Starting Five

1. Peyton, Denver: Hot, Hot, Hot.

The Mile High City tied a114 year-old  mercury record for the month of September, hitting 97 degrees earlier in the afternoon. Then Bronco quarterback Peyton Manning went out and became the first player since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 to toss seven touchdown passes in a game, which ties the NFL record. The last player to do so? Joe Kapp of the Minnesota Vikings in 1969.

The others?

Y.A. Tittle, New York Giants, 1962.

George Blanda, Houston Oilers, 1961.

Adrian Burk, Philadelphia Eagles, 1954.

Sid Luckman, Chicago Bears, 1943.

You may recognize the names Kapp, Tittle, Blanda and Luckman. Three are members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, as Manning one day will be, while Kapp is an eccentric figure whom Sports Illustrated once labeled in a cover story “The Toughest Chicano” (take that, Aaron Hernandez).

Burk is not in the Hall of Fame, but he’s worth learning about. Upon retirement he became an attorney and an NFL referee. Burk actually worked the game in which Kapp threw seven TD passes. More memorably, he was the back judge for the Oakland Raiders-Pittsburgh Steelers 1972 playoff game, the unforgettable Immaculate Reception game. Burk was the first referee to signal Touchdown as Harris crossed the goal line.

And now you know…the rest of the story. I’m Paul Harvey, good day.

2. Hello Kitties

Interesting piece in The Daily Beast about Tashirojima, an island off the coast of Japan ( itself an island) where kitty cats outnumber people by a four to one ratio. This is also the case in many apartments in Manhattan, but hey, who wants to write that piece? My favorite part of the story is that only one of the island’s 100 humans is below the age of 45, so let the old cat lady stereotypes commence.

Look at it from the kitties’ perspective, though. Tashirojima is a fishing village (yum!) where dogs reportedly are banned. This is cat heaven.

3. Not Feeling Minnesota

So Katie Heaney of Buzzfeed.com authors a piece titled “The 29 Most Minnesotan Things That Ever Happened” but there’s brushback after a savvy Minneapolis weekly reveals that many of the items in her piece did not actually take place in Minnesota. We reached out to Miss Heaney –yes, actual first-hand reportage here on MH, which may be a first– and to her credit she replied promptly and politely (now THAT is Minnesotan).  “We did add a correction!” Heaney tweeted. ” I implied images were representative but should have made that clearer in subtitle originally.”

The heck do ya mean?

4. A Second Cat Item? Seriously?!? WTF (Way Toomany Felines)!

 

When the more popular blogs find this, I know they’ll run it immediately, so I thought I’d take it now. A spectacular photo journal of a jaguar attacking a caiman in Brazil. I took this from The Huffington Post, which took it from visionarywild.com, which is a very cool site. You have to wonder if the photographer, Justin Black, who founded visionarywild.com, ever stopped to think, How safe am I if that jaguar was able to sneak up on a caiman?

5. Why SI Was Wrong

Two days ago Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Rosenberg posted a story, in advance of tomorrow night’s prime-time Notre Dame-Michigan contest, titled “Michigan-Notre Dame Rivalry Was Always About the Money.” In the piece, which is factually accurate, Rosenberg attests that the rivalry was born, circa 1978, because both schools were looking to increase revenue. Twice in the piece Rosenberg, a Detroit-based writer, notes as an aside that Notre Dame and Michigan had pre-1978 history. He points out that they hadn’t played for years due to a feud dating back to the time of Fielding Yost, Fritz Crisler (both Michigan men) and Knute Rockne, and that they’d played nine times between 1887 and 1909.

Of course, this is like me writing a summary of Michael Jackson’s career and noting that “he’d done some decent things musically before the release of ‘Thriller’.” It’s like discussing the fact that Sylvester Stallone has written a movie that will be released this fall (he has, actually) and noting as an aside that Stallone has “dabbled in screen-writing before.” Um, that would be Rocky. In short, Are you F’ing kidding me, Mr. Rosenberg and Sports Illustrated?

Worse, yesterday Rosenberg’s colleague at SI, Pete Thamel, one of the nation’s most respected college sports reporters and writers (at least until last fall’s Manti Te’o debacle), tweeted, “The great @Rosenberg_Mike gives us the real story behind ND-Michigan. Great history weaved in here.”

I don’t mind if Joe Tailgate gets it wrong, or fails to understand a story in context. I do mind, though, when a pair of SI senior writers do, because the net effect is that a myth is promulgated.

Michigan-Notre Dame was not always about the money. It was always about the hegemony.

Was Rosenberg’s story factually incorrect? No.

But to understand the Notre Dame-Michigan rivalry from 1978 is to purely not understand it or why it so shaped not just both school’s futures, but the entirety of college football.

To begin: To live well is to eat well, and to eat well is to eat Italian. Similarly, to understand America is to know college football, and to know college football is to know Notre Dame (KNOW, not “love”). If you cannot get on board with that, stop reading: I can’t help you.

