Do You Love Football?! (3 page)

There's absolutely a correlation between practicing well and playing well. Players can see the film, why they're doing what they're doing, but at the same time if they half-ass their way through a day of practice, they're not going to have a true feel for what it's going to be like on game day. You want them walking off that field and going to bed at night knowing they've had a really good week of practice and are prepared to play. It builds confidence that everyone-players and coaches-will carry into the game. That is the Bobby Knight way.

Even though I was only in eighth grade, I got to attend Coach Knight's basketball camp for high school players. There must have been about two thousand kids packing the IU dorms.

Coach Knight never showed up the first two days. When he finally walked in to address us for the first time, it got really quiet. We were holding our breath, waiting to hear what he was going to say. In typical Bobby Knight fashion, he didn't start off with one of those mushy, phony-sounding "Welcome to my camp, kids . . . we're going to have a great time" lines. He started off by asking questions.

"How many of you guys play high school basketball?"

Everybody raised his hand.

"How many of you guys don't like your coach?"

About forty guys raised their hands.

"What makes you think your coach likes you?"

That, right there, was a big lesson that I have always carried with me. I didn't take a survey, but it's a pretty safe guess that most of the guys who indicated they didn't like their coach felt that way because they weren't starting; backup players always think they should be starting unless they happen to be one of those rare individuals who is just happy to be on the team.

Maybe they thought their coach made them work too hard or was too demanding. Coach Knight's point was that the relationship between a player and a coach is a two-way street and that a coach, either professionally or personally, just might not like a particular player. You always read about the player saying he's unhappy with his coach, but do you ever stop and consider that his coach might not be too fond of him, either?

When I was third-string quarterback at Dayton, it would have been so easy for me to talk about not liking my coach. It would have been so easy to bitch about working so hard in practice, yet never really getting the chance to prove that I should be the starter. Then I'd think back to what Coach Knight said and I'd begin to see that maybe the coach just didn't like me because I wasn't playing well or because maybe, in his eyes, I just wasn't working hard enough to become better. There can be a lot of reasons. Sometimes a coach dislikes a player to the point where he eventually becomes an ex-player. My dad taught me long ago that if you're not a smart guy, if you're not really instinctive and you make a lot of mistakes, you're not going to play. I'd hear him talk about a guy who had a hard time picking up the offense or who had a hard time executing properly, and what he'd usually say was, "Man, I don't like that player . . . Man, this guy kills me."

As a coach, it's hard to genuinely like or love all the guys on your team. You've got to respect them. You've got to coach them. You've got to work together, but when you think you can please everybody all the time and make everybody like you all the time, you're living in la-la land. We've got to be professional and we've got to have a common goal, which is to win. But we don't have to go to the beach together and go to dinner together and like the same movies and read the same books and listen to the same music. That's why Baskin-Robbins has thirty-one different flavors of ice cream.

I know that Coach Knight has done some things that are controversial, and he has to answer some questions. But I love that guy. He has always been great to my family and me. When my mom had a cancerous kidney taken out many years after we left Bloomington, I don't know how he found out where she was, but he sent her a huge, beautiful painting of the IU basketball uniform-jersey, shorts, Adidas high-tops and socks-with a personal, handwritten note.

Every time I pick up the newspaper, I look to see how Coach Knight's Texas Tech team is doing. He still looks like he did in '73 at Indiana and his teams still win. If I could be like that thirty years down the road, I'd count myself the luckiest man alive.

THREE
Notre Dame, Dan Devine, and the Best and Worst of
Witnessing Greatness from the Inside

WHERE IT ALL REALLY KICKED IN for me, where football became a part of my very soul, was in 1978, when the late Dan Devine hired my dad to be the running backs and special teams coach for the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. You had that enthusiasm-that genuine enthusiasm-around the program. You had the class and mystique of the Irish. You had the pride of the gold helmet.

You had the special kind of kids who go to Notre Dame. Those were the guys I wanted to be like: Joe Montana, Blair Kiel, Vegas Ferguson.

