by John Walters

Happy Thanksgiving!

I wanted to take a few minutes to address a few words written by a friend of mine yesterday, words that in total I won’t reproduce here. Suffice it to say that if you know what I’m talking about, I’m mostly referring to the lead paragraph.

As an alumnus, what mostly caught my eyes were the words “high-minded sanctuary” and “perception….is all there is.” The Notre Dame I attended, and I doubt it has changed all that much, was replete with decent, funny, hard-working kids who took school but not themselves very seriously. In fact, there was no better way to be ostracized in Dillon Hall than to be full of yourself. Self-deprecation equaled survival.

One story: my roommate, a 6’5″ swimmer who probably could have played tight end on the football team if he’d truly wanted to (as a back up), was an outstanding athlete and brilliant in school (he since has acquired a PhD in mechanical engineering). But, during a sophomore SYR (hall dance) he got wildly drunk and threw a bucket-ful of punch at me (I’m sure I deserved it). He was stopped by an R.A. The R.A. asked him his name and room number. My genius roomie gave a false name (“Pete Smith”) but then provided the correct room number.

A half hour later came a knock on our door from the rector and my roomie, real name Jeff, got into a spot of trouble. The point is that for the next two-plus years we referred to him either as “Pete Smith” or “Sh*thead” and he just grinned and took it.

When the upcoming ESPN “Catholics vs. Convicts” doc arrives, you’re going to learn a lot more about another guy from my dorm, Pat Walsh. Pat was a good enough athlete to make the basketball team as a walk-on, but he was also mischievous and entrepeneurial enough to mass produce a line of T-shirts, cobble together enough friends to help him sell them, and pocket about $35,000 (in 1988) in one week.

At the end of that glorious October Saturday, Pat knocked on the door of our wonderful rector, Fr. Joseph Carey (the same guy who’d read Jeff the riot act), and asked if he could stash the money there overnight. “Cares,” as we all called him (a nickname he earned), reluctantly agreed, putting himself in tremendous jeopardy by doing so. But that’s why we loved the guy.

And while all of this was going on, quarterback Tony Rice, who would make the cover of SI three times in a four-month span that season (has anyone other than maybe Michael Jordan had that many SI covers in so short a period?), was living in our dorm amongst us fellow students and just being as funny and approachable and down to earth as any human possibly could be. One of my closest friends to this day was Tony’s R.A. and hey, you wouldn’t go to Tony for help on your Physics lab, but you were always welcome to hang out with him and just shoot the sh*t (he was like a much less crazy Tracy Jordan from “30 Rock”).

Last March I attended the funeral of the father of a Chicago born-and-bred Notre Dame classmate of mine. His name was John Boler. Now, Mr. Boler did not attend Notre Dame (he graduated from John Carroll, so maybe I’m really as a Notre Dame alum taking credit here that belongs to a John Carroll alum) but he made sure that his children did. And in the last 40 or so years of his life he was as supportive of Notre Dame as anyone you’ll ever meet, mostly because he loved what the university stood for.

You can look it up, but John Boler donated $20 million to Rush University Medical Center (the largest private contribution in the hospital’s history) to help build a new tower. The hospital had saved Mr. Boler’s life twice and his wife’s once and so John Boler asked what he could do to help. And the hospital, which was in the midst of a $300 million fund-raising campaign, requested $20 million. I’ll let John’s son, my good friend Matt, take it from here:

“My dad told the leadership it was a family decision since it was so big and we all went to meet with them together.  At the meeting, my dad told Dr. Larry Goodman, the CEO, that he wanted to help and handed him an envelope.  In front of everyone, Larry opened the envelope and inside were two lottery tickets.  My dad said with any luck they would win and it would pay for the whole thing.

Larry and the leadership looked at each other uncomfortably and laughed awkwardly, clearly unsure about what was happening.

My dad then told them that of course we would make the gift.  Once my dad did that, it was a few weeks before another family made a matching $20 million gift.  They were off and running.  To a man, everyone at Rush will tell you the tower could not have been built if my dad had not made the initial gift.”

The Boler family has probably donated as much (if not more) to Notre Dame and much of it anonymously (yes, I just went Ted Danson on “Curb…”, but I’m outing him; he didn’t out himself). John Boler, by the way, grew up without a father and literally slept in a closet. He was entirely a self-made man. When his son, my friend Matt, celebrated his 50th birthday this summer, a massive affair, he hired a band based on the fact that the band would be giving all the profits from the gig to military veterans. That’s pretty in line with the people I’ve come to know from Notre Dame.

