Fighting Irish and Navy ready to set sail

COLLEGE FOOTBALL NOTRE DAME v NAVY: KEITH DUGGANsamples the atmosphere of one of America's most storied sporting pageants, the clash between Notre Dame and Navy ahead of the game being played in Dublin next year

WHEN THE Navy football team plays its Army rivals each year, the senior players on the team are permitted to stitch two personalised patches on to the insides of their uniform rather than the customary one. The emblems are a rare concession to individuality in an academy where the team ethos is paramount.

In 2002, JP Blecksmith, Navy’s back-up quarterback, chose two patches which bore the inscriptions ‘Consummate Professional’ and ‘Belleau Wood’ – a reference to a World War One battle. Blecksmith graduated in May of 2003 and was leading a platoon through Fallujah when he was killed by a sniper’s bullet on November 11th, 2004.

By the next Army-Navy game, his jersey was draped over a chair on the sideline alongside the jersey worn by Ron Winchester, a former tackle killed by a grenade explosion in the Anbar province in September and the shirt worn by Scott Zellem, another former Navy football man who had been killed during a training flight accident that August.

The ghost shirts bore sombre testimony of how swiftly graduates of the Naval academy can move from the gleaming buttons and brass bands of this 100-year-old football game to the ravaged places where life just ends.

When 500 Navy midshipmen marched through the splendour of the Notre Dame campus last Saturday afternoon, the thought of what may lie ahead of them inevitably crossed the minds of the local fans applauding them and shouting out the time honoured encouragements –“God Bless! Appreciate the Service! Beat Army! Beat Army!”

If the Navy-Army game is the sacrosanct tradition, then Navy’s annual game against Notre Dame also holds a place in the American sporting canon, less for the competitiveness of the rivalry than for the enduring tradition between the two colleges.

Next September, for what would nominally be Navy’s home game, the two teams will play in the Aviva Stadium in Dublin.

“Notre Dame and Navy have much in common,” explains Chet Gladnuck, who for 10 years has been Director of Athletics with Navy. “Both schools are steeped in great tradition athletically, but as well as that we have an academic commitment that is just about second to none.

“We commit our students to graduate, to be leaders, in our case to serve our country and in Notre Dame’s case to be leaders in the business community.

All of our graduates are highly successful and they come from a background where the moral and ethical values are very much part of their lives.

“The football series is the longest uninterrupted series in the history of college football in what they call inter-sectional – they are in a different section than we are.

“And the series will be 100 years old in 1926. You know, going back to 1940, when Notre Dame had grave financial issues and a falling enrolment, the Navy sent hundreds of students there and that helped to keep the college afloat and eventually flourish as we see today. So I do think that we share similar values and recruit the same type of young men and women who aspire to be leaders.”

This year’s instalment of the game took place in Notre Dame. The college is less than two hours southeast of Chicago. The motorway gradually narrows and gives way to bleak motels and fast food restaurants and, finally, small farm houses and the rolling hills of northern Indiana. It was here, on the edge of South Bend, that Fr Edward Sorin decided in 1841 to set up a college that has become the most visible celebration of Irish-ness outside the St Patrick’s Day parades.

Even walking through Notre Dame’s campus, it is difficult to absorb the overall fabulousness and quiet money of the place, from the iconic gold dome to the huge mural of Christ on the wall of the Hesbaugh Library to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart to the pale stone 80,000 seat football stadium where bronzed life-size statues of immortal coaching heroes – Knute Rockne and Lou Holtz – deepen the impression that, regardless of what happens beyond the gates, Notre Dame will hold fast to its ways.

Home fans – many alumni, some parents, others just people who formed an attachment to the Irish – began arriving in South Bend from Thursday and by Saturday morning, the tailgating (cook-ups and beers at the rear end of a truck/car) was in full swing. Crisp sunshine gave way to thunder and an unholy downpour of hailstones followed by rain.

But the weather didn’t matter.

These football days are all about the rites of passage and so a crowd gathered to applaud the Irish team as they made their way through the church door for pre-game mass. (Notre Dame wears its Catholicism on its sleeve: it may have more scheduled masses than anywhere outside the Vatican). Some of these college players look little more than boys.

An elderly man with an Irish accent shouted encouragement. “Tear into them,” he said in a voice you would normally hear at a Connacht championship match.

Families gathered in the main building (the front steps of which undergraduates steadfastly refuse to tread upon because of a superstition about graduating).

Others waited at the Knute Rockne Gate where the Navy players would walk into the ground, in single file. Traditionally, the rivalry is one sided: Notre Dame, with its gilded history (their alumni includes two of the most storied quarterbacks in history, Joe Montana and Joe Theismann) won for 46 years in a row before Navy stunned everyone by winning in 2007 (46-44 after triple overtime). Since then, they won three of the last four so there was a rare mood of local apprehension on Saturday and the stadium was almost full an hour before kick-off.

The Dublin tradition of arriving at games at the very last reasonable moment has stunned Navy officials who came here to plan for next year’s tie. Jon Starrett, the Senior Associate Athletic Director with Navy was at the England-Ireland Six Nations game.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he recalled before Saturday’s game. “Thirty minutes before the game there was nobody in the stadium, whereas at Navy, over half the crowd are in their seats two hours before the game. If we had the last minute dash to the stadium like you guys have, I have no idea how we’d cope. Staff at the Aviva told me they can deal with 1,250 tickets a minute. We are nowhere near that.”

They don’t have to be.