All highlighted by that unbelievable fight song: "Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame . . ." Hell, I still get the goose bumps whenever I hear it or whenever I see the Fighting Irish on television.

I began playing quarterback as a freshman at South Bend Clay High School. Dad would actually bring Notre Dame players to my football games. Seeing those guys in the stands jumping up and down, watching me play . . . man, I was in my glory.

When my dad was coaching at Indiana I had followed the Hoosiers' football team as religiously and as adamantly as I followed Notre Dame. But we took some real head-kickings at Indiana. Now we were on the other end of that. Instead of seeing my dad sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday night with his head down, not even touching his meal, he's going out to dinner and having alumni smacking him on the back And you have that fight song. And you have that national ranking in the newspaper. And you have everyone wondering, Who are we going to drill this week? That was awesome, man.

I was involved with the football team in every way they would let me be involved. Dan Devine had no problem allowing the coaches' sons to hang around the team. Normally it all depends on the head coach's policy. Some head coaches don't want kids around. Some head coaches couldn't care less, and that was Dan. When I wasn't at school I was down at the ACC, the Athletic Convocation Center on Notre Dame's campus. I would go in and lift weights with all the football players. I was part of the team's strength-and-conditioning program. I was watching spring practice. I knew all the players and they knew me. They were my heroes, my idols. The longer I was around the team and the older I got, the more involved I became with it, because I was closer in age to the players. Blair Kiel, our quarterback, would leave his car at our house because his mom and dad wouldn't let him have it on campus. So, never one to pass up a good opportunity, I would drive Blair's Pontiac Firebird out on dates.

All my dad's running backs would come over to the house.

Jimmy Stone, who wore forty-two; Phil Carter, twenty-two; Greg Bell, twenty-eight; Vegas Ferguson, thirty-two; Larry Moriarty, thirty-seven; Pete Buchanan, thirty-five. No, I did not have to look up any of those numbers. I know them by heart. And some things they did are hard to forget. Greg Bell once ripped the rim right off our backboard. He was supposedly the Ohio dunk champion, which, considering that he stood barely six-foot, I found hard to believe. I even told him, "You're too short to dunk it." So he jumped up and ripped down our backboard. End of conversation.

My dad would bring home all sorts of Notre Dame football gear. I wore Notre Dame turf shoes to class. I wore green and gold sweat tops. I wore Vegas Ferguson's actual jersey to class; it would hang down to my knees. We had AstroTurf in the basement of our house in South Bend. The wallpaper was a giant photograph of a crowd at a game. We had the yard markers and lines on the turf. We had replicas of the national championship banners up. We had the fighting leprechaun painted on our wall. It was a shrine to Notre Dame.

Of course, with all the time I spent with my dad at work, the actual campus was my home away from home. There were two reasons I shadowed him like that. One, it was fun to be around the ultimate college football environment. Two, it was usually the only way I could get to see my dad for any length of time because he wasn't home a whole lot. I was with him during practices. I listened to him call recruits on the phone. I'd go to basketball games and sit next to a kid whom he was recruiting for the football team, and watch him sell the kid. At some point my dad would always have to go see someone else or have some phone calls to make, so I'd end up sitting alone with the recruit. Afterward my dad would ask, "Hey, did so-and-so have a good time?"

"Yeah, Dad, he was really into the game. I think he's going to come to school here. He seemed fired up."

I was like his spy and would give my dad feedback on how all the visits went. One time I sat in the student section at a Notre Dame basketball game with Neil Maune, a top offensive lineman from Missouri. As usual, the students were on their feet from beginning to end-with one notable exception. When the game was over, I told my dad, "I don't think you're getting Neil Maune."

"Why?"

"The whole game, he never stood up. He just sat there reading something, not even watching the game. He acted totally uninterested."

To my dad's relief, Maune did end up signing with the Fighting Irish after all. It turned out that he just didn't like basketball.

