How I Got This Way (16 page)

One night, earlier in this very year, Joy and I were out in California again, where both of our girls now live, and we were invited to the Severino home in Encino. It’s the same beautiful house that he and his wife have held on to since the seventies, back when we were in the midst of our happy KABC years of big ratings and easier living. There in the garage still stood the same big blowup photograph of Sev as a guard on the University of Connecticut football team. And Sev . . . well, like all of us, he’s older now, but he’s still a little menacing, in maybe a sweeter and gentler way. But that night we started reminiscing over most of these stories I’ve just shared with you. And he laughed and laughed, and so did I. Somehow all of that terrible drama we struggled through so long ago really didn’t mean a thing anymore. The truth is, we still love each other very much. And we probably always did, even all through those few years of temporary darkness.

Love like that, you know, can be a funny thing.
Kapish?

Chapter Fourteen

COACH FRANK LEAHY

W
ell, the time has come for me to take you back to where my heart and my spirit were truly formed—and have also happily remained ever since. That’s simply the way it goes with this particular place. Because no book of mine about people who’ve inspired and impressed me most would be complete without stories I’ve drawn from what is probably the greatest long-standing influence in my life: the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana. I suppose that if you know anything at all about me, you were expecting this. And of course, you were absolutely right.

But to this day, I can’t tell you how much I love to walk people around that gorgeous campus for the first time to let them discover its unique magic—those whispering ghosts of triumph, that certain electric vibration in the air, that peaceful feeling of goodness. It’s just a very sacred place to me. Even all these years after I graduated, it’s still the kind of place that makes you want to be better than you are in every way. It somehow challenges you to aspire to even greater heights than you’d imagined for yourself. I think about so many of its legends—along with all the priests, the faculty, the students, and the coaches I’ve met there—and I know that they live inside me always, and unforgettably. For sure, its never-say-die influence has helped me overcome a lot of pitfalls I’ve encountered in the course of my lifetime. Or, to put it another way: I don’t know what I would have done—or who I actually would have become—if I hadn’t attended Notre Dame.

My first exposure to the school came when I was about nine and my uncle Mike took me to see the great film
Knute Rockne All American
. Yes, the one where Ronald Reagan was the Gipper and Pat O’Brien was Rockne, which made such an impression on me. I was just a kid but couldn’t miss seeing, right up there on the big screen, all the passion surrounding that place and its true-life football heroes. After the movie, which we’d both enjoyed plenty, Uncle Mike offhandedly said, “One day maybe you’ll go there. . . .” Of course, I never believed for a moment that could really happen. My life was in New York, rooted especially in the Bronx. That’s all I knew. I’d never gone west of the Hudson River, and Indiana sounded like it might as well have been a foreign country. But I was already becoming a big sports fan and had known most all the legends of Rockne and George “the Gipper” Gipp and the Four Horsemen. Still, the mere idea of seeing this place called Notre Dame felt as unlikely as setting foot on the moon.

Next thing I knew, though, Notre Dame turned up right in front of me, right there in the Bronx, no less! This was in the fall of 1946 when my Catholic Youth team happened to be playing a game in Macombs Dam Park, directly across the street from the original Yankee Stadium. Around noon, I noticed an enormous crowd pouring into the stadium, followed by a long gray file of West Point cadets. That’s when I remembered that it was the day of the big Notre Dame–Army game, a pairing that was then and always would be a rivalry for the ages. At that time, the Army football team was a national phenomenon—thanks largely to their two renowned Heisman Trophy winners Felix “Doc” Blanchard and Glenn Davis, also known as Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. In their two previous meetings, they had crushed the Irish; the mortifying scores were 59–0 and 48–0. But now Coach Frank Leahy had returned from the war, and the Irish were bitter and furious about those major lopsided defeats. I don’t remember the score of the Catholic Youth game I played that day, but afterward I rushed home to hear the Notre Dame–Army match on the radio. It was a nail-biter of epic proportions, ending in the remarkable tied score of 0–0—and it would go down in history as one of the classic football standoffs of the twentieth century.

