Perfect Rivals

by Jeff Carroll

Overview

College football is a sport of rivalries—and no two teams were ever more perfectly matched than the Miami Hurricanes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. In Perfect Rivals, award-winning sportswriter Jeff Carroll takes us inside the locker rooms and onto the gridiron, as two storied programs with very different cultures battle for national supremacy, school pride, and the soul of the game itself.

Beginning with the Hurricanes’ nationally televised 58–7 pasting of the Irish at the Orange Bowl in November 1985, the two teams faced each other five times over a six-year span. The last three of those games had national championship implications, as a resurgent Notre Dame sought to reclaim its historic preeminence against a faster, mouthier, more talented Miami squad notorious for trash-talking opponents, stalking out of pregame buffets, and wearing military fatigues on the team plane. The games were marked by heartbreaking finishes, disputed plays, and nasty onfield brawls. Adding fuel to the fire was a controversial slogan created by a Notre Dame student and picked up by the press—“Catholics vs. Convicts”—which served to heighten the cultural (and, some would say, racial) tension between the opposing schools.

Carroll’s fast-paced, up-close-and-personal narrative centers on a handful of colorful characters on both sides of the rivalry: the coaches, from dapper Jimmy Johnson to punctilious Lou Holtz, and the players, including Miami’s Steve Walsh, a quiet Midwesterner and one-time Holtz recruit who defied the freewheeling Miami stereotype, and devout Baptist Tony Rice, only the second black quarterback in Notre Dame history, who defined the rivalry and decided the contests.

Filled with you-are-there depictions of game action and insights drawn from Carroll’s unfettered access to many of the major figures involved, Perfect Rivals is a vivid re-creation of one of the most entertaining eras in the history of college football.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345523150
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/31/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jeff Carroll is a freelance writer for the South Bend Tribune and The Times of northwest Indiana. His work has been honored seventeen times by various professional organizations, including the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press Sports Editors, and the Illinois and Indiana state press associations. He lives in the Chicago area with his family.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Monumental Task

"Young man, how long have you been playing football?"

Chuck Lanza looked up from his seat. Worn-out physically and emotionally from the whirlwind of the last week, particularly the last three days, he had allowed his posture to become relaxed and his mind to wander as he sat in a classroom with the rest of his Notre Dame football teammates. He had his feet propped up in front of him. He had been lazily examining his fingernails. "I was a little bit cocky at that point," Lanza says.

His new head coach, Lou Holtz, had noticed Lanza's demeanor. And he didn't like it.

Now the five-foot-ten, small-framed Holtz stood over the hulking offensive lineman. He wanted an answer to his question.

"I don't know," Lanza said. "Ten, eleven years?"

"Well," Holtz replied, "if you ever want to play another down, you will put your feet on the floor, sit up straight, and pay attention."

Message sent, message received, and not just by Lanza. Elsewhere in the modest auditorium, located in Notre Dame's Athletic and Convocation Center, wide receiver Tim Brown and quarterback Steve Beuerlein exchanged a knowing glance: This guy meant business. There was a long way to go--a very long way--but at least this seemed like a good start.

Holtz had loomed over the preceding few days, a span as difficult as any in Notre Dame's storied football history, as a distant figure. Some younger players, associating Holtz only with his previous employer, the University of Minnesota, knew little about him. While heeding his warning to sit still and shut up, they privately sat wondering where this guy, fresh out of the Twin Cities, got off taking such a tone with them. After all, most of them wouldn't have looked Minnesota's way had a scholarship come attached to a room assignment with the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Upperclassmen, on the other hand, remembered him from his successful days at the University of Arkansas. Lanza, a southerner, had even been recruited by Holtz and had sat in his office in Fayetteville once upon a time. That had been a much more pleasant conversation.

Whatever impressions his new players had developed from recent news stories, prior knowledge, or tidbits circulating the grapevine, this was Holtz's first face-to-face encounter with the team he had just inherited. Understanding the odds he faced, he knew he had to make this initial meeting count. After all, the last few months under the previous head coach's regime hadn't been merely difficult, they had been toxic, bringing the proudest program in the land to the lowest moment in its history.

Faust had resigned just six days earlier, throwing the days preceding the last game of Notre Dame's season--that ill-fated trip to Miami--into chaos. Then came the weekend that wouldn't end. In fact, Faust had addressed his players just minutes before Holtz, in the same classroom in which they now sat at rapt attention. After a teary ten-minute farewell, Faust exited. About two minutes later, in walked Holtz.

