level. Never mind that our enrollment numbers clearly called for us being in Class B. With the stern commanding tone thus having been set, I promised myself never to get into his dog house, mostly because I was afraid of the consequences which Father Cook meted out to offenders. To an observer my planned approach might have appeared as respect for the collar, and I suppose part of my good behavior was attributable to that. But mostly I behaved out of fear. I had many friends at Ryan who were more fearless than I, and I saw them pay the price. Father Cook was not a man you should anger.

This m.o. of mine regarding priests with authority carried forward into my freshman year in Cavanaugh. Father Miceli reminded me of Father Cook, and I made sure I toed the mark. One ND alum, Class of '68, recently wrote on Notre Dame Nation that Miceli's "fearsome reputation for cruelty was legend" and that guys who lived in other dorms on the Freshman Quad would not go near Cavanaugh in order to avoid an encounter with Black Matt. Speaking of legends, there was one about our Cavanaugh rector that claimed that he would sometimes wear one regular shoe and one tennis shoe at night so that when he ran down the hall after "lights out" it sounded like he was walking. Apparently, the story goes, in this way he could sneak up outside of a dorm room if he suspected something bad was going on inside. Whether the legend was true or not, the last thing I ever wanted to do was to cross Black Matt. I had enough to worry about, including tough academics and being a thousand miles away from home. But, as the saying goes, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

On October 9, 1965, the Irish were scheduled to play Army in Shea Stadium. It would be our fourth game of the season, and our third road game. The World's Fair was also being held in New York City at that time. During the summer of '65 I had received an application in the mail to sign up for a student trip to attend the game. The trip was sponsored by the Notre Dame Social Commission, a student organization which was charged with the almost impossible task of making college life in an all-male school fun. I showed the information package to my parents, who readily agreed to help me pay for the trip. Not only would I get to attend the football game and the fair, but this would be my first airplane ride as well. The Big Weekend could not come soon enough. We would leave on Friday afternoon and return Sunday evening.

Those of us lucky enough to be on the trip had a tremendous time. Most people probably remember things about their first ride in the sky. I am no exception, so please allow me this aside. I felt lucky to get a window seat on the plane, but I soon realized that most of my fellow male passengers couldn't care less about the view out the windows. A different view was more interesting, and for that they preferred to sit on the aisle. The reason? It was pretty tough to check out the flight attendants' ("stewardesses" in those days) curves unless you were on the aisle. The other main topic of conversation was that the legal drinking age in New York City was 18, compared to 21 in The Bend. The guys could hardly wait to walk into a Manhattan watering hole to enjoy several legal drinks. I was only 17 that early October, so I did not share their eager anticipation.

The Irish had no trouble with the Black Knights Of The Hudson, cruising to a 17 to 0 victory. We also got to the World's Fair, including a viewing of the Pieta, and everything about the weekend was perfect. That is, until I got back to Cavanaugh Sunday night.

I was looking forward to recapping the weekend highlights for my roommate (a New Yorker who did not go on the trip), but before I could get the first sentence out he advised me, "Black Matt told me he wanted to see you as soon as you got in." Although the rector's room was on the same floor as mine, I barely ran into him during the first five or six weeks of the school year. I was not sure he even knew who I was. I laughingly said to my roommate, "Well, I couldn't be in too much hot water because I haven't even been here since Friday afternoon." Plus, the trip to New York had the blessing of the university, so what could possibly be wrong? Despite what I thought was this sound reasoning, I was definitely worried as I made my way to the rector. All those rumors I'd heard about Miceli suddenly came back to me. The curiosity was killing me. The walk of about thirty yards down the hall seemed more like three hundred.

If you have seen The Godfather you know the look of a disgruntled Italian Don. That was the look of Father Miceli that night. There was no "hello," no "welcome back," no "how was New York?" With a sweeping arm motion he signaled me to enter his chambers, then he asked me two questions, the answers to which he already knew. First, "Where were you?" This struck me as odd, because the list of those who had signed up for the Army game trip had been posted by the Social Commission on Cavanaugh's bulletin boards, and nothing (Nothing!) was on those boards without his knowledge. Even though I knew that he knew the answer to his own question, of course I answered. His second question was, "Did you sign out with Joe?" Joe was our RA, and again I knew that Black Matt knew the answer was "no." All I could think of, in that split second, was the phrase later made so popular by the professional tennis brat, John McEnroe: "You can't be serious!" But of course I did not say that, for the reasons stipulated above.

