How I Got This Way (18 page)

It was a sunny late August afternoon when I swung off the expressway and got myself onto Notre Dame Avenue, heading toward that lovely campus. There, up ahead, was the beautiful Sacred Heart steeple and the Golden Dome towering above all else. I turned right and slowly approached the stadium, the House That Rockne Built. There was the locker-room door where Frank Leahy had stood in the rain twenty-four years before and told us how to handle defeat. There was the tree, taller than ever, which the student had climbed to get a full view of that unforgettable moment. All of it came back to me. I went straight to the coach’s locker room and heard myself explaining the bad news to the invincible Ara Parseghian, telling him that I’d lost out on getting the job in Chicago. I told him that I’d had enough, that I just wanted to quit—which is something you do not say in the presence of that man.

Because Ara wouldn’t hear of it.

“I won’t let you quit,” he said. “You must never quit.” He promised, “There will be better times ahead.”

He threw some Notre Dame sweats at me and told me to get out on the field and go catch some passes. I walked out on the practice field and felt better almost immediately. I jogged around the track a little, ran some modest wind sprints. All of a sudden it was great to be back—right there where I had learned so much about character and ambition. I was feeling that old spirit again. I almost felt like I’d never left. I caught some passes and watched Ara and his coaches put a clock on the incoming freshman quarterbacks, checking their speed and agility. One of them was an eighteen-year-old Pennsylvania kid named Joe Montana, who came in last. Joe wasn’t very fast, but he sure could throw. Nobody knew he would become the next great Notre Dame quarterback.

But in the course of that afternoon, most of the anger and frustration I’d felt earlier had evaporated. My legs were tired from the team workout, but my mind was clear. I wouldn’t quit. I’d keep going. Just like Frank Leahy had said, this defeat was only going to strengthen my resolve. And Ara had made sure of that. Whatever had brought me back to Notre Dame that day had simply saved my life.

I went home and waited. Three months later, John Severino had installed me as the entertainment reporter on KABC-TV, which was where the special journey that would eventually bring me to the life I live today truly began. And once I landed that job, I wanted to call Ara to tell him the good news. Before I could reach out, however, I learned that he’d been diagnosed with a heart condition. The doctors were suggesting that he retire for his own safety. All that intensity, all that charisma, all that work had taken its toll on him. But what a legacy—he had brought Notre Dame football back from near extinction, he made thousands of friends, he had been a great role model.

So the years went by—during which Ara himself did some work in television—and I had come back to New York and started building the morning-show franchise that has continued ever since. But one day I got a call from Ara, who told me that he needed some help telling the world about a deadly disease that I had never heard of—a disease named Niemann-Pick. Ara had become involved with the cause under the darkest of circumstances. He had discovered that he was the gene carrier for this devastating affliction, which skips a generation and passes directly from grandparent to grandchild. In his case, all four of his grandchildren were then in peril, and now Ara was asking if I might find a way to throw a much-needed spotlight on this rare and terrifying condition. He wanted to sponsor a campaign to research the disease and find a cure. He and his wife, Katie, first talked about it on my show. Viewers were stunned, having also never heard about this disease before. Naturally, the Notre Dame family staunchly got behind Ara, who has since appeared everywhere he could, spreading the message with everything he’s got.

Like he said to me so many years ago, “You must never quit.” And he hasn’t. Now the Parseghian Foundation supports twenty-five research groups all around the United States, the U.K., and Canada—each of them making great strides. He and his family have campaigned tirelessly for years to raise the funding necessary to keep exploring possibilities, and in fact, new drug compounds have been developed that actually slow the progression of the disease. But as of yet, there is still no cure. Most tragically, three of Ara’s grandchildren have succumbed, but the oldest still lives, even though he, too, is a carrier. This sort of horror would have broken the spirit of many families, but the Parseghians have stayed the course and continued the fight. And Ara, at eighty-eight, keeps trying to win this battle once and for all. God knows, he excels at the art of winning. He has helped so many people in his lifetime, and now we all want to help him win this one. We all love him.

