Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

Theories abound as to why Notre Dame hasn't won a national title in football since 1988. An insistence on holding football players to the school's stringent admissions and academic standards. A lack of unity among the athletic department, academic leaders and the board of trustees over the direction of the program. The center of football power shifting from the Midwest to the Southeast. The inability of priests and nuns at Catholic high schools to guilt their best football players into going to Notre Dame. Indiana's failure to enact daylight saving time, which may have players confused over whether the game clock is on time, or an hour ahead or behind.

But citing objective factors only gets people talking about how your Golden Dome is tarnished whenever anything bad happens to Notre Dame football. That's not going to get fans excited, nor is it going to ensure that lucrative NBC contract keeps getting renewed. No, what Notre Dame needs is something more ethereal, more spiritual, to blame for its fallow period. What Notre Dame needs is a curse.

The Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox have fed off of cockamamie curses to fill their stadiums and win fan sympathy for most of their rooters' natural lives. It's a great scam. Your team never has to take responsibility for its stupid personnel moves, its hiring of dunderheaded coaches or any other real problems, because all you have to do is blame a billy goat or Babe Ruth when things inevitably go wrong. It can give fans a very religious experience of devotion and suffering.

If you want a place where a very religious experience of devotion and suffering would go over well, why not one of the nation's most prominent Catholic universities? Notre Dame's most recent stumble was firing coach Ty Willingham in hopes of hiring Utah coach and former Irish assistant Urban Meyer, then watching Meyer get hired at Florida. Ah, another lash on the back as you wear the Helmet of Thorns!

But what curse has befallen Notre Dame? To create a so-called curse, you have to pick a seminal event, one that inexorably altered the landscape of the program, one that cannot be easily exorcised. And in Notre Dame's case, when they say exorcise the curse, they really mean exorcise the curse, Linda Blair-horking-green-pea-soup-style.

A friend of mine whose wife is a Notre Dame graduate suggested the Curse of Rudy.

Rudy was a 1993 movie about an annoying, simpering twerp who dreams about going to Notre Dame and playing football. On the last play of his senior season, he finally gets into a game at garbage time and makes a tackle. Cue the violins as Daniel "Rudy" Ruettigger, played by a hobbit, reaches his dream.

How could a movie curse a program? In a few ways. First, the film is the same unmitigated blarney about Notre Dame that annoys the school's haters. And speaking of unmitigated blarney, the real-life Rudy has ridden the coattails of the cinematic Rudy for a career as, you guessed it, a motivational speaker.

Notre Dame always has sold itself on its tradition and its alumni's deep affection for the school, but the movie Rudy — made by the people who gave you Hoosiers — and the real-life Rudy may have created a permanent backlash. As for the real-life Notre Dame football team, it hasn't been in contention for a national title since the movie was released.

However, I'm not sure Rudy itself can underpin a curse. Plus, there's the possibility some fan would try to offer up the real Rudy as a burnt offering to exorcise the curse, and I don't want to be a party to that.

So instead, I'm going to start a movement to blame the decline of Notre Dame football on the Curse of Touchdown Jesus.

Anyone with a passing knowledge college football knows Touchdown Jesus. Technically called "Word of Life," it's a 134-feet high, 68-feet wide mural on the exterior of the Hesburgh Library, located straight west of Notre Dame Stadium. It's called Touchdown Jesus because it appears Jesus is signaling a score as if he were an NFL (Nazareth Football League) referee.

The mural was erected in 1964, and was visible from inside the stadium. Its effect was immediate. After a 10-year period of mediocrity and worse since legendary coach Frank Leahy retired, the 1964 team went 9-1 under new coach Ara Parseghian and re-established itself as an elite program. The football team won four national titles under the watchful, loving eyes of Touchdown Jesus.

However, Notre Dame decided to add another level to its stadium and expand capacity to more than 80,000 seats. While the expansion, completed for the 1997 season, satisfied fans and alumni who had trouble getting into games, it removed the watchful, loving eyes of Touchdown Jesus from Notre Dame Stadium. Now, in most parts of the stadium, all you can see are His hands and part of His arms, transforming the Messiah who could walk on water into Drowning Man Jesus.

With Jesus no longer on its side, Notre Dame football has gone into a tailspin. The following events have happened since 1997: an 0-4 bowl game record; a successful age discrimination lawsuit brought by a fired assistant coach; a scandal involving a would-be Notre Dame booster who embezzled money from her employer to lavish gifts on players, including one who fathered her child; the aforementioned scandal getting Notre Dame its first major NCAA probation; the expulsion of four players accused of rape; the hiring of coach George O'Leary, who resigned five days later when the school realized he lied on his resume; the firing of Willingham — the first Notre Dame coach in 70 years not to stay at least five years — with no apparent successor in sight.

The beauty of blaming all this ineptitude on the Curse of Touchdown Jesus is that you can't easily undo the curse. Notre Dame certainly isn't going to tear down its stadium addition. Moving the mural isn't practical. So that means students, alumni and fans have to find creative ways to break the curse, beyond going to confession and then saying five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers.

And the other beauty is, fans could bond around the curse, bemoan the curse, curse the curse, and it would take a lot of pressure off the team itself for its failings. Or, sometimes, explain odd things that may happen on and off the field. Creating a curse isn't about making sense — it's about finding a way to cope. Just ask Cubs and Red Sox fans.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.