Three years later, it was college time for me. I mentioned to my parents that I’d been thinking about staying in New York and applying to Fordham. But my father surprised me by pushing hard for Notre Dame. He had served several years earlier in the Marine Corps with the immortal Notre Dame legend Ed “Moose” Krause, who’d returned to become a line coach for Frank Leahy, and would later go on to take over as the school’s athletic director. My dad recounted to me that while they were carrying out a mission off in the jungles of some Pacific island, Moose would hold the marine officers spellbound with his tales of Rockne and the Gipper and the lore of Notre Dame. My father was instantly hooked by the great history of the school, and felt that I would thrive there. One phone call to Moose paved the way. He pushed for me, and I got in. That was the first great turning point in my life.

And so, one Sunday in early September 1949, I got on the 6 p.m. westward-bound train at New York’s Grand Central Terminal—and off I went clattering toward exotic and faraway South Bend, Indiana. It was an all-night train ride, but there would be no sleeping for me. I was scared stiff! We arrived at six o’clock the next morning and were met by buses that took us to campus. On the way up Notre Dame Avenue, someone yelled out, “There’s the Golden Dome.” Sure enough, there it was shining in the glint of sunrise, looking like a beautiful postcard image. I landed in dorm room 222 of Zahm Hall, which was planted close to the Golden Dome itself. And that’s how it all began for me.

That first week on campus also brought with it the opening game of the season—against Indiana. I attended my very first football rally on Friday night before Saturday’s game. It was an event unlike any I’d witnessed—this thunderous show of sheer confidence, raising the rafters of the old fieldhouse, where basketball games and these pep assemblies always took place. The revered football squad filed, one by one, into the balcony seats above us. They looked enormous and tough, which of course they were; most of them were already hardened war veterans now in their final year at school. Then the coach stood up—the legendary Frank Leahy himself, who’d never lost a game since his return to Notre Dame in 1946. He began to speak in a voice that could cut through steel. This was a serious, no-nonsense guy who had a magical way with a motivational turn of phrase. He directed a portion of his remarks at the freshmen in the overflowing crowd, telling us in particular of the university’s wondrous tradition and of the spirit that would soon consume us, and also what Notre Dame would mean to each of us later in our futures and how we should enjoy every moment of our time there because we would never again experience a place like this for the rest of our lives. (That, incidentally, pretty much summed up everything I’ve believed ever since.) With each declaration he made, I’d feel my scalp tingle and more goose bumps rise. He simply inflamed us and, frankly, I was ready to go join the team that very instant—to make that tackle, catch that pass, run for that touchdown! We began to cheer the coach onward, one sentence after another. I had never felt such wild enthusiasm in my life. And so, through the hypnotic power of Frank Leahy, Notre Dame had begun to overtake my soul so deeply that it would never let go.

Leahy had played tackle for two of Knute Rockne’s five national championship teams in the late twenties and early thirties. Once during that period, as fate would have it, Leahy was injured at the same time Rockne was taken ill, and the two shared a hospital room for a couple of weeks, where they talked about nothing but football. Rockne spoke and Leahy listened. Leahy asked the questions and Rockne gave him the answers. Neither one could have known that Leahy would one day be considered Rockne’s next truly great successor as a Notre Dame head coach. After he graduated, Leahy started as a line coach at Georgetown, then moved to Michigan State. He took over as line coach for five years at Fordham University with Vince Lombardi at the helm and then accepted the head coaching position at Boston College, where he lost only two games in two seasons. That’s when Notre Dame quickly brought him back where he belonged in 1941 until the war took him away again a few years later. He became a lieutenant in the navy and returned to coach in 1946. Now here it was 1949, and his team was mainly composed of war veterans (no longer fresh-faced high school recruits), all of them still young men, who’d been aged by the rigors of fighting for their country. But then, Leahy was a master of psychology and motivation, which equals coaching genius. And together, this group hadn’t lost a game since they landed back on American soil.

