Dream gig ends with heartbreak for scribe
GLENDALE, ARIZ.— There is a four-yearold boy living in East York who, the moment he is asked, will tell you the name of the best football team in the world. He cannot always remember what he had for lunch at school that day, but his football answer is unshakable, and said with deep conviction: Notre Dame.
He will not acknowledge a counterargument. I know this, because he is my son. Heading into its game against Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl on Friday, Notre Dame had lost only twice this year — in a monsoon to top-ranked Clemson, and on a last-second field goal at Stanford — but went undefeated when the four-year-old was awake to watch. This gave him the sense he was the reason the Fighting Irish won, and I have never tried to dispossess him of that notion.
It is illogical, of course, but so is the notion of a liberal-leaning atheist from Toronto who lives and dies with the fortunes of a football team from a conservative-minded Catholic school in Indiana. Nobody in my family attended Notre Dame.
I grew up a fan of the New York Mets, the Toronto Argonauts, the Boston Celtics, the San Francisco 49ers and a hodgepodge of hockey teams. In every family photo album, from elementary school through the ongoing creep toward middle age, the only constant in my wardrobe, in T-shirts and hats and sweaters, is Notre Dame.
There are plenty of reasons why someone would become a fan of Notre Dame. The religious aspect is significant for some, the nickname and logo for others. It helps that NBC has been broadcasting home games since 1991, making the Irish perhaps the most accessible team in college football.
“It seems like it’s a deep kind of family connection to Notre Dame,” Irish offensive lineman Steve Elmer said a few days before kickoff. “It’s not ‘My mom went there,’ or, ‘My father went there and that’s why I root for them.’ ”
Sometimes, a parent did attend. Michael Wadsworth attended the school en route to becoming its first Canadian athletic director. Wadsworth, who died in 2004, fostered a bond with the school that has been passed down through his family.
“We had a household where the phone’s ringer was the Notre Dame cheer,” said his daughter Carolan Wadsworth-Lesaux. “Everything was Notre Dame.”
Joe Bowen grew up in Sudbury, Ont., the son of a Notre Dame fan. His father died of a stroke before he made it to a game in South Bend, Ind., and Bowen, the play-by-play voice of the Maple Leafs, makes a point to take his own sons to a game every year.
“Every time I go, I go to The Grotto,” Bowen said of the outdoor campus shrine. “And I light a candle for my dad, and I wish he was there.”
My great-grandfather, J.P. Fitzgerald, was sports editor of the nowdefunct Toronto Telegram, but it has never been made clear whether he was a Notre Dame fan. What is clear is that, on Saturday afternoons growing up in Burlington, if Notre Dame was on, my father and I were in the basement watching. The Irish, who last won a national title in 1988 when I was 11 years old, became a lingua franca for us, sometimes standing as a final thread in frayed times.
That fandom has survived years of mediocre football, heartbreaking losses and Manti Te’o, the beloved linebacker who helped lead Notre Dame back to prominence but who was also eventually found to be mourning a deceased girlfriend who never actually existed. (It’s complicated, and causes headaches.)
Notre Dame has led me to become, as dear friend and Star columnist Bruce Arthur has put it, “a sitcom husband,” ducking out of weddings to check the score. Four years ago, while visiting relatives in New Jersey, I slipped out of a party, undetected, to watch the Irish play Brigham Young University at a road house around the corner. (Notre Dame won17-14 and my wife covered for my absence.)
Which is why being assigned to the Fiesta Bowl felt, at first, like a prank, like my editor was going to change the airline ticket at the last moment and send me somewhere soul-crush-