The '65-'66 school year was the last year the dorms at ND had mandatory room checks. We had to be present and accounted for in our rooms by 10:30 each weekday night, and by midnight on the weekend. Once the RAs took our attendance, we were free to move about -- but not leave -- the dorm. All of the outside doors were locked except for the front door, and a security guard was posted there. If a dorm resident was on campus, he was required to abide by those rules. If he was going to be off campus, he had to sign out ahead of time with an RA. In my situation, the thought of signing out with Joe never crossed my mind because I mistakenly reasoned that signing up with the Social Commission was, in effect, letting the university know where I was going to be on that Friday and Saturday night. Signing out with Joe would have been redundant, form over substance. Wrong! I was AWOL.

Black Matt lowered the boom. He "campused" me for two weeks. That punishment meant that I was immediately confined to campus through the following two weekends.

Ordinarily that penalty would not have been too painful for me. I did not have a car and I had practically no money (especially after spending a weekend in New York City), so I rarely ventured off campus anyway. However, those particular upcoming two weeks were not scheduled to be ordinary circumstances for me. My parents were planning to make the 2000 mile round trip drive from Minot to visit me for the Southern Cal game weekend, October 22-24. Black Matt's punishment thus put me in a pickle. I couldn't tell my parents to stay home. They already had tickets for the Southern Cal game, a game which had been circled on the schedule for months by college football fans across the country. USC was ND's perennial arch rival, and the memory of the 1964 game in the LA Coliseum in which a phantom holding call cost the Irish not only the game but the National Championship was fresh on the minds of the faithful. The 1965 game was going to be The Revenge Game. (In fact, the main rallying cry at all the pep rallies preceding the game was "Revenge! Revenge!") My dad, the quintessential Irish Catholic, was the football team's greatest fan. There was no way he was going to miss the game. The other big problem was having my parents wondering how their son could possibly get into trouble with his rector after being in school less than two months.

After the first of my two weeks of punishment I asked Joe -- who, by the way, was a cool guy -- if he thought I stood a chance of getting Black Matt to waive the second half of my "sentence." Joe's reply, in essence, was "not a chance." He indicated that the rector sometimes campused guys for longer periods than two weeks for similar offenses. In retrospect I should have sucked it up and asked Miceli face-to-face for a break anyway. Instead, I talked myself out of it. I might have been a chicken, but at least I was a live chicken. I will never know if Joe was right, but he knew the priest better than anyone else in Cavanaugh.

The weekend of my parents' visit did not turn out to be so bad after all, proving once again what The Marquis always said: The things you worry about the most seldom happen. The Irish got their revenge, 28 to 7, lifting their record to 4 and 1. We spent a lot of time that weekend walking around the beautiful Notre Dame campus, and I enjoyed being the tour guide. The biggest negative was that I had been looking forward to eating with my parents in real restaurants, especially Portafino's seafood restaurant in nearby Niles, Michigan, but had to settle for Huddle burgers and the grog served up in the dining hall. The weekend flew by and then it was time for the tough goodbye. As my parents pulled away I wondered if they prayed that I would not get into hot water with my rector again.

***

Father Miceli passed away a week ago today at the age of 89. There has been a lot written about him on ND Nation and in the South Bend Tribune. What people had to say about him was all good. A few highlights: He was born in San Giuseppe Jato, Italy in 1923, and moved to the US when he was six years old. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1947 (the year I was born), and was ordained five years later. He celebrated the 60th anniversary of his priesthood earlier this year. He taught theology at ND from 1954 to 1962, and after a one year stint at the University of Portland returned to teach theology at ND from 1963 to 1993. He was the Cavanaugh rector for twenty-eight years, commencing in 1963, and when he left that position in 1990 he held the Notre Dame record for most consecutive years serving as rector of the same dorm. He lived out his retirement years residing in Holy Cross House on ND's campus and pursuing his favorite hobby, making wine.