The Naval Midshipmen’s daily routine makes the match day ceremonies a breeze for them while Notre Dame also places a heavy emphasis on structure – be it sports or class time tables or the variety of mass times. The lawns have many statues of holy men, none of whom you sense would have approved of tardiness.

Because it is such a completely self-contained universe, with the leaves and the statues and the general goodwill, Notre Dame creates the magical illusion that nothing ever changes.

It does, of course. Female students have only been admitted since 1972. The football stadium held its first night game this year. And on Saturday, they were experimenting with the sacrilegious usage of piped rock music before the game.

But it remains a stadium of brass and anthems and today’s students can move unselfconsciously between dancing in the bleachers to Kanye West and loyally singing the words of the The Notre Dame Victory March (“Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame/Wake up the echoes cheering her name”).

That is the most striking aspect of the Notre Dame experience: you have to search far and wide to hear a discordant, cynical note. 8,000 students (with a 12:1 student-lecturer ratio!) and not a Holden Caulfield among them.

The perpetuation of the Navy-Notre Dame tradition is important in the wider context of American college sports too. Nostalgia and loyalty and the unfussy grandeur of the college means that Notre Dame can make what is a serious sports business seem like a throwback to a more idealised time.

But this is a game that generates around €1.5 million in television rights for the home team. This is a game that commands its own military flyover, which occurred seconds after the national anthem. This is a huge money spinner. Notre Dame, with its strict policy on alcohol, does not sell beer in the stadium, lest its students be tempted. But the merchandise and food stands do serious trade.

The football team is revered and is the most visible symbol of what the school means. It is hard not to wonder how those who won’t advance to glamorous violence of the NFL will ever find anything in later life to match this adrenaline and excitement. But the demands on these young players are severe – daily training session at 6am and classes are scheduled around the gym and field work.

The very best of the ranks – such as Michael Floyd, the outstanding wide receiver who dominated in Saturday’s 56-14 victory – will hope to advance to the instant wealth of the NFL upon graduation. But for the Navy players, that dream has never been an option. The days of the Naval Academy recruiting the top prospects have long ended.

“The players realise when they make a commitment to the Naval Academy that they are going to become professional in something other than sport – namely in serving their country,” says Gladchuk.

“So when they graduate they are accomplished at giving orders and they are leading men and women into conflict and into strife. It is a calling or a vocation. And it is something that professional ambition that brings with it the core steel of the challenges. They are not going to be NFL players or baseball players. They are going to serve.

“What they sometimes find is that, by their senior year, their minds begin to turn from being completely immersed in the athletics dimension to becoming much more involved in the next step in their careers, which is their true vocation – serving their country. So when they come through they are motivated.

“The sport is extremely important, but they begin to think about what is the most important thing in life to them. Sport is a microcosm of life in many ways and there are no big stars with Navy. It is about the team.”

Of the 30 Navy players graduating next year, about 12 are in the Marine Corps and will more than likely be deployed on the front lines. The peculiar thing is that since the United States’ overseas conflicts began in the months after 9/11, recruitment has not dropped off.

Applications for this year alone exceeded 20,000 for just 1,100 places. Those who make the Navy football team might not otherwise be recruited by division one schools. From a sports perspective, the attraction is obvious – to participate in the annual games against Army or Notre Dame is to take part in two of the most revered American sporting pageants. In addition, the Navy is a path to an education and, in many cases, to a better life.

But in these grave times, it can also be the path to a swift death.

And because of that, there was something sombre and serious about the presence of the Midshipmen on the famous old campus on Saturday last.

They marched in slow file, 500 of them, in full black naval suits, black coats and white scarves. They marched behind their band and smiled at the Notre Dame fans.

One old-timer remarked: “Well, they don’t feed ’em much.” A father admonished his child for not cheering the visitors. “They’re the ones who protect us, son.”

And regardless of one’s viewpoint on the role of America in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is all but impossible not to acknowledge the genuine valour of their commitment. For they are all so shockingly young and they believe in this cause and in this life, regardless of where it takes them. They were the living embodiment of everything that frivolous youth is not.

The same was true on the field. A greying Naval officer patrolled the sidelines, encouraging the team even as the scoreboard blazed a bigger and bigger deficit.

They went down with honour and, afterwards, as the Notre Dame fans celebrated, the Navy team gathered at the their end of the ground to sing the Navy Blue and Gold: “Now colleges from sea to sea may sing of colours true/But who has better right than we to hoist a symbol hue?”

Then they left. The younger players on the team will be in Dublin next year for the next chapter of this ode to American learning and vigour and to an inherited way of life.

For the senior Navy football men though, it will soon be time to leave the pageantry and cheering all behind.

Notre Dame v Navy will take place in the Aviva Stadium in Dublin on September 1st 2012.

Advance sales in the US have reportedly been strong so far, with package sales approaching 10,000. Packages catering to the European marker will be available shortly while corporate hospitality bookings are complete. Tickets will go on sale to the general public in March of next year and with considerable numbers expected to travel from both colleges, the organisers are confident that the game will be sold out.

Reports that the GAA are moving the All-Ireland finals to accommodate the game are unfounded. The rules state that the All-Ireland football final should be played on the penultimate Sunday of September, with the hurling final taking place two weeks previously. Normally, that would mean the first and third Sundays of the month. However, next September contains five Sundays, which means that the GAA finals could automatically be delayed for a week.

Croke Park was the venue for the last Irish instalment of the Notre Dame-Navy rivalry, which took place in 1996.