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Peter FitzSimons tells the great story about watching a Bledisloe Cup Test with a kid sitting beside him wearing a Wallaby jersey.
The Wallabies were being walloped and at halftime the kid disappeared for a few minutes and then reappeared – wearing an All Blacks jersey!
Fair weather supporters like this don’t rank in my opinion. You have to embrace a team and then support it, come what may, through good times and bad times.
And this is my attitude to the Notre Dame side that plays Alabama over the weekend for the title of number one US College gridiron side for the 2012/2013 season.
Why Notre Dame? It all goes back to my days boarding at a convent primary school, Star Of The Sea in Wellington, New Zealand.
On Saturday nights, the nuns would often have a film evening. The novices in their white gowns would sit in front, the boys (about 60 of us covering all the primary school classes) behind them in rows and then the teaching nuns in their black habits and white starched front pieces looking like huge, immobile penguins, sitting stiffly at the back.
The films we saw were invariably biographies. Madame Curie, George Gershwin, the young Lincoln, uplifting movies like this, with little romance in them. If there was any kissing, the nun running the movie would put her hand across the lens and the picture would be blocked and only the words would be heard.
Not that we youngsters had a clue about what the kissing was all about. I think the concern was for the novices and to save them from confronting the pleasures of the flesh they were giving away.
A favourite film was ‘Knute Rockne: All American’, a movie about a legendary Notre Dame gridiron coach who took a relatively obscure Catholic university and made it a College gridiron colossus.
The beauty of the film, as far as the nuns were concerned, was that there was no kissing or much romance involved (although Rockne was happily married). As well, Notre Dame was a Catholic university. So there were many scenes with priests playing a leading role in the action.
Pat O’Brien played the charismatic Rockne, a coach who developed the Four Horsemen backfield, with choreographed moves that he had developed after seeing the Rockettes at Radio City in New York.
Ronald Reagan played the key role of George Gipp, the gifted ball-runner and a playboy (rather like another Notre Dame golden boy decades later, Paul Hornung), who contrives to play one last game while being seriously ill.
On his death-bed, a scene Reagan plays for all it is worth, ‘the Gipp’ tells Rockne that if ever Notre Dame needs to win a game he must ask the team to “win one for the Gipper”.
“Rocke, sometimes when the time is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there and with all they’ve got to win one for the Gipper.”
And, of course, in the film a game against their great rivals Army becomes a pivotal scene when, with Notre Dame down and out at half-time, O’Brien/Rockne tells his boys the story of the Gipper and begs them to win one for him.
The team rushes out of the changing room after the speech with tears cascading from their eyes and proceed to rip Army apart.
The film gave me an insight at an early age to the power of the coach in big time sport, how you could construct winning plays and how emotion can play its part in achieving a victory.
These were insights I brought into my thinking about how rugby should be played.
My first major essay on rugby, which is included in ‘After The Final Whistle’ (published in 1979), described how in gridiron every attacking play is the equivalent of a set move and that it would only be a matter of time before rugby coaches had plays that ran in sequences when their teams were in possession.
This notion, that when you had the ball you could control its progress up the field in a series of organised plays, was at the heart of the revolution of the ‘continuity game’ devised by Rod Macqueen.
When I studied at a university in Washington D.C. in the 1960s, Notre Dame were a major power still. This was the era of Ara Parseeghian, a latter-day Rockne, in Notre Dame mythology.
I used to watch their games during winter Saturdays on my portable black and white TV set. But there was a rising team in the South – Alabama, coached by a new Rockne-like coach, Bear Bryant.
Bryant’s teams were full of tough, white (no blacks played for Alabama in those days) good old boys from the tough small towns of the South. They played a swarming, irresistible, surging style that just swept away slower and less passionate opponents in a manner that gave rise to the team’s nickname, the Crimson Tide.
Through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Notre Dame lost its status as the invariable power house. There were glory days but few glory seasons.
Lou Holtz was the number one coach in 1988 and Charles Weis again in 2000. Notre Dame were unbeaten in 1988 and the number one team in the nation, for the last time, in 1993.
But generally it was lean pickings for the fans. Devoted supporters around the world, though – like myself – never gave up the dream.
But this season, glory be, ‘the Fighting Irish’ have stormed back into contention as the number one side. Their opponents for the national title are Alabama, a side that still plays with the Bryan-induced energy, enthusiasm and hard-shoulders, but now with a squad loaded with black stars.
So it’s the Crimson Tide against the Fighting Irish, with the experts picking Alabama to take away the victory and the national championship by a 10-point margin.
If ever Notre Dame needs to ‘win one for the Gipper,’ this is the game.