Support for Irish doesn’t stop at border
Some Canadian diehards travel vast distances to see team play in South Bend, Ind.
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.— Three years ago, with two friends he met at the University of Notre Dame’s football fantasy camp, John P. O’Neill bought a five-bedroom, ranch-style house in South Bend, Ind., just a few hundred yards from the school.
They have a golf cart, and “we drive ourselves to campus.”
O’Neill has season tickets for football, behind the marching band, near the five-yard line. He has given money to the school — an amount he described as “just silly” — and travelled to Boston earlier this season to watch the Fighting Irish play at Fenway Park. One hundred and eight seconds into a conversation, his mobile phone jolted to life, with Notre Dame’s famed “Victory March” blaring out as the ringtone. He is not a Notre Dame graduate. O’Neill is a Toronto businessman, a 48-year-old with an economics degree from York University and no easily defined connection to Notre Dame, a private Catholic university seven hours away by car, off an isolated patch of northern Indiana highway. After one trip to see a game two decades ago, though, he was hooked.
“Can I explain it to Canadians? Absolutely not,” he said. “I’ve had conversations with someone telling me that Western University has the best spirit ever. I was like, ‘Dude, you’re out of your tree. You have no idea what you’re talking about and you’re making an ass of yourself.’ ”
Many Canadians watch U.S. college football games featuring schools they did not attend. Last year, an average audience of 702,000 viewers watched the University of Oregon thrash Florida State in the Rose Bowl on TSN, making it the most-watched NCAA football game in Canadian TV history. The network will air 25 bowl games this season, including the Fiesta Bowl on Friday afternoon, featuring Ohio State and Notre Dame in Glendale, Ariz.
Shawn Redmond, vice-president, programming and marketing at TSN, could not say which teams were the most popular among Canadian viewers, but said the audience was growing, “in particular in eastern Canada,” with a base in Ontario. The University of Michigan and Michigan State University both have at least informal alumni associations in Toronto, and Syracuse University also has ties to the region.
“Basically, as a Canadian, experiencing American college football is a true culture shock,” said Paul Matthew, who works for Statistics Canada. “Notre Dame takes it a couple of notches above that.”
Matthew lives in Ottawa, but he volunteers as an usher for football games at Notre Dame Stadium. On the Thursday of a game weekend, he will drive three hours south to Syracuse, N.Y., then catch a train to South Bend, arriving early Friday morning. His return trip begins on Sunday. In all, he uses about three weeks of vacation time a year to volunteer.
“Every time I go there, there are people who are in awe of being there,” he said. “And I go, ‘Yeah, I get that.’ But why? I guess, if it was easy to explain, other schools would copy it.”
Notre Dame is a small school. There were 8,551undergraduate students on campus in 2014, compared to the 28,962 undergraduates at Ryerson University. This reporter graduated from Ryerson but owns a closet filled with Notre Dame sweaters and T-shirts and has never — to the best of his memory — snuck away from a wedding for a Ryerson game like he has for Notre Dame football.
The Notre Dame fan-base, then, is broader than just its graduates.
One explanation has roots more than a century deep, back to a time when the U.S., as now, struggled to cope with a wave of immigration. Notre Dame rose to prominence in football when many Irish families had living memory of open discrimination, a time when “No Irish need apply” appeared with regularity in classified advertisements in no less than the New York Times.
It helped that Notre Dame, which was still not widely known as the Irish, was winning. The school won its first national title in 1924, becoming a beacon for beleaguered Catholics.
“When you walk up to people today and ask ‘What’s your Notre Dame story?’ it’s not uncommon for it to go back to great-grandparents who had an interest,” said Tony Nelson, president of the Notre Dame Club of Toronto. “It’s been passed down by family after family. This thing is absolutely phenomenal.”
The club has 380 members on its mailing list. Nelson said three quar- ters are not alumni.
Notre Dame Stadium holds 81,000 fans, but Rob DeCleene, executive director of the South Bend tourism office, said as many as 160,000 descend on the region for game weekends. That is two-thirds the population of the county.
Two years ago, the tourism office bought an RV and named it the Golden Roamer, after the colloquial term used for Notre Dame fans (“Golden Domers.”) It had a dry-erase map of the U.S. on one side, so people could check off their home state.
“The thing that we overlooked was not including international, because we get people saying, ‘Where’s Canada? Where’s England? Where’s Japan?’ ” DeCleene said. “We’re going to add an international map.”
Joe Bowen, the longtime play-byplay voice of the Toronto Maple Leafs, has developed a familiarity with recreational vehicles. He has rented one for the last 17 years to transport friends and family down to at least one Notre Dame home game each season. When Notre Dame changed its playing surface to artificial turf, it sold chunks of natural grass from the stadium for $150 a roll. Bowen’s children bought him a roll, which has since been planted in his suburban Toronto backyard.
“I told them, when I die I would love to have a little bit of me sprinkled over the field at Notre Dame,” he said. “Now I’ve realized: The bastards don’t even have to leave town. They’re just going to sit out here and drink beer and sprinkle me over the grass in my backyard.”