By Bob Markus

Notre Dame football fans are about to run off another football coach--perhaps justifiably so--and there's nothing unusual about that. Happens all the time (see Alabama, UCLA, Texas A & M, et al). But this is Notre Dame, America's school, whose subway alumni stretch from the A train in Manhattan to the remotest part of Alaska where the natives think a subway comes on a footlong bun with lots of mayo. This is Notre Dame, the school of Rockne and The Gipper, Lujack and Lattner, Ara and Montana (Joe, not the state). Did I mention the Four Horsemen?

I suppose there are schools that could come up with a roster of football immortals that would rival those in Notre Dame's Pantheon. But no other school has Notre Dame's mystique. What other school has a religious icon with the whimsical name Touchdown Jesus? What other school could get away with a nickname that is, if you examine it, an ethnic slur? Sure, and don't the Irish love their boozing and their brawling? In short, Notre Dame is supposed to be different.

Perhaps it is unfair to hold the Irish to a different, higher, standard. Charlie Weis, whose job hangs in the balance after losing 15 games the last two years, still has a winning (28-23) record at Notre Dame. So did the last three other coaches who were axed--Gerry Faust, Bob Davie, and Tyrone Willingham. But merely winning is not good enough at Notre Dame. You have to win big--like Rockne did, like Leahy did, like Parseghian and Devine and Holtz did.

I'm not defending Weis, who has done nothing to indicate he is the right man for the job; I'm just pointing out that, since Lou Holtz left, more or less on his own terms, after the 1996 season, Notre Dame has gone through three coaches. The program now appears to be nearly back to the mess that Parseghian pulled out of a quagmire when he took over in 1964. The Irish had not had a winning season since 1958, when Terry Brennan's last team went 6-4. Brennan had a winning record in four of his five seasons and his 1957 team ended Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak in one of college football's biggest upsets.

Brennan's firing shocked many fans. Hardly older than his players, Brennan's only previous head coaching experience had been at Mt. Carmel High school in Chicago. He had been an assistant at Notre Dame for only a year when he was elevated to the head job, replacing the iconic Leahy, just five years after his own graduation from the school. Many saw Leahy's finger prints all over Brennan's letter of dismissal, but Brennan, who never coached another football game, did not express any bitterness in public. However, in 1969, after I had written a column ripping Leahy's performance as a TV football analyst I received the following letter from him:

Dear Bob:

I read your article this morning about Frank Leahy. I thought you used great restraint because the list of people he has hurt to suit his own special purposes is a long one. I am delighted to see a fine reporter of your caliber call a spade a spade and let people know what kind of person Leahy really is. Good luck.
Sincerely

Terence P. Brennan

In any event, Brennan's dismissal was prelude to the darkest period in Notre Dame football. Parseghian wasted no time in leading the Irish back into the sunlight, guiding the Irish to a 9-1 season and nearly to a national championship in his first season. The Irish won their first nine games and led Southern Cal 17-0 at halftime, before the Trojans came back for a 20-17 victory. Two years later Parseghian got his national title despite the controversial 10-10 tie with also unbeaten Michigan State.

I was part of the Chicago Tribune coverage of that game in Spartan stadium, but I was assigned to the Michigan State locker room. I didn't think I'd written a particularly good story, but when I returned to work the following Monday I was called into Sports Editor George Strickler's office and told The Tribune was breaking its long-standing tradition of having only one sports column and that I was going to write the second one.

That gave me the opportunity to address the real story of that year's "Game of the Century," Parseghian's decision to run out the final 84 seconds and take the tie when the Irish got the ball at their own 30. Like many others, I criticized that decision, but Parseghian told me that with starting quarterback Terry Hanratty hurt and with his backup, Coley O'Brien, a diabetic who needed to take insulin daily, he was not going to take any "foolish chances." When Notre Dame routed USC 51-0 on the final Saturday of the season, Ara was vindicated as the Irish were crowned national champions.

My relationship with Parseghian rather mirrored--in reverse--my feelings about Notre Dame itself. As a small boy I was a huge Notre Dame fan and the worst day of my young life was the Saturday when I sat in a dentist's chair having a tooth extracted while listening to Army pounding Notre Dame 59-0, with the cadet core screaming in the background: "More yet, more yet."