Despite the legends which originated years ago, there is no question that Black Matt will be remembered by most as a good guy. In fact, a Notre Dame alum and former resident of Cavanaugh has established a scholarship at the university in Father Miceli's memory. Apparently Black Matt had a great sense of humor which my contemporaries in Cavanaugh did not get to see. In 1994, the last year before Cavanaugh was converted into a women's dorm, Father Miceli celebrated a Mass in the Cavanaugh Chapel. At the final blessing, he urged the male congregation to go out after graduation and make as much money as possible to donate to the university, so that the funds could be used to construct an additional women's dorm and "the urinals can be brought back to Cavanaugh."

I regret that I never made a point of getting to know Father Miceli. In fact, I avoided him during the remainder of my freshman year before moving into Dillon in the autumn of '66. I felt the punishment he laid on me the previous October did not fit the crime. Isn't that what the biblical verse "an eye for an eye" is all about? They say Italians never forget when someone does them a disservice. I am 50% Italian. Right or wrong, I was not able to get past the Army Weekend Incident. In retrospect, at some point I wish I had. On many occasions when I returned to Notre Dame following graduation, I made a point of paying a quick visit to Father "Flash" Flanagan, my rector in Dillon, but never ventured to the North Quad to see Black Matt. That was, and remains, my loss. May Father Miceli rest in peace.

Refusing To Sleep With The Enemy

In the world of sports, what if it would behoove your team to have your bitter rival win its next game against another opponent which poses a bigger threat to your team than does your rival?  That is the exact situation faced by fans of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish this coming weekend.

Under the current rules of the BCS (which stands for "Bowl Championship Series"), only the top two rated teams have an opportunity to play in the National Championship Game on January 7, 2013.  There is no tournament like the NCAA has for basketball.  The BCS ratings are calculated weekly using a somewhat complicated formula involving two polls (the Harris Interactive Poll and the USA Today Coaches' Poll) and six computer rankings.  Each of the six computer rankings takes into account not only a team's won-loss record but also its strength of schedule (SOS).  Thus, beating a team ranked, say, number 9 is worth more in the computer rankings than beating a team ranked number 19.  (Incidentally, the BCS system for determining the national champion is going to be replaced by a four-team playoff, starting with the 2014 season.)

According to the BCS ratings which were released two days ago, the top four teams, in order, are Alabama, Kansas State, Notre Dame and Oregon.  All four of those teams are undefeated, and since they are not scheduled to play each other, there is a decent chance - - I would put it at about 80% for each team - - that their records will remain unblemished throughout the remainder of the regular season.  Thus, the fans of each team will not only be cheering for that team; they will also be pulling for the other three top-rated teams to lose, thereby enhancing their own team's chances of getting into the National Championship Game.  Right?

As former Indiana head coach and ABC analyst Lee Corso would say, "Not so fast, my friend!"

Consider this coming weekend's slate of games.  Number 1 Alabama plays LSU.  The Crimson Tide is a 9.5 point pick, even though the game is in Baton Rouge.  ND fans will automatically hope the Tigers can pull the upset (even though the LSU head coach is a Michigan alum, the wacky Les Miles).  Similarly, Irish fans won't hesitate to cheer against number 2 Kansas State, which is an 8 point pick this weekend over visiting Oklahoma State.  However, it is the third battle, number 4 Oregon against Notre Dame's arch rival, Southern Cal, which is causing a division in the ranks of Irish boosters.  For which team should we cheer?

At first blush this should be a no-brainer, at least for the casual observer.  A win by Southern Cal, which is a seven point home dog, would deliver two immediate benefits to Notre Dame.  First and most obviously, it would knock Oregon from the ranks of the unbeaten and give ND some BCS breathing room.  (I am going out on a limb by predicting Notre Dame covers the seventeen point spread against Pitt in The Bend.)  Secondly, a win by SC on Saturday would benefit Notre Dame's SOS if the Irish manage to beat the Trojans over Thankgiving weekend.

There is, however, one tiny problem in asking this Domer, and many other Domers, to cheer for a Southern Cal victory on Saturday over the Ducks.  To wit, I would be cheering for Southern Cal!  You can call me a fool or you can call me short-sighted.  You can even call me Al.  I am sorry, I just cannot bring myself to cheer for the Trojans.