In a private meeting with Faust during the week, Holtz had complimented his predecessor on his overall recruiting, but said he wished Faust had left him some more speed on the roster. That would have to come later. For now, the men gathered in the room for Holtz represented what he had to work with. Because Lanza had been the unlucky one sitting in the front row and giving in to his justifiable exhaustion, not to mention his somewhat less justifiable sense of exaggerated self-importance, he had borne the brunt of Holtz's stern message. But it had been meant for everyone.

"I want you to sit up straight!" Holtz barked. "Put your feet on the floor, keep your heads up, your eyes forward, and get ready to talk about winning football games."



When Dan Devine, a national champion coach in 1977 at Notre Dame, announced his retirement in 1980, the university's administration hired not one of the many able college coaches who would have jumped at America's most prestigious job, but instead Faust, who had never coached above the high school level. Not that Faust had been a run-of-the-mill high school football coach in his twenty-one years at Archbishop Moeller, just down the road in Cincinnati. He oversaw a veritable high school football empire, an empire he had built largely from scratch. Moeller's two-hundred-page game program brought in $30,000 in advertising revenue a year, and one unforgettable Friday evening Moeller outdrew baseball's Cincinnati Reds. At the time he left, Faust, also Moeller's athletic director, had been negotiating for Moeller to play a game in Japan.

On the field, Faust's last few seasons at the school were likely unmatched at that level anywhere, any time, before or since. In seventy-one games played from 1975 through 1980, his final season at Moeller, Faust's teams lost one game. They won five Ohio state titles and four mythical national titles. Working tirelessly on behalf of his players, Faust had sent three hundred of them on to college football scholarships, including fourteen to Notre Dame. The university powers that be had noticed.

Beyond all of that, Faust was considered by many to be about as nice a man as had ever walked the face of the earth. He was a proud Catholic who began every day with early-morning Mass, and a devoted husband who still wrote his wife, Marlene, thank-you notes. "His world is a hundred yards long," wrote biographer Denny Dressman, "with a goal post at one end and an altar at the other." In other words, he was a perfect fit for Notre Dame in the eyes of its administration, which still believed that Notre Dame didn't hire great coaches but rather created great coaches. A gifted football coach and motivator--Faust jetted around the country delivering motivational speeches to businesspeople in Moeller's off-season--and a prince of a man, Faust would never do anything to embarrass the image-obsessed school.

Off the field, at least. On the field, whatever else graced his resume, he was still a high school coach. He had no preparation for the rigors and pressure of the job that greeted him in South Bend.

Faust's first batch of Irish players were skeptical of him from the time his hiring was announced, and he didn't do a tremendous job winning them over. The college players considered themselves grown men and wanted to be treated that way. They had serious doubts that a lifelong high school coach would be able to relate to them, and Faust unwittingly confirmed their suspicions, getting his players' contact information removed from the university's student directory. In today's celebrity athlete culture, the move would hardly be considered drastic: Most detail-oriented modern coaches, obsessed with maintaining a grip on every aspect of their programs, would consider it a necessary step to keep outside influences and distractions at arm's length. But in 1981 many Irish players felt the move was paternalistic and displayed a lack of respect and trust by the new head coach.

After a tough loss during Faust's first season, a few upperclassmen visited a popular downtown South Bend bar, Corby's Irish Pub, to drown their sorrows for a few hours. It was a pretty standard way for of-age Irish players to blow off some steam. But, according to Notre Dame linebacker Bob Crable, Faust "went ballistic." Yet again, Faust's players felt as if they were being treated like children.

Faust baffled his players by devoting much of an early team meeting to trivial changes to their uniforms: They felt they had spent an inordinate amount of time on the color of Notre Dame's game socks. The players, just a few weeks removed from giving national champion Georgia all it could handle in the Sugar Bowl, felt as though they had a good grasp on the time and effort required to be a successful college football team. Their new head coach, fresh off the high school sideline, was painfully proving that he did not.

"You had the sense right away that he was in over his head," says John Krimm, a first-stringer on Faust's first team. "I don't think he appreciated the physical and mental toll that, week in and week out, the season would take on a college player versus a high school player."

There were some triumphant moments during Faust's tenure, including a convincing victory over Louisiana State University (LSU) in his head coaching debut and an upset victory over No. 1-ranked University of Pittsburgh a year later. But the disappointments were more frequent. Under Faust, the Irish lost four consecutive games to Air Force. They played to a 13-13 standstill in 1982 against an Oregon team that had lost its first six games of the season--and thirteen of its last fourteen dating back to the season before.

"We were a very depressed group of young men," says Mark Bavaro, an All-American tight end under Faust. "I couldn't wait to get the heck out of there. If the rules had allowed you to leave early back in those days, I would have tried like mad to get out of there."