By Bob Markus



In a perfect world, Notre Dame would have waited a week to fire Charlie Weis or Tiger Woods would have settled for a cold shower. As it is I now have two huge national stories to comment on, three actually, if you count the virtual sacking of Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden, whose 34 year tenure at Florida State has taken him beyond the bounds of regionalism and into the national spotlight.



Let's start with Tiger, whose post-midnight prowl on Black Friday gave the newly-minted term for the day after Thanksgiving new meaning. Woods may be among the world's greatest drivers, but apparently that applies only to the golf links. Behind the wheel of his SUV, Woods appears to be a duffer. How else explain his double bogey--a demolished fire hydrant and a bruised tree--at the home hole? Indeed, his failure to explain where he was going at 2:30 in the morning, why he presumably floored it exiting his driveway, why he was wearing no shoes, and just how he lost control of his vehicle is the very crux of a story that has made front page headlines throughout the known world. Who knows what the Martians are using to fill the news hole these days?



By Florida law, Woods doesn't have to tell anyone, including the police, what happened and there are many who believe that he has every right to remain silent. And he does. But he has already discovered that the absence of information inevitably leaves a vacuum that will soon be filled with rumor and innuendo. Surely, even those who most staunchly defend and even encourage Tiger's silence must wonder what did happen. Everyone has his own interpretation of the few facts that exist and here's mine: Tiger and his wife have a violent argument, not in the physical sense, but in the decibel sense. The argument probably has nothing to do with the consistency of the mashed potatoes in the recently consumed Thanksgiving dinner. More likely Elin, his wife, had seen the article in the National Enquirer which claimed that Woods was having an affair with a woman from New York and confronts him with it. He denies it (or maybe he doesn't) but at some point the discussion escalates to the point where Woods is agitated enough to storm out of the house, jump into his car and stomp on the gas pedal. He likely wasn't wearing a seat belt, which would account for the facial bruises and brief period of unconsciousness that has been reported.



If that is the truth of the matter, or something near the truth, it would serve Woods well to own up to it. Most people could relate to that. What married couple hasn't had a knockdown, dragout screaming match at least once in their lives? I've had more than one myself and my ultimate response has been to walk out of the house with the appropriate slamming of the door (just to make sure she knows I'm leaving) and walk off my anger.



Woods' image, which along with his unmatched golfing brilliance has made him a billionaire, is going to take a hit no matter how this story plays out. Perhaps it will soon be forgotten, as other sports heroes' escapades have gone away. How many people think of his rape trial when they watch Kobe Bryant play for the Los Angeles Lakers? Chances are, Tiger will keep winning golf tournaments and piling up endorsements, but for the short term when you hear the name Tiger Woods, "great golfer" will not be your immediate mental response. Rather, you might find yourself wondering, just why did Tiger's wife have that golf club in her hand when she went out to see what had happened?



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Notre Dame is easy to love and easier to hate. Its football players, by and large, are good kids who stay out of trouble. You rarely hear of a Notre Dame football player being involved in a barroom brawl. But its fans are insufferable. That's why being the head coach of Notre Dame's football program is the second toughest job on earth. Barak Obama has the toughest. The last three Notre Dame head coaches have all been fired, despite posting winning records. None of them lasted longer than Charlie Weis's five years. The longest tenured Irish coach was also, arguably, the greatest--Knute Rockne. The Rock served for 13 years and might have gone on for 13 more had he not been killed in a plane crash.



Since then there have been three more highly successful coaches at Notre Dame. Curiously, they each coached the Irish for 11 seasons and quit while they were ahead. The three of them, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, and Lou Holtz all had something in common when they took the reins in South Bend. Experience. Frank Leahy was 20-2 in his two years as head coach at Boston College before coming to Notre Dame in 1941, just as America was preparing to go to war. His teams lost only four games in three seasons before he himself went off to war and when he returned he was even better.