Anyone who works in or covers college football knows Tim Bourret, a good friend of mine and the associate athletic director at Clemson. Tim is a Notre Dame alum who has all the traits of Domers that I love: he’s smart but not arrogant; decent but not pious; helpful and kind but not saccharine; honest and trustworthy and quick to laugh. Tim’s just a good egg. He’s the ideal Notre Dame person and he’s the typical Notre Dame person, too (Note: I’m probably the biggest asshole that Notre Dame has produced, at least in terms of people you may have heard of).

Notre Dame isn’t perfect nor has it ever claimed to be. But it does strive to be good and true to its ideals, inside and outside the football program. Players start out inside the dorms and live amongst their fellow students and many continue to do so all four years (one notable exception was Jimmy Clausen, whom Charlie provided special dispensation for, which is a reason Clausen never quite got Notre Dame…even though he’s seemingly now figured out a way to make that association work for him at NBC).

There is obviously a tension, one that also exists at places such as Stanford and Northwestern, when your student body all finished in the Top 3% of their high school classes academically (probably higher now) and your football team is populated with students who finished in the top 1% of the nation on the gridiron. The average Notre Dame student is as ill-equipped to score a touchdown versus Virginia Tech as one of its football players is to get an “A” in general chemistry.

And so, of course, most do not take general chemistry, but most do the work and most give an honest effort. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain that institutionally, from the adults who run the place, that there is no institutional corruption taking place. There is tremendous pressure to succeed at Notre Dame (and many other schools, yes) and young people succumb to taking short cuts. What I have seen is that when they do, and when Notre Dame finds out about it, they punish them and then welcome them back after they have sat out a semester. From Julius Jones to Everett Golson, both of whom sat out an entire year and then returned (and there are others), this is the case.

Almost always, these players (as well as students who are not athletes) return. They want to be at Notre Dame.

I was a varsity athlete at Notre Dame. I rowed crew. We had 5 a.m. practices. One late winter morning I hit the alarm at 4:4o a.m, as usual, and opened my door in Room 335 in Dillon. Staring back at me was an avalanche of laundry bags (at the time the guys had our laundry done for us, a late vestige of overt sexism). A few friends, paying me back for a prank I had pulled, had spent part of the wee hours going down to the basement and then toting giant sacks of laundry back to the third floor so as to create a mountain, stretching floor to above my door, of laundry sacks. They’d then taken a photo of themselves leaning proudly against their mountain. Somehow I eventually dug myself out. And then I began thinking about payback. That’s how we made it through winter, in that interminable span between the end of autumn and the start of Bookstore Basketball.

Every year John Heisler, the associate athletic director at Notre Dame, puts together a book called “Strong of Heart.” Each edition has profiles of Notre Dame alums or former employees who had some connection to the athletic department. And every year I do one or two profiles of them and am humbled not so much by the accomplishments of the people, but by the strength of their character.

This fall I did a profile of Thom Gatewood, the first true African-American superstar at Notre Dame (after Alan Page, but Tom played offense). Tom held the Notre Dame career receptions record for Notre Dame from 1971 until 2006, but he never bragged about it. When Tom was going to be a senior at Notre Dame, he asked a white student in his dorm who was not an athlete to be his roommate. This was in 1971. Not typical. The two men are still close friends to this day.

When Thom was dating his future wife, Susan, he never told her that he had played football. Or that he had played at Notre Dame. Or that he had been an All-American. She had to drag it out of him after a month or so of dating, basically playing 20 Questions with him. Thom, whose dad was a construction worker and mom a homemaker, was a black kid from a tough neighborhood in Baltimore who spent all eight semesters at Notre Dame on the Dean’s List. He was recruited by every major school in the country (O.J. was his host at USC and Bo Schembechler promised him “I’ll change my offense for you”) but he chose Notre Dame because, as he says, “Ara Parseghian didn’t promise me anything.”

These days, still in fantastic shape, Thom gives tennis lessons to the children in the community where he lives, many of them the kids of Asian or Turkish immigrants. None of them know that he was once Joe Theismann’s favorite target, or that he appeared on TV with Bob Hope as an All-American, or that he was recently voted into the College Football Hall of Fame. That’s not Thom’s style.

Anyway, this has been quite the rambling and somewhat incoherent essay (apologies to my Freshman Comp & Lit prof). Suffice it to say that as long as Notre Dame exists and attempts to play big-time football, there will be a certain amount of tension in trying to both uphold the school’s academic and ethical values and, you know, not sucking. Not losing to Duke and Navy in the same season. But those of us who went there, just about every last person, know this: If Notre Dame is even the least bit a great institution, that is because at its core it is a good place. Of this I am certain.