Crusaders & Slaves

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Notre Dame's football coach--every schoolboy knows his name is Frank Leahy--began the 1946 season by overcoming a serious handicap: a single pair of eyes, operating at ground level, could not possibly watch the whole vast Notre Dame processing plant. So Leahy (rhymes with "may he") built a tower, 30 feet high and bristling with loudspeakers, smack in the middle of Notre Dame's three-gridiron practice field. From the tower he looks down on an operation that is as carefully calculated, as extremely complicated as the Studebaker assembly line in nearby South Bend.

Leahy's football factory is meeting its production quotas, and then some--nine touchdowns in the first two games--but the Man in the Tower is the kind of guy who always aims to do better. At one end of the field, the tackle coach is instructing eleven tackles in the refinements of "forearm shivers." At the other end, twelve brutish guards are doing "duck walks." Nine T-formation quarterbacks, never far from the centers, are working on a half-dozen different types of pivot--the crossover, reverse, reverse-deep, hop-around, slice and crossfire.

On two of the gridirons, squads vaguely referred to as the "reserves" are running through plays. The voice floats down from the tower: "Coach Krause ... did you see that?" The awful sight is re-enacted, and corrected.

From where he stands a lot of things look awful to Big Boss Leahy. "If I only had a breakaway back," he mourns, adding that Notre Dame this year will probably play a good deal of "Minnesota football''' (three yards at a crunch). Leahy prefers tricky overhand laterals and daring forwards with trade names like Banana, Swerve, Flair, Stop & Go, Rainbow.

Suddenly ex-G.I. Halfback Bob Livingstone, a star in '42, swivel-hips his way past three tacklers before being slammed to earth 40 yards downfield. "See," says Funless Frank bitterly, "he didn't go all the way."

Martin, Czarobski, Sitlco. . . . Such talk does not fool Notre Dame's millions of subway-circuit alumni. Every butcher boy, beer salesman and politician in the U.S. knows that Notre Dame is loaded.

The Swistowiczs, Skoglunds, Kosikow-skis and Kellys include one fancy-stepping freshman and an even 53 ex-serviceman stars. The line, a coach's dream, bristles with the likes of ex-Gob Zygmont Czarobski, a 213-lb. bonecrusher tackle, and 205-lb. End Jim Martin, a husky ex-Marine who swam ashore on a voluntary reconnaissance mission just before Tinian was invaded. And even if Perfectionist Leahy has not found him yet, Notre Dame surely has at least one express-train halfback up its sleeve somewhere. The real question is when he will be sprung. One good bet is squatty, slippery Emil Sitko.

Besides perfectly conditioned beef and brawn, Leahy can count on some help from the far sidelines--from nuns in convents, whose Saturday radio-side prayers go something like this: "God's will be done . . . but if it doesn't make any difference, let Notre Dame win." Says Frank Leahy, a realist, "The prayers work better when the players are big."

They were big enough--and smart enough--to breeze by rugged, speedy Illinois in their opening game. Score: Notre Dame 26, Illinois 6. The Irish offense, more sound than spectacular, was expertly directed by Quarterback Johnny Lujack. The defense, especially designed to stop the Illini's flashy Buddy Young, featured

Lujack, one of the surest tacklers in college football. Young gained 36 yards.

Next came the one soft touch on the nine-game schedule. Score: Notre Dame 33, Pittsburgh 0. That left seven to go--Purdue, Iowa, Navy, Army, Northwestern, Tulane, and Southern California--and every one looked like a battle. The one that really matters is Army. West Point's 1944 and 1945 unbeatables, led by touchdown twins Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, plastered the Irish with two humiliating beatings, 59-0 and 48-0. Hence this year's Notre Dame dedication to a holy crusade: beat Army Nov. 9.

Six-Bit Endeavor. The chief crusader is, of course, blue-eyed Frank Leahy. He is a natural-born fanatic. But, like most good fanatics, he is businesslike about it. At his work, he is crisp and indefatigable. No talker to start with, he took elocution lessons and became a persuasive speaker.

With people, he works almost too hard at being pleasant. He breaks out the big smile, and begins using six-bit words (sample: "I will endeavor to obliterate the defects"). Some people think he is unctuous; some think he is just right. His square-jawed Irish face would look fine in a collar ad. He is 38, married, the father of four children.

As long as it doesn't interfere with his work, Frank Leahy enjoys being a good fellow. If someone offers him a cigaret, he says, "I'll have one later." (He doesn't smoke.) If someone offers him a shot of whiskey, he may even hold the bottle up to his lips. (He doesn't much like the taste of the stuff.) But under this genteel velveteen is the real ironbound Leahy. Sometimes the iron bands crack. Halfway through the 1942 season, Coach Leahy landed in a hospital from overwork.

Back home in South Dakota, in a place called Winner, Frank's father used to ask him every night: "Get in a fight today?" If the answer was no, the old man invariably said, "Well, get in one tomorrow." At 17, his father put him in the ring with a pro boxer. Frank got flattened six times in the first round. In the third, he knocked the pro cold.