His teams went undefeated for four consecutive years, then, after three comparatively mediocre sesons, he ended up with a fifth undefeated season. That one was marred by a 14-14 tie against Iowa in a game that changed football history. The Irish scored their two touchdowns on the final play of each half after faking injuries to stop the clock. His successor, Terry Brennan, had no head coaching experience at the college level and was a Leahy assistant for only a year. Despite four winning seasons out of five and a monumental 7-0 upset of Oklahoma, which broke the Sooners' 47-game winnning streak, Brennaan was fired. Then began the bleakest era in Fighting Irish history and it was Parseghian who came to the rescue. Ara had loads of experience when he took the Notre Dame job in 1964. He had been at Miami (o.), the Cradle of Coaches, for five years and at Northwestern for eight more. He had twice guided the perennial doormat Wildcats to the No.1 spot in the polls, only to see the dreams fade away because of a lack of depth. It was to fulfill his ambition to coach a national champion that he took the Notre Dame job and he almost accomplished it in his first season. The Irish, in a stunning turnaround (they had gone 2-7 the previous year), won their first nine games and led Southern Cal 17-0 in the season finale before losing 20-17. Nevertheless quarterback John Huarte went from obscurity to the Heisman Trophy during the course of that magical season. Parsegian got his national title in 1966, either because of or depite the infamous 10-10 tie with Michigan State. He repeated with an undefeated team in 1973 but in another year, burned out by the pressure, he retired, never to coach again.

Parseghian's successor, Dan Devine, had plenty of experience. I first met him when he was coaching Arizona State in the 1950s. I was stationed in Yuma, Ariz. at an army base where, as public information specialist I had a disc jockey show on Saturday afternoons. There I met Chuck Benedict, the radio voice of the Sun Devils, who took me along as a spotter on several occasions. Later Devine coached at Missouri, my alma mater, and with the Green Bay Packers, where I got to know him fairly well. On the day Parseghian resigned, acting on a tip, I flew to Green Bay, where Devine was getting ready to announce he was leaving for the Notre Dame job. After ending a hastily called press conference in the late afternoon, he crooked a finger at me and said, "Bob, come into my office for a minute." When we were alone, he said to me, "I just want you to know that whoever gets this job here will start with better personnel than I had when I got here." That was typical Dan Devine. In one sentence he had absolved himself of blame and put pressure on his successor, who happened to be Bart Starr.

I covered several Notre Dame games while Devine was head coach, including his only loss, 20-13 to Mississippi, in a game played in Jackson, Miss. That loss came early in the year and Devine's Irish won the national championship by beating Texas, 38-10 in the Cotton bowl. Devine worked for six years in the pressure cooker before resigning. To replace him the Irish turned once again to an untested coach, Gerry Faust, who had a brilliant record as a high school coach in Ohio, but no college head coaching experience. That turned out to be a disaster and, so, the Irish went back to the tried and true, hiring Holtz away from Minnesota. Before that he had seven successful years at Arkansas, where I first met him. You couldn't help liking the man. He spoke quickly, and with a lisp, and performed magic tricks with true dexterity. As coach at Notre Dame, Holtz won a natyional championship with a 12-0 team in 1988 and finished second in 1989 and 1993. The Irish haven't been in serious contention since Holtz left. During Monday night's NFL telecast Holtz commented on the Notre Dame situation, noting that the three coaches who followed him were good men, but lacked experience. Bob Davies and Weis had never been head coaches, he reminded and Tyrone Willingham had only a few years as head man at Stanford. Actually he coached the Cardinal for seven years. Holtz also dismissed the popular conception that it's easy to reruit at Notre Dame. "Notre Dame recruits nationally," he said, "which means when they recruit in Oklahoma they're going against Oklahoma and Oklahoma State and when they recruit in Pennsylvania they're up against Penn State."

I don't know who the next Notre Dame coach will be, but it's likely to be an experienced, successful college coach. Several names have been put out there, but there's one name I haven't heard and I wonder why. How long has Nick Sabin been at Alabama now. Two years, three? Isn't it time for a change?

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Bowden has spent 34 years turning Florida State from an ugly frog into a handsome prince. He didn't deserve the kissoff he was given Monday by school administrators. Their offer to keep him on for a final year with diminished responsibility was an insult. You're either head coach or you're not. Bowden was right to turn the offer down. Bowden not only was a great football coach, but a great guy. I covered his team only once. It was a battle of Titans against Miami and Bowden's team lost it when he went for a two point conversion in the final minute and missed. The next morning he hosted a media breakfst and was charming. I hope he enjoys his retirement. He once said that "after you retire there's only one more big event in your life." I hope, too, that he enjoys many little events before the inevitable big one.