I don't know when my feelings started to change. Perhaps the first time I saw a game at Notre Dame and saw how obnoxious their fans were. When the crowd applauded an injury to a rival player, that was enough to turn me off. Ironically, while I came to dislike the idea of Notre Dame football, the reality was that every time I had to deal with a Notre Dame athlete I was impressed with how courteous and articulate the players were. And their public relations staff was always incomparable, from Charlie Callahan to Roger Valdiserri to John Heisler. The first time I can recall going to Notre Dame was for a scene setter before the 1965 Michigan State game, which was almost as highly hyped as the following year's. Michigan State, destined to win the national title in one wire service poll, was unbeaten while Notre Dame had lost one game early in the year.

Callahan was the sports information director at the time and couldn't have been more helpful. In those days you could take a train from Chicago to South Bend and, when I came back on Friday night before the game, Callahan was at the station waiting for me. He dropped me at my hotel and said, "I'll pick you up for dinner in 45 minutes." I said, "but Charlie, I've got to write my advance." "Write fast," he said.

I sensed, even going back to his Northwestern days, that Parseghian didn't like me. I'm not sure if it was the questions I asked or the way I asked them and he never said anything overtly hostile, but that feeling was there. Later, he became more cordial and this last summer when I saw him at John Pont's funeral he was quite friendly.

The day that Parseghian resigned at Notre Dame after 11 seasons and a 95-17-4 record, I received a call at home from Sports Editor Cooper Rollow. "Get up to Green Bay," he said, "and talk to Dan Devine. There's been a report that Ara Parseghian is resigning and Devine's going to take his place."

My relationship with Devine went all the way back to his years of coaching at Arizona State in the 1950s. I was in the Army at the time, stationed in Yuma, Az, and one of my duties was to be a disc jockey on a local radio station every Saturday afternoon. There I became friendly with Chuck Benedict, the play-by-play announcer for Sun Devils games, and he took me along as a spotter.

So, when Devine became head coach at Missouri, my alma mater, I was very aware of who he was. I didn't get to know him, however, until he became head coach of the Packers. Covering the Packers on the road one week-end I got into a long conversation with Bart Starr, who was then coaching the Packers' quarterbacks, and Bart had some quite disparaging things to say about Devine. But at the end of our talk, Starr said, "Please don't print any of that."

I honored his request, but inserted the phrase, "Bart Starr, who has little reason to love Dan Devine," near the end of my column. I was astonished when, just a few days later, I got a letter from Devine, who was both general manager and head coach of a team in the middle of the season. Devine asked me who had given me the idea that Bart was not enamored of him and I wrote back, rather cravenly, that I couldn't remember how I'd gotten the notion, but that I was a Missouri grad and hence aDan Devine admirer.

Devine had a strange way of answering questions. He would talk for minutes at a time and you would write down the salient points but when he was through and you looked at your notebook you would find he really hadn't said anything. Rather like the candidates on those Presidential debates.

Now, I was sitting in his outer office, along with the Packers' beat men and columnists, just waiting for Devine to emerge from his inner sanctum. When he did, he confirmed that he was leaving the Packers to take the Notre Dame job. He thanked the local writers for their support, such as it had been, and then, after a final farewell, said to me, "Bob, come into my office." When I got there he said, "I just want you to know that whoever gets this job will find it in better shape than I did when I got here." What a master stroke! In one sentence he had absolved himself of any responsibility for his lacklustre record at Green Bay and burdened his successor with unrealistic expectations. That successor just happened to be Bart Starr.

Whatever his failings at Green Bay, Devine was a good college coach and he won a national championship in his six seasons at Notre Dame. After a five year interlude when it again tried to win with a high school coach, Gerry Faust, Notre Dame snatched Lou Holtz away from Minnesota. Once again I was in on the story, hurrying down to South Bend for Holtz's first press conference. I had interviewed Holtz for a magazine length story when he was coaching at Arkansas and, as an interview subject, he was the antithesis of Devine. A glib speaker, who supplemented his income by giving inspirational speeches, he also was a magician so gifted he probably could have earned a living on the stage.

By the time Holtz left Notre Dame after a successful 11-year run, I had retired. So I never got to meet Davie or Willingham, or Weis. Now, when I see Davie on television and watch Willingham's professional life fall apart in Washington I feel a little guilty about any feelings of satisfaction I might have harbored when they were struggling at Notre Dame. As for Charlie Weis, I hope he's given one more chance to prove himself. Does that mean I want him to succeed or fail? I wish I knew the answer.