Notre Dame’s first football game –in fact its first three– were all against Michigan, all defeats. The inaugural contest, played on Thanksgiving morning, 1887, was an 8-0 loss. The two played twice in 1888 before the Irish finally broke through and beat Harvard Prep School (Ill.) for the first win in program history.

Notre Dame and Michigan would meet eight times between 1887 and 1908, with Michigan winning all eight times by a combined score of 121-16. To be fair to the South Bend-based school (not yet known as the Fighting Irish), they did a number on Northwestern Law School (20-0), Illinois Cycling Club (18-2), Highland Views (82-0), St. Viator (60-0), Kirksville Osteopath (28-0) and Physicians and Surgeons (88-0) during this same period.

Then, in 1909, Notre Dame beat Michigan, 11-2, and Wolverine coach Fielding Yost said, “Waaaaaaait a minute.”

Now, understand, Yost was not used to losing. Between 1901-1905 Michigan went 55-1-1, including a 49-0 demolition of Stanford in the inaugural Rose Bowl in 1902.

The two schools would not play again until the midst of World War II, meeting twice, in 1942 and 1943 (each side won once). Then, except for some highly secretive games that were only televised in upstate New York, apparently, the two schools would not meet until 1978. Which is where Mr. Rosenberg’s narrative begins.

The story of how they did NOT meet and how that altered the entire landscape of college football, THAT is the essence of the rivalry.

As briefly as possible: Yost did not appreciate an upstart program from a private, Catholic institution in his own backyard. Further, he felt that (you’re going to laugh) there might be some recruiting improprieties taking place under the noses of the Holy Cross fathers in South Bend. Not only did Michigan refuse to play the Irish but the Wolverines, the most powerful school in the Western Conference, issued a fatwah of sorts against Notre Dame, urging all member schools not to play them.

And nobody did. In 1915, an era of train travel, Notre Dame’s road games took place in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska (Nebraska and Creighton), West Point, NY (Army), and Austin and Houston, Texas (Texas and Rice). Omaha was the closet road trip. Note well: no games versus current Big Ten schools.

When Yost issued his fatwah, Notre Dame had to make a choice: downsize and become, basically, Marquette (a school the Irish played almost annually at the time) or dream big. Most of the priests wanted to do the former, but coach Jesse Harper –in my mind THE single most influential name in the school’s gridiron history, bigger even than Rockne, who played for him– implored them to do the latter. As a result, Notre Dame took to barnstorming.

(By the way, if you’re noticing a parallel between Notre Dame in the 1910s and Miami in the 1980s, bully for you. Highly similar, which is what made the whole “Catholics vs. Convicts” rivalry so ironic.)

That the Irish adopted the Pat Hill model (or is it vice-versa) of playing anyone, anywhere, any time is only part of the tale. The other two parts? One, they won. And two, they did it largely with Italian and Irish immigrants at a time when A) those people only dreamt of sending their own sons to college and B) the greatest wave of immigration in U.S. history was taking place.

Thus, a phenomenon was born, and Knute Rockne was the ultimate P.T. Barnum-like character to be the face of it. It didn’t hurt that Grantland Rice –after whom a website would later be named — mythologized the school and its gridders a la Beano Cook.

And thus, in the Golden Age of American Sports, the 1920s, the only thing as big as Babe Ruth and boxing was Notre Dame football. Whereas most of college football was regionally based, and biased –as remains the case today –Notre Dame transcended geography or regional distinction –as remains the case today.

None of that happens if Yost takes his beating like a big boy and maintains the series with Notre Dame post-1909.

THAT, and most importantly that, is the essence of the Notre Dame-Michigan rivalry. It irreversibly shaped Notre Dame, which in turn irreversibly shaped college football.

Among major football powers, Michigan and Notre Dame are Nos. 1 and 2 all-time in winning percentage (.734 and .733) and Nos. 1 and 3 all-time in overall victories (903 and 865; the Irish trail Texas by two). That alone should make Notre Dame and Michigan a sight to behold when they meet in the Big House tomorrow night –a stadium, by the way, whose design Knute Rockne chose to shamelessly copy as his model for the construction of the current Notre Dame Stadium.

But to base a story on the Notre Dame-Michigan rivalry from 1978 on is to blatantly misinform your readership.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for Pete Thamel to tweet a link of this out to his followers.

Note well: This information is not due to my diligence. This is largely the work of Murray Sperber, whose “Shake Down The Thunder” is a thorough and unvarnished look at the rise of Notre Dame football. And, by the way, it is not a homer’s guide. Sperber’s portrait of Rockne, et al, is sober and often unflattering.

 Remote Patrol

Soccer: USA at Costa Rica

beIN Sport, 8 p.m.

I don’t understand either why ESPN or Fox Sports or even NBC Sports Network doesn’t have this World Cup qualifier from San Jose, Costa Rica, an authentic grudge match. The U.S. has never won in Costa Rica, while Los Ticos is still furious over last March’s Mile High mayhem in which the game was played in the midst of a blizzard. My, have we come a long way in six months, haven’t we, Denver? How big is this game? Keith Olbermann made it his lead story last night, noting that Costa Rica failed to supply the Yankees with balls with which to practice. Tune in — if you can find it.