So, yes, when I got to the school, they had gone undefeated for three straight seasons. And we freshmen were beyond impressed by those players on that ’49 team. They were older than us, for sure, and had an air of invincibility. We respected them to the point of awe. One player, in particular, who stood out on that great team was “Jungle Jim” Martin; he’d been a First Team All-American left end, but when Leahy suddenly needed a tackle, he chose Martin. And just like that, Martin made All-American at that position, too. His co-captain that year was the tough right end Leon Hart, who is one of only two linemen to ever win the Heisman Trophy; it was, you see, an amazing team. But I confess, Jungle Jim completely fascinated me. He would walk the campus like the heroic ex-marine that he was, and I’d find myself watching him from a distance until he’d disappear into whatever building he was headed toward. He was a rugged blond with a crew cut, and was also the heavyweight boxing champ of the school two years in a row, not to mention a superb swimmer. In fact, he swam so incredibly well that during his military tour, the navy would take him by submarine to a position off the Japanese-held island coast of Tinian and then bring him up to the water’s surface, where he would swim his way, in the dead of night and all alone, to shore. There, he’d reconnoiter the island’s beaches as a prelude to the marines’ landing a few days later. Then he’d swim back to the spot where he’d left the sub and just wait, treading water and hoping it would reemerge to collect him. I was so taken by the guy that I actually wrote a story at the time about Jungle Jim. Years later, I had him as a guest on my San Diego TV show and decided to read the story to him on the air. He was genuinely moved by it, and I was happy I had the chance to do it.

But Jungle Jim and Leon Hart and most all of those tough veterans graduated after that 1949 season, leaving the following year’s team depleted and weakened. It showed early on. In fact, in the second game of the 1950 season, Purdue upset us on a dark rainy September day, handing the Fighting Irish its first loss in five years.
Five years!
It had been so long since Notre Dame had lost a game, the whole student body had no concept of defeat. We’d never once seen the team lose a game. It was a shock. A real crusher. The score had been 28–14. We all just sat in the stands after the game, rain pouring down on us. The pain was staggering—an altogether new sensation, crazy as that sounds. Up till then, every Saturday had been a celebration. It had been the most dependable day of the week.

For some reason, a bunch of us wandered outside to the locker-room door of the stadium, where the team would exit. We began to call for Coach Leahy to come out. Maybe he could explain this awful turn of events and tell us what it was that had just happened. As we stood there getting drenched, the crowd grew larger. One student climbed to the top of a nearby tree so he could get a good look at the scene below. That big proud tree, by the way, had stood symbolic and firm during so many postgame celebrations. But now it anchored this wet and mystified assemblage.

Finally, the door opened and there was the coach, looking more haggard than any of us had ever seen him. He had never lost a game at Notre Dame. He didn’t make any excuses or give us specific reasons why we were beaten. Instead, he told us about defeat and how sometimes during our lives we, too, would be defeated by something or someone. We would lose out or take it in the chops and it would hurt—but we should use what happened on this day to remind us that a defeat can always come your way. He explained that what had occurred on the field that day should only make us stronger, make us want to win even more, make us understand that that’s what life is all about. It was all about getting back up again. Then suddenly it didn’t hurt so much. I moved away from that tree renewed and hopeful all over again. We all did. And I never forgot his speech in the rain, especially whenever those inevitable moments of loss came along in my life.

Like Jungle Jim, I later convinced Coach Leahy to come on that Saturday show of mine in San Diego. My respect for him had always been just so profound, and now I faced him, man-to-man—although he was, of course, a truly great man among men. This was really such a deep and personal privilege for me, even though it was being broadcast live to the public. Especially because I was able to look right into his eyes and tell him, as best as I could muster, what he and Notre Dame had continued to mean to me. But still, he could never really know what an impact he’d made on all of us with his speech that day in the rain. I’m sure it was a day he wished had never happened. But even then, I was so grateful that it did happen. And that his words about the importance of loss had been not just necessary but also driven home so powerfully. I always thought it made me a better man.