Chapter Sixteen

COACH LOU HOLTZ

I
need for you to indulge me here—
just one more very special time
—so that I can tell you about someone else I also happen to love, someone who is almost impossible
not
to love, unless you’ve once found yourself opposing him during a big-game showdown. But then again, he’s the kind of guy who would win you over even after he’d won over you—as in beaten you and your team’s brains out. I’ll swear this to you: Even if he’d never become part of the legacy of Notre Dame coaching greats, I still would have wanted Louis Leo Holtz (or, as I like to chant, “Lou! Lou! Lou!”) to become a part of my life. Which he is, and for which I am very grateful. Really, I would have felt the same way about him if he’d instead been a tax accountant or an insurance salesman. Although thank God he didn’t become anything other than what he was, and continues to be. He radiates a remarkable sense of magic unlike any I’ve ever encountered. His spirit, his wisdom, his kindness, and his standards—simply as a man—are just that infectious.

How infectious, you ask?

Well, let me share with you a journal excerpt of sorts, returning us to Friday, September 9, 1994: There I was, back in South Bend, where the campus was pulsing with that electrifying one-of-a-kind Notre Dame pregame anticipation. It’s called a pep rally. I was one of the speakers. This was the evening prior to the next afternoon’s season opener, always a thrilling time, and for the sake of posterity (and also a book I’d been working on), here are some notes that I happened to put together shortly afterward. It ought to give you just a small taste of how Lou had been capable of inflaming me. . . .

Lou Holtz has asked me to speak at tonight’s pep rally. I’m ready! I’m always ready for Lou. The crowd is big, noisy, hopeful. I get up, take a deep breath, and holler: “In the last two years, we’ve had two fabulous football teams, yet neither one of them could win the championship. They came close. They deserved it. They earned it. They didn’t win it. So now we have this team and they know better than anyone else that this is their season. Their year! Their chance! Their turn to bring a national championship back to Notre Dame, where it belongs!” I’ve got the crowd roaring. “We have three things on our side: the greatest sports fans in the world, the greatest tradition in sports, and the best coach in college football. Let me tell you how good Lou Holtz is: You could kidnap him on the day of the game. You could tie him up, blindfold him, hide him in a cellar in Goshen, Indiana! And he would still outcoach the other guy!” The crowd goes wild. The band plays the victory march. Lou speaks and brings down the house. We’re all on fire.

Lou, you see, was all about fire—and a bunch of other terrific qualities—and his fire was always ignited in that proverbial nick of time. But to backtrack here for a moment, there were still plenty of good times to be had for the Irish when Coach Dan Devine followed strong on the inimitable heels of Ara Parseghian, winning the national championship with star quarterback Joe Montana in 1977, as well as the Cotton Bowl the year after. But as these things go, once Devine left in 1980, Notre Dame again fell into a tailspin. One we couldn’t get out of either. I was back to kicking wastepaper baskets in my office after losing games. This sort of behavior continued pretty consistently from me for more than a few years. It got exasperating, let me tell you. One day, before a televised Notre Dame game, I called my friend Andy Sidaris, who had directed so many college broadcasts for ABC-TV, and I asked him if there was a coach out there who could bring us back. Andy said, “Let me put my color guy on with you.” So he handed me over to the game analyst Frank Broyles, a good coach who later became the athletic director at the University of Arkansas. Like it was yesterday, I remember Broyles saying to me in that sweet southern drawl of his, “Regis, there’s only one coach in America who can bring Notre Dame back to where you want it to be, and that’s Lou Holtz.” While I had heard of Lou Holtz, I wasn’t all that familiar with his career. But Frank Broyles was pretty convincing, and I soon began repeating what he said to me wherever I went, to whomever would listen. I’m sure it had nothing to do with what happened, but one day not too terribly far down the road, Lou Holtz was named the next head coach at Notre Dame.

