I started writing this after Notre Dame beat Texas A&M Week 1 of the College Football season. I’ve watched Notre Dame lose that type of game a thousand times and as it came down to the wire I was sure they would find some way to lose again. Somehow, they pulled it off. A solid victory over a ranked SEC team in one of the craziest environments college football has to offer sparked the optimist in me. I even went to church Sunday after the game to thank Touchdown Jesus for finally delivering a needed big win.
I started looking at the schedule ahead and thought…this might be the season. This might be the time that Notre Dame rewinds the clock to its glory days and wins the whole damn thing. Wins one for the Gipper. Wins one for Lou Holtzshhhhh. Wins one for Rudy for fucks sake. Boy was I wrong. That whole beautiful mirage of a national championship came crashing down in week 2.
With that in mind, I will continue this post as intended. The gist is to explain how one becomes a Notre Dame fan and in turn what that fandom means. I was going to leave out the perennial heartbreak, but I guess this year the heartbreak just came a little bit earlier (and unexpected) than it would have in years previous.
Without further ado…
How One Becomes a Notre Dame Fan
Notre Dame is one of those brands that is country wide. There are fans from California to Florida to Maine. They are like the Yankees or the Cowboys. Geographical nearness to the team means nothing. I’ve been to Indiana a handful of times and don’t really want to go back (unless it’s to South Bend), but I am still a diehard Notre Dame fan. You could also assume that most Notre Dame fans actually attended the school. But if we are being honest, the majority of fans are WAY too stupid to actually get in to Notre Dame (myself included). So how does something like this happen? A rabid fan base crossing the entire country that all bleed Kelly green? Well, the first and most obvious answer is…
1 – You watched Rudy at a malleable age
You want to know how to make a grown man cry? Throw on Rudy and watch the waterworks flow like Niagara Falls. If this movie catches a boy at the right time of his life, usually around 10 or 11 years of age, when the hopes and dreams of becoming pro in any major sport have not been dashed, then that boy will never be the same. The probability of that boy becoming a Notre Dame football fan are impossibly high. The boy will want a Notre Dame varsity jacket, the boy will know the name Ara Parseghian, the boy will know the Gipper speech, the boy will find a stool to stand up on and say “were gonna go inside, were gonna go outside, inside and outside…”, the boy may even want that ridiculous middle bar facemask.
What’s even crazier about Rudy is that as you grow up and realize you will NEVER make it in any pro sport then the movie takes on an entire new significance. Some movies lose their luster as you grow old, Rudy ages like a fine wine. It teaches you that no matter what life throws at you, you have to keep fucking dreaming and keep fucking working to make that dream come true. I consider myself the Rudy of the publishing industry. All I need is one glorious play published novel to consider myself a success.
Rudy is so crucial to a Notre Dame fan’s upbringing that we can even forgive Sean Astin for becoming a #WhiteDudesForHarris member (and Frodo). To us he is, and always will be, Rudy.
2 – You grew up around Irish people
Irish people are a very fun bunch. This is undeniable. It is one of the reasons I wouldn’t trade growing up in New Jersey for the world. Jersey is filled with exports from the Emerald Isle. They drink, they dance, they sing, they laugh, and they don’t care how loud, long, or often they do so. The fact that one little island in the Atlantic has spun off such an amazing diaspora is a testament to the American dream. The Irish have a way of making you feel at home no matter where they are. They have a knack for pulling you under their wing and never letting go. You want to be around them and they want to be around you. And in order to really become one with the Irish, you have to root for their favorite team.
I met my best friend, Sean Smith, at the ripe age of 7. If you couldn’t guess, he is very Irish. He has gotten sun poisoning. He can chug a Guinness in 2 seconds flat. He can poke a hole in a can with his bare fingers and shotgun a beer all in one motion. He drinks, dances, sings, and laughs for longer than I could ever dream of. But most importantly, his dad was my lifelong football coach.
Big Sean, Sean’s dad, would lock us in the basement at a very young age to watch film. That’s right, around the age of 10 I knew how to read defenses and find tells in a Mighty Might team’s game plan all before I could get a boner. Football is in my blood because of Big Sean. It will never leave. And you know what we did after each film session? We watched Rudy of course. You know what we did after every Saturday game we played? Watched Notre Dame of course.
If you’ve grown up around Irish people and are as charmed by them as I am, then you really have no choice.