When I think of Southern Cal I think of cheaters like former running back Reggie Bush, whose family accepted at least $200,000 in illegal benefits from SC boosters.  I think of former head coach Pete Carroll, who got out of Dodge and fled to the Seattle Seahawks right before the NCAA lowered the boom with very tough sanctions, including drastic scholarship reductions and a two year bowl ban, against his program.  I think of phantom penalties in the LA Coliseum, including the invisible holding penalty which cost ND a national championship in 1964, not to mention mysterious holding and clipping penalties throughout the years which never show up during a replay review.  I think of athletic directors like Mike Garrett, who finally got fired for "looking the other way" when NCAA rules were being broken right under his nose.  I think of their football practices being open to visits from Hollywood stars and rappers who have no connection to the school.  I think of former quarterback Matt Leinart, who was enrolled in a single class, ballroom dancing, to keep his eligibility alive for his final season.  I think of Southern Cal's current coach, Lane Kiffin, a Minnesota native who is such a horse's patootie he makes Jay Cutler look like Billy Graham.  And of course, who can think of USC without recalling their most famous football player, stone cold killer OJ Simpson? Only a jury of his starstruck peers believed The Juice was innocent.

My theory is this: If Notre Dame keeps winning, things will work themselves out.  If I'm wrong and it turns out that a perfect season by the Irish does not result in a chance to play in the National Championship Game, so be it.  I will still be able to look in the mirror knowing that I didn't prostitute myself by rooting for an SC victory over the Ducks.  As we used to cry out during SC Week back in the day, "Puncture the Trojans!"

Dillon Hall Diaries: Emil T & The Pre-med Washout

Marriage and medicine weaved similar threads through the crystal ball of my youth. I could picture myself being married and therefore presumed that someday I would be married. Once in a while, like every blue moon or so, I even pictured myself being a dad. But I never, ever, pictured myself actually getting married. Too many variables would have to fall into place to lead up to my tying the knot. My thought was that if I could not wave a magic wand and - - ta dah! - - be a married man, it was unlikely to happen. But that was before I met Mary.

Similarly, I pictured myself being a doctor, most likely a pediatrician. When I was in high school I read "The Citadel" by A.J. Cronin, a novel about a young country doctor in Wales. That book greatly influenced me. If I could not become a pediatrician, maybe I'd become a general practitioner like Andrew Manson, the protagonist of "The Citadel," setting up a family practice out in some remote community. The obstacle to my dream was not being in possession of that magic wand. I could not imagine going through what it took to become a doctor, including achieving outstanding grades in college, then med school, followed by internships and residencies. Too tough, too long, too unlikely.

So maybe I wasn't thinking clearly in 1965 when I applied to Notre Dame and indicated an intention to major in pre-med. The Marquis thought it was a splendid idea and did his best to convince me to feel the same way. Being a salesman, he was adept at the art of persuasion. When ND accepted me, one of the priests at my high school told my parents that getting into the pre-med program (as opposed to most other courses of study) was truly a feather in my cap. The folks under the Golden Dome were not dummies, he said; they would not have taken me for pre-med if they didn't think I could do it. Once The Marquis heard that, there was no other path for me to even consider. Of course, my dad had never met Emil T.

Professor Emil T. Hofman was a legend in his own time. It's pretty safe to say that every single student at Notre Dame, not just those who had him for class, knew who he was. There were two pre-med programs at ND. One path initially took its students through the College Of Arts & Letters, the other through the College Of Science. Only those in the latter group, including me, had Dr. Hofman. He was "Emil T," and the road to medicine ran through Cushing Hall, where he taught freshman chemistry. It is difficult to reflect on my four years at Notre Dame without including Emil T in the playback.

