“I can’t believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.”
—Lou Holtz
The first time I saw Lou Holtz, I had to do a double take.
“That’s the coach of Notre Dame?” I thought to myself.
He looked so ordinary.
It was 1986 and his first season with Notre Dame. Sporting his navy blue windbreaker emblazoned with an arching Notre Dame logo and donning the familiar ND baseball cap, this 5’10” and 152 pound bespectacled man was dwarfed by the behemoth players around him. I was accustomed to the oversized coaching likes of Florida State’s Bobby Bowden, Michigan’s Bo Schembechler, and Nebraska’s Tom Osborne, many of whom were taller by a few inches and heavier by dozens of pounds. They exuded an aura of football gravitas, whereas Coach Holtz could have been mistaken for a freshman statistician.
In the last football game of the season, the unranked (4—6) Notre Dame Fighting Irish were visiting the seventeenth-ranked USC Trojans in the sixtieth year of this epic football rivalry. Having just lost two heartbreakers to No. 3 Penn State (by a score of 19—24) and No. 8 LSU (by a score of 19—21), a bruised Notre Dame football team headed to the Los Angeles Coliseum for one more fight before the close of the season. But not without first learning a few lessons from their feisty coach.
Shortly before the trip, the team freshmen were subjected to a written test about the storied Notre Dame—USC rivalry. If they failed, they didn’t dress. As Holtz recalled, one of the questions was “Name four great coaches that have participated in this game.” As one player answered, “I think Rockne, Leahy, McKay—and I can’t think of a fourth.” Holtz chimed in, “How ‘bout me?”
This was the year that Lou Holtz discovered the “PLAY LIKE A CHAMPION TODAY” sign captured in a black-and-white photo in an old Notre Dame history book. Inspired, he subsequently had it painted in Notre Dame blue and gold and fixed it to the bricks at the bottom of the locker room stairwell. Game after game, players tap it, thump it, feel it as their last inspired moment before racing onto the gridiron. “Every time you hit this sign,” Holtz insisted, “I want you to remember all the great people that played here before you, all the sacrifices that your teammates have made for you, all the people . . . who are responsible for you being here.”
“I follow three rules: Do the right thing, do the best you can, and always show people you care.”
Time and again in his inaugural season, Holtz talked about poise, saying, “Poise is just having confidence in yourself and what you’re doing. We are not going to mouth off, push, or shove ever at Notre Dame. We’re going to wait until that ball is snapped, we’re going to put a Riddell [helmet] on somebody, and we’re going to be the most physical football team in the country until the whistle blows.” He insisted on focus: “For the next sixty minutes, I want one thought, one mind, one body, and one spirit.” He championed unity: “This school’s got so much spirit, you could put pads on the band and we’ll kick their ass.” He knew that Notre Dame was about culture—God, country, Notre Dame.
Going into this one last game—this last, imposing hill to climb—Coach Holtz knew that his team was destined for greatness.
The USC game was to be the swan song of senior quarterback Steve Beuerlein. Breaking nearly every passing and total offense record at Notre Dame, Beuerlein’s final season would boast thirteen touchdowns and 2,211 passing yards. But it was his five interceptions that troubled Coach Holtz.
Early in the season, when Holtz sat down with the experienced quarterback, he said, “Steve, you own all the passing records, and that’s great. But, son, last year you threw seventeen interceptions and I make this commitment to you: You will not throw seven interceptions your senior year.” When Beuerlein became excited about Holtz’s hidden strategy to help whittle down his picks and asked about the plan, the coach answered, “When you get to six, you ain’t playing anymore. It’s that simple.”
Though that conversation seemed a distant memory to Beuerlein, it came roaring back. On the day before the USC game, Beuerlein (with five interceptions on his record thus far) met with Holtz privately, where the coach offered a valedictory about the great leadership the quarterback had provided the team. But as Holtz walked out of the room, Beuerlein recalls his parting words, “Oh, by the way, I wanted you to know that if you throw an interception tomorrow, I’m going to pull you out.”
As the next day dawned and the game unfolded, Notre Dame quickly fell behind. By the second half, USC was outmatching the Irish 30—12. And it was right about then that Beuerlein threw his sixth interception. After trotting off the field, Holtz went up to the veteran quarterback and barked, “You aren’t playing anymore. Sit down. I made a promise to you. When I say something to you, I mean it!” Beuerlein was mortified. “I sat down on the bench,” he remembered, “and literally started to cry. I was at home in southern California. I had about three hundred people at that game. . . . It was my bowl game—the last game of my career. We wanted to end it right.”
Well, Beuerlein couldn’t just sit there. Holtz recalled, “[Steve] came up to me saying, ‘Coach, you can’t let this happen. This is my last game. I’m in my home town. I’m from California. You can’t let me go out this way!’ He was begging me, saying, ‘I promise I won’t throw another interception!’ and I felt bad for him.” Dejected, as Beuerlein remembers, he sat on the bench for two or three series. The clock was mercilessly ticking. “When out of nowhere,” Beuerlein declared, “Coach Holtz came up beside me, jumped in my face, and said, ‘Are you ready to play some football, son?!’ And I looked at him saying, ‘Yessir! You won’t regret it! I promise!’ [To which Holtz bellowed], ‘Get out there and win us a football game!’”
Beuerlein was a changed man. Down 37—20, with just over twelve minutes left in the game, the focused quarterback executed a sequence of game-changing plays: a 42-yard touchdown pass, a 5-yard touchdown pass, and a two-point conversion that set up a game-winning 19-yard field goal with no time left on the clock. Beuerlein finished by tying a Notre Dame record of four touchdown passes against USC and claiming the most touchdowns (at the time) thrown by a Notre Dame quarterback in a single game.
Game over: 38—37 Notre Dame.
Years later, Coach Holtz recalled, “I tell you what. [Steve] led one of the great comebacks at Notre Dame.”
And Steve Beuerlein insisted, “I’m so grateful I had one year with Lou Holtz. It was a gift from heaven for me.”
Two years later, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish became national champions. In eleven thrilling seasons (1986—1996), Coach Holtz would amass a 100—30—2 record to become the third winningest coach in Notre Dame history—third only to Brian Kelly and Knute Rockne. Steve Beuerlein went on to play fifteen years in the NFL. He set nearly every Carolina Panthers passing record that still stands to this day.
To be sure, the story of a rousing, unlikely Notre Dame comeback against an archrival like USC is delicious in and of itself. It’s part of the legend, the lore, the aura that surrounds Notre Dame and its football team.
But Notre Dame won that game and hundreds since not solely because of strategy and strength but because of culture. A culture of faith. A culture steeped in history. A culture of excellence. A culture of mutual dependence. A culture of accountability. And a culture of second chances. God, country, Notre Dame.
Lou Holtz, coach and devout Catholic, didn’t create that culture at Notre Dame, but he breathed new life into it. “You don’t come to Notre Dame to learn to do something,” he asserted, “You come to Notre Dame to learn to be somebody.” Holtz once explained, “I follow three rules: Do the right thing, do the best you can, and always show people you care.” And many times, Holtz would add, “I can’t believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.”
When I first saw Lou Holtz in 1986, I thought he was ordinary.
But he was anything but ordinary.
Lou Holtz, requiescat in pace.