3- You are Irish
The cherry on top, for me, is that I am Irish too. My Grandmother’s maiden name was Kennedy. She had a picture of JFK on her bedside table. She drank scotch. She was a devout Catholic. She referred to herself as Carolyn Kennedy Muka, even though she never legally hyphenated her name. She liked clovers and green and she LOVED being Irish.
If you are Irish it’s hard to imagine routing for any other team. If there was a baseball team called the Fighting Cooking Cubans you bet your ass I’d switch allegiance from the Yankees. It’s just so easy to fall into the trap of becoming a Fighting Irish fan when you are a Fighting Irish yourself.
The craziest part about Notre Dame’s team name is that some morons have called for a name change. They find the name runs counter to their “morals”. “The Fighting Irish is a stereo type the Irish need to fight against, every day,” these weirdos might say (the irony isn’t lost on me). According to a poll the Irish’s mascot, a leprechaun, is the 4th “most offensive” college football mascot in the country. The dope Max Kellerman said “Pernicious, negative stereotypes of marginalized people that offend even some among them, should be changed.” This just goes to show that if you are listening to a talking head on a TV screen, you are doing it wrong.
Little does Mr. Kellerman know the term “the fighting Irish” was originally an insult hurled at the school and its players for being Irish and Catholic. But in true Irish Catholic style, they used this as a rallying cry. Instead of whining about the prejudice others held against them, they flipped it like B Rabbit in 8 mile and made it their team name.
Any true Notre Dame fan, especially the Irish ones, have a sick and twisted pride about the name. I would chain myself to the stadium entrance in protest if they ever thought about changing it.
What being a Notre Dame fan means
What it means to be a Notre dame to me personally is something that goes back to the days of the Smith’s basement watching film and Rudy and Notre Dame football. I feel like a kid every time I watch those gold helmets run out of the tunnel. Though at one point I had wished to be a Notre Dame player, I came to the realization that I am too slow and too stupid, but that still has not taken away my fandom. But what being a Notre Dame fan means to most of the world is…
1 – You are either loved or hated
Everyone has an opinion on Notre Dame. They are like Duke in basketball. You are either in love with the team or you absolutely abhor the team. This hatred goes deeper than just the team though. People hate the team, the pomp, the fans, even Rudy! It’s sad to see everyone who is not a Notre Dame fan hate them so much. It’s jealousy, I know. It can be forgiven. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there at all times.
2 – You may never win a championship again
This is the bitter pill all Notre Dame fans must swallow. It is quite possible that the heyday of Notre Dame University football will never return in my lifetime. Notre Dame has won the 4th most national championships out of all college football teams. They’ve won 13 to be exact. The problem is that the majority of those championships were won before the 1950’s. The last time Notre Dame won a national championship was 1988, 2 years before I was even born. Every year I go into the season with absurdly high expectations only to watch the team crumble against behemoths like Alabama or Ohio State. It’s a sad state of affairs when Notre Dame is losing to Northern Illinois, a MAC team, as three touchdown favorites in week 2 of a season you thought might be the one.
But there is clearly something to glean from the way I became a Notre Dame fan. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Rudy it is to never give up. I will bleed green for the rest of my life and I will follow in Rudy’s metaphorical footsteps. I will always have hope that Notre Dame will win the whole damn thing until my dying day. And if they don’t, at least I’ve been lucky enough to live a life surrounded by Irish people, rooting for the Fighting Irish.
P.S. – The NIU game almost broke my fandom. It was a pathetic loss I may never recover from.
P.P.S - The 66-7 beatdown of a dogshit Purdue squad last week has me all the way back into thinking this is the year.
P.P.P.S. – There’s nothing like watching a bunch of college kids try to get a ball across a line to make or break your entire weekend!
P.P.P.P.S. - Rudy was not offsides, you’re just a Notre Dame hater.
The origins of the name are debated but one is that Robert E. Lee used it to refer to a specific group of Irish Union soldiers who handed him his traitorous ass. Another is that there was a KKK march in South Bend and the students went out there and beat their racist ass.
Regardless, whenever there’s fighting Irish around someone’s getting their ass kicked. ☘️
I'm about a decade older and grew up in rural Kansas, and yet pretty much everything in this hits home with me, including the roller coaster ride from A&M to NIU to Purdue and all the way to the title game last year. Here's hoping we both have the same feeling tonight we had after the A&M game (or after the first drive of the title game).