My paternal grandfather, a Notre Dame graduate, lived out his life in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as a high school football coach who won several state championships. He was Catholic, though my own father didn’t pass it on to my siblings and me.
My mother is from just north of Pittsburgh, and when my parents tired of the drive between Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, they decided to look for a place that was roughly between the two. On one of those drives, my father noticed a sign for a school “just south of South Bend,” which is how I have always described where I grew up to people who don’t know the area.
Family lore has it that my football coach grandfather made one visit to Culver, where I grew up. It happened to be a fall weekend, and my dad took him to a high school football playoff game. The Internet tells me this must have been October 30, 1987.
The school my father worked at lost that night, 20-7, and my grandfather came away impressed with the opposing quarterback. That team was Goshen, the quarterback a young man named Rick Mirer. Goshen would go on to win the Indiana 4A football state championship a year later, and Mirer would make a dent in the Notre Dame record books before playing 12 seasons in the NFL.
“I just hope I live long enough to see these boys play,” my grandfather is said to have said about my brothers and me.
He died of cancer less than a year later; I was four years old when we lost him.
If I know my grandfather mostly from stories, the connection to Notre Dame and sports is something I have lived.
This place has been a part of me for as long as I can remember.
The first Notre Dame football game I remember watching was in 1993, No. 1 Florida State against No. 2 Notre Dame, in South Bend. My parents chose not to have a television in our home at that time. But when my dad was especially interested in a game, he would take us to the campus where he worked or to a restaurant he knew would have the game on.
I watched the so-called “Game of the Century” in the living room of one of my dad’s friends. Seminole quarterback Charlie Ward played like the Heisman winner he would soon become, but his final pass that day was underthrown, and when Notre Dame safety Shawn Wooden batted it down on the goal line, Notre Dame was the new No. 1.
A week later, I was in the family van when I heard news of the last-second field goal by Boston College kicker David Gordon that beat the boys in blue and gold, the start of a sequence of events that would lead to that same Florida State team being voted national champions in both major polls.
It was probably not much later than that game that I began looking each morning for the South Bend Tribune, which I would read only for the sports section. And I would listen, on the radio, to a number of games over the years, including an early-morning Saturday game in 1996 when the Irish played Navy in Dublin for the first time.
The first game I watched from inside Notre Dame Stadium was in 1998, a victory over LSU. I would eventually find ways to watch games on TV, but by 2012, when I was living abroad in Northern Ireland, I would watch Brian Kelly’s third Notre Dame season and run to the national championship game huddled over a laptop, sometimes after midnight, paying whatever fee I owed to gain access to the games. This included a Notre Dame win at Oklahoma, which I watched in Paris, after meeting up with a couple friends from college for a weekend.
As I think about the privilege that will be watching my first game in Notre Dame Stadium from the press box, a game that could eventually lead to a first national championship since 1988, I’m aware that none of what I’ve described here is all that unique, except for the details.
As the stands begin to fill at Notre Dame Stadium, I suspect that the kind of reflective awe that I feel applies just as much to the Indiana University faithful who have justifiably been ensnared by coach Curt Cignetti and quarterback Kurtis Rourke, enough for many of them to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a trek to South Bend for the first game of its kind in modern college football, the inaugural first-round game of the 12-team College Football Playoff.
On a rare Friday night all around Notre Dame Stadium, as the Notre Dame and Indiana fans gather in the more mixed-than-usual tailgating in 30-degree weather, I know that beyond the enthusiasm about an historic first-round game and a spot in the Sugar Bowl are comparable stories of families and communities and their hopes and dreams about what life is — and what it might still become.
By Chris Schumerth