I never accompanied my dad on the trips he made to recruits' homes, but I heard he was a great setup guy for the head coach to be the closer in the house. I realize it's easier to recruit football players for Notre Dame than for Indiana, especially at that time, but my dad was as relentless as hell. He covered all the bases. He was really good at finding out who was going to be the biggest influence on a recruit's decision-the high school coach, the kid's mom, his stepdad-and he would work on that person just as hard as he worked on the recruit.

I used to watch my dad coach his running backs; my brother Jay and I sometimes would be the quarterbacks for his ball drills. I didn't know the playbook and I wasn't aware of all the protections that were called and so forth, but I knew that my dad knew what he was talking about. I knew that he had his players' attention. I knew that every year he was there, Notre Dame had a thousand-yard rusher.

It also was no coincidence that the backs my dad coached hardly ever turned the ball over. He demanded excellence. He set a standard that his players had to follow and they followed it-or they didn't play for him. What came through loud and clear from my dad was that you should try not to have guys on your team who repeatedly make mistakes and if you do, try to replace them as soon as possible.

I'd love to tell you about how I witnessed one of the greatest moments in the history of Notre Dame football-the 1979 Cotton Bowl against Houston. But I can't. That's because I only stuck around long enough to see us fall behind 34-12. New Year's Day, 1979, brought one the worst ice storms in the history of Texas. It was cold, windy, miserable as could be. A lot of people left the game early. Unfortunately I picked that game as the first and only time I had ever walked out on the Fighting Irish while my dad was on their coaching staff.

I was with my best friend, Scott Johnson. His father is Jim Johnson, the outstanding defensive coordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles. Jim worked with my dad on that Irish staff and at Indiana before that. Anyway, as painful as it still is to admit, Scott and I walked out on Notre Dame, got on one of the team buses, and just waited to go home-with our heads in our hands.

Then some frostbitten lady got on the bus. She had sucked it up and stayed the whole game. "That's the greatest game I've ever seen," she said through chattering teeth. "We won!"

At first we thought she was smoking something. We went running down to the locker room, slipping and sliding the whole way. When we got there, I couldn't believe my eyes. My dad was on the floor, celebrating with the players. As soon as he spotted me, he jumped up and grabbed my shoulders.

"Did you see the end of that game?" he yelled.

I almost didn't have the heart to answer him, but I knew I had to.

"Uh, no," I said in a faint voice.

"He missed the whole thing," said my brother Jay, who had toughed it out and was all too happy to inform our father about what a wimp I had been. "He was on the bus."

On the bus and unaware of the incredible magic that Joe Montana was performing inside the stadium. The last I knew he had been sick. He had missed most of the third quarter because of a below-normal body temperature. By the time he returned, the game looked pretty much out of hand. And with Joe sick and us trailing by twenty-two points, the ice storm provided a good excuse for Scott and me to leave. Who could have ever imagined that Joe would be able to fight off his illness and rally us to a 34-34 tie on the final play of the game? Who could have ever believed that it would come down to Joe Unis, a Dallas native, kicking the extra point with no time remaining to give the Fighting Irish a 35-34 victory.

Even worse than missing Montana's heroics was not seeing two of the guys who we were hanging around with all week Steve Cichy and Tony Belden, B-team players who were just getting their first taste of action-play a huge role in the win on special teams. Steve blocked a punt and Tony caught it and ran it in for a touchdown to give us a chance near the end. Those were the guys playing pinball with us during the week.

My dad still busts my chops about leaving that game early. When we're playing golf and he's three shots up on me after three holes-as is usually the case because he's an excellent golfer-he says, "I'll bet you want to go get on the bus and leave, don't you? I know you want to get on the bus."

I was there only for Joe Montana's senior year so I didn't get to know him really well. Of course, I'm not so sure how close we would have been even if I had lived in South Bend through his entire college career. He was Joe Cool, the first genuine superstar player that I had ever been around, and I was too intimidated to even approach him.