Emil T arrived in South Bend as a student on the GI Bill in 1950. After serving as a teaching assistant for a couple of years while earning his masters degree, he began teaching chemistry at ND in 1953 and continued doing so for several decades thereafter. His class met three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and the section I was in was comprised of almost four hundred students. To say that Professor Hofman had a commanding presence as he lectured from the Cushing Hall stage would be a vast understatement. He did not need a microphone, as his baritone voice with a slight German accent could probably be heard out on the South Quad. My strategy for his chem lectures was the same as that for almost every other class I took: write down in abbreviated note form everything that the prof said for as long as I could keep up, and then try to make sense of it all after class. Sometimes I would be so busy trying to catch up, hoping that he'd pause to catch his breath, that I did not notice that he had left the stage and was prowling the large auditorium as he lectured. Even though he rarely called on students, it was chilling to hear him coming up my aisle. I'm sure the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

The most famous - - "infamous" is more like it - - aspect of Professor Hofman's class was the seven question quiz, sometimes referred to as "Emils," each Friday morning. I recall Thursday nights at the Grotto down by St. Mary's Lake, following hours of studying at the library. The place was so packed with students praying to Our Lady for good luck on the next day's Emil that it resembled the Saturday morning throng praying before a home football game. "Deliver us from Emil" was a phrase heard murmured by the supplicants. The quizzes were so hard and tricky that no amount of praying seemed to do much good. Each quiz was entirely multiple choice, and each question would have four possible answers. Our challenge was to pick the best answer from among choices "A," "B" and "C." We were to mark choice "D" if either (i) more than one of the first three choices were correct, or (ii) none of the first three choices was correct. I remember the first day of class, when Emil T was explaining the ground rules regarding the quizzes. Someone in the middle of the room got up and asked, if a student were to mark "D" for a particular question, how the prof would know for which of the two reasons the student had done so. It seemed clear to me that this student thought it was a bargain, courtesy of Dr. Hofman, to have one response for two totally distinct possibilities. Emil T replied, "I won't know, but believe me, it won't be easy for you." Truer words were never spoken. The quizzes were anything but easy. There were no bargains.

One piece of sage advice an upperclassman gave me was never to participate in the weekly "post mortem" rituals which took place in the Cushing Hall lobby after the Friday class was dismissed. In the post mortems the students would gather informally in small groups, before leaving the building, to discuss what answers they had given to certain questions posed in that day's quiz. As I found out, that was a sure fire way to ruin not only my Friday afternoon, but the entire weekend as well. Still, I usually could not resist at least eavesdropping to hear what some of my brainy classmates had to say. (I did not want to wait until the following Monday when Emil T, with kind of a sadistic grin, would go over the quiz.) The worst would be when I'd hear several students say with bravado that they had given an answer different from mine on a question that I thought was an easy one. Too many times it turned out that they were right and I was wrong.

By the time May 1966 rolled around I was convinced I was not doctor material. The future doctors had not broken a sweat in chemistry, while I had a lump in my gut every Friday. On the day of the final exam, Emil T entrusted his three TAs to administer an essay test. They passed out the blue test booklets, and the four hundred of us put our heads down and feverishly began to write. About four or five minutes into the test, a student got out of his chair, ripped up the test booklet with his hands extended above his head, and loudly proclaimed, "I just can't take it any more! I quit!" He flung the torn pages into the air and stormed out of the room. The rest of us applauded while the TAs put on their grimmest faces. I never found out if the guy who "quit" was actually a student who had been in Emil T's class all year, or if it was maybe somebody's roommate (in other words, a plant) who threw a make-believe tantrum on a dare. In any case, you might say I followed in his footsteps. During the summer I switched out of pre-med and enrolled in the College Of Business.

According to an excellent article by Brendan O'Shaughnessy which appeared in the autumn 2011 edition of Notre Dame Magazine, Emil T is still going strong at age 91. His retirement from teaching in 1990 was covered by the South Bend media. Since then he has remained active, with his new focus on philanthropic work for the people of Haiti. He has also, from time to time, assumed different responsibilities on behalf of the university. Of all the faculty and staff at ND during the years I attended, no person other than Ted and Ned (Fathers Theodore Hesburgh and Edmund Joyce, the top two administrators at ND) was better known or more highly regarded than Professor Hofman, and no one has been of more service to the school.

Back in the old days, the Readers' Digest used to have a column, contributed by different authors, called "My Most Unforgettable Character." When it comes to the teachers I had at Notre Dame, there are three, including Emil T, to whom I'd give serious consideration for the title of "My Most Unforgettable Professor." My guess is that a majority of the alums who once sat in his class would feel the same way.