America at Large: Easy to see why Trump loves Lou Holtz

Chet Lacheta was an 18-year-old offensive lineman out of Illinois living the dream in his first year at the University of Notre Dame in 1990. At spring training, he got thrown in to play against the starting team. A huge opportunity but, still recovering from recent injury and illness, he found the scrimmage to be tough going. Afterwards, Lou Holtz, the iconic coach who had led the college to a national title just two years earlier, offered him an assessment of his performance.

“He called me a coward and he said I shouldn’t bother to come back to school in the fall [autumn],” said Lacheta. “He grabbed my facemask and then he purposely spit at me. The other players knew what happened.”

Last Friday, Donald Trump took time out from denying that he labelled US marines who died at the Battle of Belleau Wood in the first World War as "losers" and "suckers" to award Holtz the presidential medal of freedom, America's highest civilian honour. The official screed claimed it was recognition of his contribution to college football and his philanthropy. More cynical onlookers regarded it as a reward for the dyspeptic 83-year-old being unashamedly Trumpian in his public utterances for the past four years. A tendency that started with a cameo at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

“I don’t want to become you,” he warned immigrants that day, shortly after denouncing them as an “invasion”. “I don’t want to speak your language. I don’t want to celebrate your holidays. I sure as hell don’t want to cheer for your soccer team!”

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Red meat for the carnivorous constituency of the party that believes soccer to be a sleeper cell of creeping globalisation, an insidious international game threatening the myth of American exceptionalism by luring children away from superior native sports. After that triumph, Holtz became a regular on the right-wing airwaves, a high-profile version of the elderly neighbourhood grump warning kids to get off his lawn, always wearing the slightly puzzled mien of somebody wondering why young boys on Schwinn bicycles don’t deliver morning newspapers anymore.

In this bellicose guise, he was invited back to speak at the most recent Republican National Convention. Appearing between a nun and a police union chief, the deeply-religious Holtz used his platform to denounce Joe Biden’s candidacy, describing the former vice-president as “Catholic in name only”. A charge so ludicrous that was it too much even for the leprechaunistas at Notre Dame who moved quickly to distance themselves from the one-time coach dropping the college’s name during that particular invective.

"Lou Holtz receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom is absurd," tweeted Stan Van Gundy, former head coach of the Detroit Pistons. "Is the criteria how vocal you are in support of Trump? And these coaches who have made their careers on the back of young African-American men supporting a racist president is shameful."

This is not Holtz's first flirtation with extremist politics. In 1983, he was fired as head coach of the University of Arkansas for using his office to film election campaign commercials for Senator Jesse Helms. A notorious homophobe and white supremacist, Helms was such a dogged opponent of civil rights that he fought to try stop a national holiday being named for Martin Luther King Jr. Holtz's tenure in Arkansas had already included some racially-tinged episodes including a class action lawsuit brought by black players alleging, among other things, that he didn't care about them getting educated and frowned upon inter-racial dating.

The more you delve into Holtz’s life the more you can see why Trump regards him as so admirable. Much like the president, his entire career has been hallmarked by rule-bending, serial cheating and exploiting those less fortunate than himself.

When his coaching days ended, he restyled himself as a motivational speaker, hired at $50,000 a pop by institutions who didn't care that his storied teams at Notre Dame were encouraged to use steroids and were often physically abused by him and his assistants. That charge sheet was laid out in forensic detail by Don Yaeger and Doug Looney in their seminal investigative book, "Under The Tarnished Dome: How Notre Dame Betrayed Its Ideals for Football Glory".

None of the noxious clouds he left in his wake in South Bend or every other place he coached ever affected his inflated standing in this most corrupt of all sports. At Notre Dame, they erected a statue in his honour and he made hay for years on ESPN’s football coverage as an irascible relic from another era, peddling over-exuberance in place of actual analysis, always railing against subversive notions such as paying college athletes, and once even coming out with the line, “Hitler was a great leader too!”

A man so tone deaf that when most people were in a tizzy about Augusta National still prohibiting women from joining back in 2002, Holtz gleefully accepted Hootie Johnson's invitation to become its latest member. More recently, he railed against some colleges cancelling football season due to Covid by bringing up how everybody knew there'd be casualties when they were storming the beaches at Normandy. The type of bizarre, offensive analogy beloved of his friend in the White House.

“Can you imagine,” asked Holtz at the convention last month, “what would happen to us if president Trump had not shown up in 2016 to run for president?”

We can. We definitely can.