Winning is an obsession with him. As counselor in a Wisconsin summer camp, he lost a tennis match to a twelve-year-old kid. He took to practicing every day, challenged the kid just before camp closed, and beat him.

Frank Leahy will drive himself (and, if need be, will drive everybody around him, too) to any length to ward off that dreadful thing, defeat. This obsession has helped make him a lonely man, and just about the best football coach in the U.S. His five-year coaching record: 46 wins, 5 defeats, 3 ties. He has been just as successful, but nowhere near as popular as his old teacher and friend, the late great Knute Rockne.

High Cost of Living. Although Leahy's football teams gripe about the way he drives them, they really like him fine. But some newsmen and fellow coaches don't. The newsmen mainly object to his moaning & groaning, an occupational disease indulged in by most football coaches.

The coaches are more specific. Complaint No. 1: Leahy teaches dirty football. This same mud was slung last year at Army's great team, which also played hard, rough football. The last time Notre Dame played Southern California, in 1942, the Irish hit so hard that there were U.S.C. mumblings about breaking off athletic relations. Notre Dame's accusers appear to have forgotten that those who die for dear old Rutgers often try to sell their lives as dearly as possible.

Complaint No. 2: Leahy is the slickest recruiter of football talent that ever breathed. In a year when recruiting has reached its frenetic zenith, that is high praise.

Nary a squawk has come from Worcester, but it is no secret that Holy Cross is steaming over the case of George Connor, its 225-lb. All-America tackle, who decided to attend Notre Dame this year. Leahy has plucked two other red-ripe plums: Frank Kosikowski, ex-Marquette end, who starred last year on the champion Fleet City (Calif.) Navy team; and pugnacious Center George Strohmeyer, ex-Texas A. & M. and Iowa Pre-Flight.

Basic B.R.T. This season, beefy tackles and flashy halfbacks, fresh out of G.I. uniform, are three-deep on many a campus --often on different campuses from the ones they trod before the war. The traffic in talented footballers is greater by far than in 1929, when the Carnegie Report let go a blast at professionalism in college athletics.

Unlike some sanctimonious coaches, who can hardly believe that rich alumni are paying the freight on their high-priced stars, Leahy takes the situation for granted. He says there has been no inflation in Notre Dame rates. His boys still get B.R.T. (board, room, tuition) for working at out-of-the-season jobs (e.g., sweeping the coaches' office).

This modest B.R.T. program makes Notre Dame practically a simon-pure in 1946's dark brown scheme. That scheme is a mosaic of little schemes. North Carolina and Duke, just twelve miles apart, were out to hijack each other's squads as though they were fighting Yankees. Kansas and Missouri, archrivals, have been on the verge of war over a prize halfback named Forrest Griffith. Coach Jim Lookabaugh of Oklahoma A. & M. has accused Oklahoma U. of spending $200,000 to buy a football team. Said he: "Some players who will oppose us this fall will be drawing as high as $10,000."

In the Southeastern Conference (Alabama, Tennessee, Tulane, etc.) Georgia is proud of its loyal halfback, Charlie Trippi, who came back to work for alma mammy at a rumored $5,000, plus apartment, auto and incidental considerations; the pros had offered him $17,500.

Flowers & Candy. In the Big Ten Conference, the alleged angel of angels was a do-or-die Iowa alumnus, war-rich from the deep-freeze business and completely fed up with seeing the old school ploughed under. The Big Ten's front office denied any knowledge whatsoever of professionalism. The more it said, the more certain it appeared that there were at least 30 or 40 fully accredited angels at work. Stars of far less lustre than Illinois' Buddy ("Black Magic") Young were reportedly getting $2,500 to $5,000. Rumored top for headliners: $12,000.

Everybody was doing it. A bare six months after getting together for a good cry over the evils of subsidization (TIME, Dec. 3), the Ivy League colleges began announcing incoming prospects. Yale landed the most sought-after halfback in the East: 190-lb. Negro Levi Jackson, a comfortably relaxed student. Pennsylvania's old grads, and the scores Penn posted, looked as aggressive as ever.

Every top-grade prep-school prospect was scouted and catalogued. One who rated triple-A priority was one Ernie Zalejski, ballcarrier extraordinary at Washington High--which was located, of all places, in South Bend, Ind. The story: flowers and boxes of candy flowed in to his mother, with cards from coaches all over the Big Ten; from one nice man, Ernie got an offer of $1,500 and a new home for his folks if he would put his name down for Michigan. But Ernie still wore an Army uniform, and his preference was Notre Dame.

On the West Coast, where earnest protestations of purity bloom all year round, U.C.L.A. had come up with a fabulously strong team. Down in Texas, where they shoot folks for even hinting at subsidization, Texas U. had a team that might be the best in the land--and, possibly, the glittering exception in 1946's pigskin dollar derby.

Specialists & Smokers. Last week, American University (Washington, D.C.), which has never taken football too seriously, abolished it for good. Said American's President Paul F. Douglass: "Postwar college football has no more relation to education than bullfighting to agriculture. ... I see no reason why one corporation should hire a specialized group of employes to outrun, outbump and outbruise the specialized employes of another corporation. ..." A football player, he concluded flatly, is nothing more than "a human slave" caught in the "biggest black-market operation" in the history of higher education.