Before coming to South Bend, Lou had been recruited by the University of Minnesota to build up their struggling football program and was succeeding in bringing that team back up the ranks pretty quickly. But luckily, his Minnesota contract had a clause that said if Notre Dame ever called, he’d have to go. Well, I was thrilled when he arrived at Notre Dame for the start of the 1986 season. I called my old classmate Roger Valdiserri to find out what Lou was all about. Besides sharing that he was of medium height, very slender, and had a patch of blond hair on top of his head, Roger told me about Lou’s first introductory team meeting. Now the squad he had inherited was, at that point, not only mediocre but also a bit lazy and maybe even not all that interested in football anymore. They were talking loudly as Lou walked into the room and took his place up front, where he waited to speak to the players seated before him. Two hulking linemen sat slumped in the front row, laughing raucously among themselves, with their feet casually propped up on the stage.

According to Roger, Coach Holtz looked down at the two of them and growled, “Get your feet off the stage and sit up straight. Listen to me and look at me. Look me straight in the eye!” And then he gave the group a riveting analysis of what he thought was wrong with their playing and what his plan was to correct the problem. None of them had known that Lou Holtz was such a passionate and inspirational speaker. So yes, they sat up straight that night and listened, too. They realized that this man was going to be something special, a different kind of leader. For starters, he had all of the names removed from the backs of the players’ jerseys to drive home the importance of team effort over individual achievements.

Lou worked the team hard in the first year. They finished with five wins and six losses. The six losing games added up to a difference in score of only eleven points, so you know they were heartbreakingly close games. The second year, 1987, was already better. Toward the end of the season, they were eight and one. But then they lost the last three games on the road to three excellent football teams that year—Penn State, Miami, and Texas A&M. The final score of the last game was A&M 35, Notre Dame 10. This, after the Irish had grabbed an early 10–0 lead. It left a bitter taste in Lou’s mouth. He didn’t understand how they could’ve blown such a lead. He had disciplined them. He had earned their respect. But he wanted something more from them during the next season. He wanted perfection. Perfection means everything to Lou Holtz. He began his third year of coaching at Notre Dame with that in mind: perfection. When he took the stage at the first team meeting of that ’88 season, this is what he told them—which remains, as motivational words in life go, perfection in and of itself:

I want you to pay close attention to what I say because I don’t want any misunderstanding about how I feel. I’m here to win football games for the University of Notre Dame. Not some of our games, not most of our games—I’m here to win all of our games. Every doggone one of them. We aren’t here to come close. We are here to win every single football game we ever play at Notre Dame from this point forward.

I want you to be the best, the very best in all areas of your life. I want you to be the best student you can be, I want you to be the best person you can be, I want you to be the best football player you can be. The only reason a person should exist is to be the best he can be. To play at Notre Dame is to reach perfection. I’m basically a perfectionist. I’ve heard all the reasons why you can’t reach perfection. I’m here to tell you something. We are either going to reach it or we’re going to come so close that the average person won’t know the difference.

Perfection at Notre Dame will not be demanded. It will be expected. I don’t ever expect to lose another football game as long as I’m at Notre Dame and I sure don’t expect to lose one this year. Less than perfection is a personal embarrassment to me, to you, and to this university. We’re going to write another chapter in Notre Dame football history. We’re going to reach perfection in football the same way as the university seeks perfection in every facet of the school. We are not asking for perfection—we are going to demand it. Don’t expect us to lower the standards to satisfy people who are looking for mediocrity, because that won’t happen. Mistakes are a thing of the past. We expect perfection and we’re going to get it.

I want to tell you what this football team is going to be. It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be physical. It’s going to be relentless. We will look adversity in the eye and we will turn it into success. That’s perfection. I’m sure there are people in this room who say right now, “Tell us what we have to do because we’re willing to pay the price.” On the other hand, there may be some in this room who will say, “We just can’t do it.” I don’t care who questions our ability to succeed as long as they aren’t members of this team.

