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Notre Dame has rich history and tradition, but not all of it is what it seems No. 1 Tigers down Oklahoma, will face Alabama for championship on Jan. 11
As with anything, there are pros and cons to being a die-hard fan of the Notre Dame football team.
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The Legends: Many schools have legends, but with Notre Dame, legends tend to become Hollywood movies. Remember the catchphrase “Win one for the Gipper?” It was based on George Gipp, a Notre Dame player who died of pneumonia in 1920 and who was immortalized eight years later in perhaps the most famous halftime speech in history.
With Notre Dame locked in a tie with Army, coach Knute Rockne repeated Gipp’s final words. Notre Dame beat Army, and Ronald Reagan, the future U.S. president, went on to play Gipp in the 1940 film adaptation, Knute Rockne, All American.
The Traditions: There is a pep rally, and there is a sprawling tailgate, but there is more at Notre Dame than you might find at other campuses. For the spiritual, there is the Grotto, a man-made replica of a French shrine where believers can light a candle and savour just a moment’s peace amid the madness.
The Victory March: It is not the fight song, it is the Victory March, and it is more than a century old, having been written by two Notre Dame graduates. It is up-tempo, with traces of the music popular at the time, and it has crept into all corners of popular culture.
The Accessibility: Its broadcast deal with NBC — which will run through the 2025 season — means Notre Dame is perhaps the easiest team to find on the dial every week, even in Canada, where U.S. affiliates beam those games across the border. That sense of accessibility extends to the school’s campus in South Bend, Ind., where alumni and fans mingle without many of the barriers that might otherwise be expected from a private institution.
The Campus: With favourable traffic and border conditions, the drive to campus from Toronto can be completed in about seven hours.
Some make the pilgrimage from much further afield, and some only once in their lives. (In another movie, the 1993 underdog parable Rudy, the protagonist’s father, on entering Notre Dame Stadium for the first time: “This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen.”)
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The Legends: Many of Notre Dame’s cherished legends have benefitted from decades of polish, which serve to obscure the more nuanced truths. Take the story of George Gipp, the early star who became an immortal with the halftime speech delivered long after his death. In reality, Gipp was allegedly a drinker and a gambler.
“Gipp was the team’s bookie,” James A. Cox wrote in a 1985 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, according to the New York Times. In 2011, Daniel Ruettiger, the basis for the movie Rudy, agreed to pay $382,866 (U.S.) to settle a case with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Traditions: Tradition does not separate Notre Dame from other universities. If anything, it only distracts from how Notre Dame faces the same troubling questions being asked on campuses across the U.S. and Canada.
In 2010, Lizzy Seeberg, a 19-year-old first-year student at nearby St. Mary’s College, killed herself days after accusing a Notre Dame football player of sexual assault. No charges were laid. Tom Seeberg, her father, has, among other things, accused the school of conducting a “superficial” investigation into what happened.
The Victory March: It is ubiquitous on campus, and difficult to escape elsewhere. It had a cameo in the 1980 farce Airplane! — the hero’s old friend was name George Zipp, hence “win just one for the Zipper” — and it can be purchased through any number of items on the campus bookstore. The bookstore is only part of a massive merchandising undertaking. “Has there ever been a university savvier about the commercial possibilities of football than Notre Dame?” Joe Nocera asked in the New York Times earlier this year.
The Accessibility: With tuition, board and other expenses, Notre Dame estimates that it would cost $64,775 to be a student this year. That would work out to about $90,000 — for just one year, which does not really seem all that accessible.
The Campus: If the traffic is reasonable and the border is clear, getting to South Bend is only a seven-hour drive. The problem? How often do traffic levels ever approach “reasonable” in Toronto, and how often would a border crossing be clear on a game weekend?