WHEN I TURNED SIX, I was deemed old enough to start going with Dad, who until then had brought our next-door neighbor Leon Helak, a police officer, to sit with him in his seats in the southwest corner, Section 21, Row 42, which his faculty status gave him the privilege of buying each year. I don’t know when this literary scholar picked up his taste for American football, but it must go back in some way to his boyhood devotion to the great English soccer club Manchester United. After all, that loyalty meant he was totally at home as part of a roaring mass in the stands of a great stadium cheering for a team known by its deep and legendary tradition.
When the Man United team plane crashed on takeoff in 1958 in Munich, the disaster at once claimed the lives of my father’s soccer heroes and cemented his lifelong loyalty to the team—much as a 1931 crash in Kansas both took Notre Dame Coach Knute Rockne’s life and sealed his legendary status. Perhaps that’s why my father’s fondness for Notre Dame football showed no sign of the gap in affinity that you might expect to see between the Fighting Irish and a nonreligious Mediterranean intellectual. One afternoon thirty years after the Munich tragedy, he cheerfully guided his bewildered son up to his place on the weathered wooden bench to take in his first game, against Purdue.
It wasn’t even close. Lou Holtz was coaching; you could make out his red hair even from our corner seats two-thirds of the way up. The quarterback, Tony Rice, ran thirty-eight yards for a touchdown and later threw a fifty-four-yard touchdown pass to the soon-to-be-legendary Raghib “Rocket” Ismail. The crowd roared when Ricky Watters returned a punt sixty-six yards to the end zone, imprinting on my young brain the idea that every kickoff must be a scoring opportunity. Clutching the program my father had bought me, a four-dollar extravagance so that we could check the players by number, I stood on my seat to see the field when the fans leapt up for a big play. I was watching what would become the national championship team of 1988.
Over the years the mysteries of the stadium began to decode themselves. I finally grasped that those strange concrete forms that had looked like upside-down stairways leading nowhere were in fact the underside of the stands. I began to understand the difference between the regulars, who kept the same seats for decades as my father would, and the ones who came in one game at a time after buying tickets from one of the scalpers standing out by the Toll Road exit. I learned about penalties, rushes, passes, touchbacks, and safeties. And amid the magnificent swearing of people sitting around us I started to gather how profanity may be abusive but also poetic.
I learned about hierarchy, too. There were “alumni,” a word I came to associate with combed-over gray hair, blue blazers, blue-and-gold-striped ties, beige raincoats, and the smell of cigars. The nearer to the fifty-yard line and the closer to the field I looked, the more gray hair and beige coats. Our seats were more the domain of the “fans,” sporting Notre Dame jackets and scarves and hats and socks. And of course there were “students,” a mysterious kind of proto-adult whose ranks dominated the northwest corner of the stadium and who stood for the whole game.
Then there were the ushers—the same men each year—who conveyed in their yellow jackets and white caps such authority that it is peculiar to think that they were volunteers with day jobs, rather than full-time members of a football-oriented military order. Indeed, there actually was a football-oriented militaristic order, the elite and selective Irish Guard, consisting of tall, kilt-clad students in narrow bearskin hats, who marched out magnificently behind the band’s drum majors and performed the flag honors at the beginning of each game.
Some things I did not understand, and wouldn’t for years. At six, I could detect but not fathom the controversy when the students arrived at the vaunted 1988 Miami game wearing Tshirts that read CATHOLICS VERSUS CONVICTS. Nor could I then figure out what motivated my father’s wrath when he turned to some fans in the next row, aggravated by their catcalling Tony Rice (our second-ever black quarterback) over his grade-point average, and said to one of them, “I’d like to see your grade-point average.”
I could not then have comprehended the tension involved in the fact that my father was a man of the left, no easy thing on a campus like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s. I would learn later that many of his closest friendships among the faculty were sealed amid the protests of his early years, such as the time he spoke out against the Reagan administration’s covert support for human rights abusers in Latin America during the popular president’s visit to campus. (All I knew at the time was that he took me to the airport to see Air Force One through a chain-link fence at the end of the runway.)
As reliably as most students were conservative, the humanities faculty members were overwhelmingly liberal. From dinner tables at the homes of my parents’ professor friends I would hear words and names that would mean nothing to me then but in retrospect make it very clear what was on their minds: Reaganite. Intellectual. Iran-Contra. Lynne Cheney. Half the table talk was just faculty gossip, and that was pretty understandable to me by the age of ten or so because it wasn’t that different from the talk at school. But the other part, the reference-laden intellectual and political discussion, was opaque. I would hear but not understand arguments over the uselessness of post-structuralism or the relevance of Hobsbawm’s historiography, wondering what any of it meant and how anyone could be as passionate about it as the people seated at the dinner table who just a couple hours earlier were indulgingly asking me about my loose tooth or my baseball card collection. At first I tuned it out, awaiting the first opportunity to excuse myself from the table with the other kids and go watch TV (especially if the house we were visiting had cable) or play tag. Like the coffee they would pour to go with dessert, their style of conversation was an acquired taste. But the more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator. This offered its own sort of political education. At Saint Joe, we were brought up not only to learn Church doctrine on matters like sexuality and abortion, but also to understand the history of the Church as a voice for the oppressed and downtrodden. At all-school mass in the bleachers of the airy, aging gym, we would pray for the various places and peoples around the world experiencing oppression.