Notre Dame doesn't play fair
By T.J. BERKA
There is nothing like the first weekend of September.
A slight chill hits the air, hinting of the autumn that is soon to come. Students are bustling, reuniting with old friends and getting ready for the school year lurking around the corner.
And most important, the college football season starts.
At Michigan and Notre Dame, this means one thing: rivalry weekend. The Wolverines and the Fighting Irish begin the football season with a knockdown, drag-out, no-holds-barred contest which separates the contenders from the pretenders for the national championship hunt.
Well, at least Michigan does.
The Fighting — in name only — Irish felt that starting the season in Ann Arbor was just too much stress for its young team to deal with. So Notre Dame just decided to schedule a not-so-powerful Kansas team — without Danny Manning — to give itself a trial run before Michigan comes calling.
Knute Rockne must be spinning in his grave. I guess I can see what Notre Dame coach Bob Davie was thinking about when scheduling the Jayhawks. Like Michigan, Kansas has blue uniforms. But all similarities end there.
Although Notre Dame played the part of a fragile lamb in scheduling the Jayhawks, it's fine that Notre Dame has no confidence in itself. It really has no reason to feel good about its prospects.
The Irish haven't competed for the national title in the past five years. Heck, they dropped their last two games to Michigan State, the other university in Michigan.
But that's OK. Notre Dame has hit its bad patches before. Remember Gerry Faust? But Notre Dame being a lackluster football team is not the reason that the Golden Dome has more of a resemblance to a bronze pig.
The fact is that Notre Dame isn't quite the holier-than-thou program that it, or NBC, will have you believe. Forget what Rudy Ruettiger might have told you. The truth of the matter is that Kimberly Dunbar is more of what the Notre Dame program stands for.
Free plane tickets. Kickbacks totaling thousands of dollars at a time. A child. All this and more can be obtained when joining the Notre Dame football program.
As for the annoying little leprechaun who dances around the field as if he had just exited the pub, its rumored that the pot full of gold was also a gift from Dunbar, an even exchange for the luck of the Irish.
I guess Dunbar didn't alter the Notre Dame tradition. She just brought dishonesty, kickbacks and cheating to a whole new level.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Sports Stories for Friday, September 3, 1999