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune of hearing many of Lou’s speeches to his teams as well as to some of America’s biggest captains of industry. Whether or not you play football for him, you can’t help but get fired up by the sheer conviction Lou Holtz turns loose on any group. You want to be the best player, the best company boss, the best anything you can be in his presence. Not only can he motivate you, he can entertain you. Believe me, I’ve heard all the great comedians throughout the decades and I assure you that Lou Holtz more than holds his own when it comes to getting the big laughs. He’s not only wise about football, but also about everything else life tends to throw at us. You can give him your toughest personal problem—one so difficult that you don’t know where the real answer lies—and Lou will listen to it, analyze it, dissect it, and give you the most effective solution. He’ll tell you what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. He is one terrific human being with a pretty flawless life compass. He comes with layers upon layers of great gut instinct and rational thinking powers. I’ve pondered his remarkable gifts for years, curious to discover just what makes him Lou Holtz.

So a number of times, I’ve accompanied him back to his hometown of East Liverpool on the Ohio River, which is a fairly typical midwestern town, except for the unusual fact that it seems to be run more or less by the local mortician, Frank “Digger” Dawson, who simply reveres Lou. As does the general population of East Liverpool; he’s their proud son and everlasting hero. They built a museum to showcase all his awards and trophies and photographs and everything else a legendary coach accumulates over a lifetime. It’s quite a sight to behold. They’ve even installed an elevator to help the handicapped and elderly visitors see all the exhibits on the upper floor. With Lou’s help, they also regularly raise money for scholarships that send the town’s kids off to college.

One day I stood in front of that museum on Main Street with Lou as he pointed out his old haunts. “See the candy store on the corner across the street? That’s where I hung out as a young guy.” It looked, in fact, just like the candy store, Mac’s, where I hung out as a kid in the Bronx, on Morris Park Avenue, across the street from my grammar school, Our Lady of Solace. I kind of liked that coincidence! Lou’s son, Skip, who happens to be a terrific young coach now at the University of Southern Florida, told me that his dad had long ago played linebacker on his high school team, even though he weighed only 140 pounds. But he made up for what he didn’t have in size with what he carried in fierce passion. I read somewhere that Lou prayed to God every night to make him bigger and stronger so he could continue to play football. Lou had been an altar boy back then and sometimes wondered why God didn’t seem to be listening to those prayers. Only years later did he realize that God had most likely heard him, but had a different plan in mind, pointing him in another direction of the field instead. Better than just playing the game, God apparently wanted Lou to capitalize on his passionate spirit and become a coach. It was a plan that would work out pretty well for everyone.

You want another clue as to how the Lou Holtz spirit works? Well, early on another day when I’d gone to East Liverpool to help celebrate the anniversary of his museum, I had an afternoon date to drive twelve miles south to Steubenville, Ohio, where I’d been asked to be the grand marshal of a Dean Martin birthday celebration parade. Lou insisted on joining me, which meant that he would have to leave his own function in East Liverpool a little early. I tried to convince him to stay, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I think it was his way of thanking me for being on hand for his anniversary party. So we drove to Steubenville together while he reminisced about all the times he’d ridden there by bus to play Steubenville’s high school football team, which called itself the Big Red. Lou said they never did beat that team. Dean’s commemorative birthday celebration, as it turned out, would begin later with an afternoon mass in the church where Dean, too, had served as an altar boy. Yes, just twelve miles downriver—and twenty years apart—Dean and Lou each performed altar boy duties while growing up in their respective and very similar small Ohio hometowns. And in time, both would become men who, different as they could be, achieved immense stardom in the professions they pursued. I kind of like that coincidence, too. In fact, something tells me that they would have thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. The image of that combination can’t help but warm my heart somehow.

Anyway, Lou and I have never lost touch through the years, as our friendship has only expanded. Whenever he’s in New York, we always find a way to get together. Which brings to mind one particular New Year’s Eve a handful of years ago. He had called ahead to tell me that ESPN needed him to come to town and join its panel of studio commentators during the New Year’s Day bowl games. He’d asked whether Joy and I would be around the night before, so that maybe we could ring in the New Year together. Well, as it happened, we would not only be around but would actually be hosting the Fox network’s special New Year’s Eve celebration, direct from Times Square. I asked him to be a guest on the big broadcast and suggested that we all go out afterward. He happily agreed.