Counterfeit Amatuers
by Allen Sack
From Chapter 1
Playing Football in Ara’s Era
I played my last football game for Notre Dame in 1966 against Southern California at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Since then, big-time collegiate sports has morphed into a multibillion-dollar industry. Although rampant commercialism jumps out as the most obvious change in college sports since the sixties, changes in NCAA rules that have blurred the distinction between amateurs and professionals have also profoundly altered the college game. Because my personal athletic experiences serve as a point of reference for comparing college sports, past and present, I have decided to begin my story with a description of what it was like to play football for Ara Parseghian in the 1960s, and to be a student during that turbulent decade. As is the case for anyone who engages in highly competitive sports, I had my share of both success and bitter disappointment.
My Fall from Grace
The most disappointing moment of my athletic career occurred in preseason football practice at the beginning of my sophomore year at Notre Dame. The team had already endured two weeks of double sessions in the stifling heat and humidity so common in northern Indiana in the summer. The Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest had already given players a good idea of where they stood in the football pecking order. I knew that things were not going well for me on the playing field, and that I would probably be at the bottom of the coaches’ depth chart. Nonetheless, I was stunned by an announcement made just before our nightly team meeting.
Just after dinner, John Murphy, an assistant coach under Ara Parseghian, called about twenty-five players aside in a room just outside the main dining hall. He got right to the point. None of the players assembled in that room, he said, would ever dress for a Notre Dame football game. Our job, he said, would be an important one nonetheless. As members of the preparation teams, we would attend practice, run the defenses and offenses of upcoming opponents, and try to simulate real game conditions. I noted that he did not equivocate. He did not say that we would probably not play for Notre Dame. He said that we would not play. I was devastated. I had honestly never realized that some players who receive scholarships never even dress for a game.
To explain my free fall from a highly touted All-State quarterback from Pennsylvania to a defensive end position on what players humorously referred to as the “shit squad,” I need to backtrack to the beginning of my freshman year. In 1963 the football program at Notre Dame had fallen on very hard times. Between 1959 and 1962, Joe Kuharich compiled the worst record in Notre Dame history by winning only seventeen of forty games, for a winning percentage of .425. Hugh Devore, who had been freshman coach under Kuharich, replaced him as head coach in 1963, with the understanding that he would serve only as an “interim coach” until a full-time coach could be hired.
Devore recruited a freshman class with depth at every position. I was one of seven quarterbacks in the freshman class, and it seemed to me that many of the players I talked to, regardless of position, had been All-State or even All-American athletes in high school. Alan Page, a high school All-American and future inductee into the National Football League Hall of Fame, left a lasting impression on me by carrying five or six glasses of milk back from the milk machine in the dining hall all at once. He was wearing one of the green tee shirts that had been issued to all of us. His massive forearms, imposing six-foot-five-inch frame, and the air of self-confidence he projected left no doubt in my mind that he was destined for stardom. Many of the other players were equally impressive. This was clearly the big leagues.
Even though freshmen were not eligible for varsity competition back then, we were still expected to be on campus a week or so before other students. No sooner had we arrived than the coaches sent us to the stadium to get equipment we would need for a scrimmage with the varsity the next day. I knew that I had come to Notre Dame to play football, but I had not expected to be playing before my bags were unpacked. The equipment manager, a cantankerous older man with silver-gray hair, called Mac, looked as if he had been around since the Rockne era. Not unlike an army quartermaster dealing with recruits who had just arrived at boot camp, Mac made us feel privileged to have equipment at all, let alone equipment that fit.
We were all given heavy green jerseys, apparel far more conducive to weather in late fall than the dog days of summer. Some of the lucky players received helmets comparable to what they might have worn in high school. Others had to make do with leather models not unlike the ones I had seen in pictures of the Four Horsemen. Mac had no sympathy for players who did not like what they were given, often subjecting them to verbal abuse for questioning his judgment. Joe Smyth, a lineman from the Philadelphia area, ended up with an old leather helmet that earned him the nick name “Big Red” after Red Grange, the legendary University of Illinois football player from the 1920s. I lucked out in the helmet category but ended up with pants that kept sliding down below my hip pads.
Dressed in antiquated equipment and with no idea of what to expect, we marched out to the practice field the next day to be used as defensive cannon fodder for Notre Dame’s varsity offense. I am sure that the veteran players saw this as an opportunity to give the freshmen, many of whom had arrived on campus with inflated images of themselves, a much-needed reality check. My first taste of big-time college football came when Bob Meeker, a 240-pound offensive tackle, hit me so hard that I was dazed for a couple of seconds. I was playing safety. I saw a running play developing off tackle, came up to fill the hole, and was pounded by Meeker instead. That was only one of several hard hits I took that day. I survived this rite of passage and left the field feeling confident that I was physically tough enough to compete against players like these.
Throughout the fall, my performance as a freshman quarterback was inconsistent. Some days I felt a little like the cocky young quarterback I had been in high school. A week before the Navy game, I was assigned the task of playing Navy’s All-American quarterback and future Heisman Trophy winner, Roger Staubach, on the game preparation team. I did well, getting a few compliments from coaches. For the most part, though, I felt my confidence slowly slipping away. In high school, pass receivers I had thrown to for years had developed an instinctive ability to run under my passes, even when they were not perfectly on target. I missed these players, one of whom had accepted a scholarship to the University of Illinois. Everything was different, from the way the ball was snapped from center to the way I had to plant my feet when throwing a pass. Adjusting to a whole new system, in addition to handling the pressure of being at Notre Dame, was making it difficult for me to do things that had been second nature in high school. My performance suffered.
At the end of the fall I was still viewed as one of the top three freshman quarterbacks. But the fact that freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition, plus Hugh Devore’s laid-back approach to freshman player development, made it difficult to evaluate player ability. The athletic demands on freshmen in the Devore era were not excessive, thus making the transition to college life a lot easier from an academic standpoint. However, this lack of systematic attention to the freshmen program may also have reflected a certain neglect of the entire football program during this period. Not surprisingly, Devore’s team finished the 1963 season with a disappointing 2–7–0 record, one of the worst in Notre Dame history.
© 2008 The Penn State University