The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game.
When I was growing up we didn't have cable. All that came on Saturday morning was Notre Dame football, and I was there every time to watch it.
You have to be equal at both - great at football and great at dedicating yourself to the academics at Notre Dame. It's hard. There are no rooty-toot classes for athletes in South Bend.
To my father, Notre Dame represented the underdogs of the world, the Italians, and the Polish people. I told him that one day I would play football for Notre Dame and worked hard to make that dream come true.
I visited Notre Dame at 11 in the morning and the sun was entering through the south rose window, it was so impressive. This is when architecture can be king and give people sensations, like music.
I haven't seen the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre. I haven't seen anything. I don't really care.
My dream was to play football at Notre Dame more than anything.
Notre Dame and Sydney - that was nothing. Notre Dame doesn't have a police station; it is not 1,000 or so feet high. It was a public structure, very easy to access. And Sydney Harbour Bridge was half-and-half: a bridge, in the middle of the night. The World Trade Center was the end of the world. Electronic devices, police dogs.
Three coaches at Notre Dame made a big difference in my life, not that I played any football when I attended Notre Dame. But Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, and Lou Holtz - they all made a difference to me, and I respected them for their attitudes about life and how they handled loss.
I remember when I drove into Notre Dame, getting ready for the first day of work. I had an electrical charge go up my back because I realized all of a sudden that I was responsible for the traditions that the Knute Rocknes and the Frank Leahys had set, and what Notre Dame stood for.
There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters. And, quite frankly, they're both a pain in the ass.
The University of Notre Dame does not redshirt, and I endorse that policy completely. I am very much in favor of redshirting, but not at Notre Dame. But there's no doubt about it. It puts us at a huge disadvantage.
I've been coming to Notre Dame since 1957. This place, this campus, is the closest thing there is to perfection.
If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who's been successful at another college program, they're going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.
I had grown up during a time when Notre Dame football was held in the highest esteem. I listened to all of the games on the radio.
Every morning, just like in Alabama, I got up with the sun, ate my breakfast even before my mother and sisters and brothers, and went to school, winter, spring, and fall alike to run and jump and bend my body this way and that for Mr. Charles Riley.
Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is the decoration of the railroad station... There was never more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything connected with the railroads... Railroad architecture has or would have a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work.