At Notre Dame, Frank Leahy was far too busy teaching his pass defenders new tricks--such as dancing first on one foot, then on the other, for a quick getaway (something he picked up from watching Bobby Riggs play tennis)--to worry about the morals and ethics of U.S. football. "But when I get time to think of it," he said, "it depresses me terribly."

There is little chance of a talent shortage at Notre Dame, with its magic football name and its many devoted alumni. Notre Dame's supply system is larger but looser than most other U.S. colleges'. GHQ at South Bend gets constant reports on good prospects (twelve Notre Dame grads now coach pro clubs, 150 are at colleges, 600 at high and prep schools). In the off season, Leahy and six assistant coaches make a swing of 48 states as guest speakers at smokers and gymnasium get-togethers. They know what to do when a likely young fullback says, "All my life, I've wanted to play football for Notre Dame."

Formula, Discipline, Showmanship. Sometimes the Holy Cross fathers who run Notre Dame wonder if the tail isn't wagging the dog--and hasten to insist that there is a university connected with the football team. It has 4,500 students, a good chemistry department (where a formula for synthetic rubber was discovered), one of the best libraries on Irish culture and history in the U.S., and some of the strictest discipline anywhere outside West Point and Annapolis.

French priests founded the university 27 years before intercollegiate football began. Then, in 1910, a broken-nosed Norwegian named Knute Rockne came along, and Notre Dame really started to roll.

Besides being the greatest football coach of his day, Rockne was a chemistry prof and a keen student of human emotions. He was also one of the greatest showmen since P. T. Barnum. With names like Madigan, McMullan, Murphy and Moynihan in his lineup, he dressed his men in Kelly green (the colors of Notre Dame are blue & gold) and they became famous as the Fighting Irish.

Rockne took his teams to both coasts and to the Gulf. The annual game with Army became one of football's classics. Talk about the tough Irish schedules, Rockne's half-time orations, his famed Four Horsemen, his theatrical shift and the fancy footwork of Notre Dame backfields topped all football talk in the '20s. Gate receipts went up (last year, after carrying deficits from other sports, Notre Dame netted $240,000 from football)--and so did some new college buildings.

Seven Blocks of Granite. Four years before Knute Rockne plane-crashed to death in Kansas, Irishman Frank Leahy came to Notre Dame. He already had determination. He became first-string tackle simply because he practiced blocking, tackling and charging (against dummies) hours after the rest of the team took their showers.

Nobody heard much more about him until he turned up as line coach at Fordham. Then everybody heard about his undentable Fordham line--nicknamed the Seven Blocks of Granite--which twice (in 1936-37) stopped Pittsburgh's powerhouse cold. That got him a job at Boston College, where Leahy made himself crystal clear the first day: "I did not come here to lose." B.C. bounced from national obscurity into two Bowl games in two years.

By 1940, Leahy's doings attracted coach-hunting Notre Dame. On generous terms (estimated at $15,000 a year), the man with the winning obsession went to Work for the Irish. By now he had some persuasive theories on how to win.

At B.C., skinny, deadpan Charley O'Rourke had helped him discover the pleasures and profits of a daring offense. With an alter ego like O'Rourke to run the team on the field, think for it in emergencies, maybe run and kick but certainly do the forward passing, Leahy could go on through life "playing" football, not just coaching. At Notre Dame, he searched until he found an O'Rourke. This one was named Angelo Bertelli. Then Leahy found a system to fit his man. It was the popular T.

Leahy's calm abolition of the Rockne shift amounted to heresy at Notre Dame. But one father, plain-talking Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, now Notre Dame's president, came to his aid: "A man is a real success when he knows what God wants him to do and has the discipline to do it." As a T quarterback, Angelo Bertelli was a sensation.

Angel in Disguise. Now Leahy has Johnny Lujack. This veteran of 36 months in the Navy is a brown-eyed, brown-haired, Polish 21-year-old who never has much to say. As T-formation quarterback he does no running (although he used to be a left halfback); he keeps busy thinking, punting, passing and doing much of the tackling.

Like Leahy, 180-lb. Johnny Lujack is a perfectionist. Every fake has to be a magician's maneuver. He knows the blocking variations of every basic Leahy play--not only for himself but for every man on the team--and frequently refreshes a forgetful player's memory in the huddle. An expert field general, he clicks with typical Leahy strategies: calling running plays in passing situations.

Lujack, who will be hard to keep off anybody's All-America team, rates about as high in the temporal world as "Top-litzky" rates in the spiritual. In a new musical soon to open on Broadway, Top-litzky is the angel who comes down from heaven disguised as a quarterback and charged with the sacred mission of helping Notre Dame beat Army.*

Leahy, who likes to do things his way, would rather have Lujack. But if something should happen to Lujack? Then, says Leahy, "I guess we could send a wire to the Pope."

* He does.

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