THE SCENE borders' on the comic. At the heart of the Notre Dame campus, down by the quiet lake and in the shadow of the Golden Dome, sits the grotto to Our Lady. On the morning of match, days, fans who have arrived, from every corner of the US, visit the grotto to light a candle and to pray that their lads in the pads shall be delivered from harm and emerge victorious. It's a tradition.
The image is as tidy a summation of the essence of Notre Dame as one could hope for Tradition. Faith. Football.
Admittedly, in the late 1990s the order should more accurately run Football. Tradition. Faith. God still has a large role to play, but it's not as big as that of head coach Lou Holtz.
For the Irish visitor, the grotto is a bit unsettling, for it looks for all the world as if it has fallen down from the side of Carrauntoohil. Its provenance is easy to imagine: some Holy Cross father, home from Amerikay at the close of the last century (perhaps for his dear mother's funeral), is inspired by the grotto outside his village and determines to erect its like in South Bend, in the vast flatlands of northern Indiana. After all these years, it still looks rather incongruous in its New World setting.
What is now the University of Notre Dame was founded by a 28 year old French missionary, Edward Sorin, in the early 1840s, a few years before the Queen's colleges were established here. By American standards, that's ancient, tradition with a capital T; northern Indiana wasn't exactly the wild west, but it was still the frontier. Chicago was a windswept cow town waiting for the railroad to arrive.
In the early years the college never attracted more than a dozen students a year. As one historian of the college put it: "If (Sorin) was to begin at all, the head of this new college had to be mightily concerned about empty stomachs and frostbite. The more elusive problems of intellectual development would have to wait."
What finally ensured the university's survival, and cemented its identity, was the early wave of European immigration in the second half of the 1800s. The immigrants were overwhelmingly Catholic (though not disproportionately Irish), and though Notre Dame's location was seemingly remote, it was within easy reach of cities like Chicago, Detroit, St Louis and Cincinnati, all of which had large, immigrant Catholic populations.
At the same time, there was a growing anti immigrant, anti Catholic sentiment in the air, and those few early immigrants who had actually "made it" were determined their sons (the daughters could wait) would be educated in the right environment, away from godless public institutions. For the next few decades the school enjoyed a reputation as a solid, midwestern institution of high Catholic standing and moderate academic success.
Two things happened after the first World War which completed the evolution of the school's ethos and turned it into a national institution. The first was financial: a board of lay advisers began a national campaign to establish a $1 million endowment, and the first "annual giving programme for alumni" was launched. Between 1919 and 1933 the university tripled in size.
The second thing was accidental but possibly more profound football.
KNUTE ROCKNE had emigrated as a child with his parents from Norway to Chicago. By 1913 he was a senior at Notre Dame and captain of the football team at a time when the game had still not evolved far from its rugby origins. That year he teamed up with quarterback Gus Dorais to stun the cadets of Army 35-13 through a series of innovative forward passes. It was the beginning of almost 20 years of unparalleled success for Notre Dame with Rockne at the helm.
By 1917 Rockne was head coach and free to indulge his penchant for innovation. He designed his own equipment and uniforms, reducing their weight and bulk but increasing their protectiveness. He introduced the now familiar gold satin and silk pants to cut down on wind resistance.
He was the first to bring in the two platoon system, and created the "Notre Dame shift", in which all four members of the backfield were in motion before the ball was snapped opponents never did learn to deal with it, so eventually it had to be banned.
But of all his innovations, arguably the most important in the creation of the legend of the "Fighting Irish" was Rockne's decision to take his team all over the country to initiate a series of sectional rivalries, from Army in the east to Stanford in the west. The Irish took on the best among the high and mighty, and, in Rockne's time, usually won.
In his 13 year tenure Rockne's teams were undefeated in five seasons, including 1925, the year, of the Four Horsemen (the backfield quartet immortalised by Grantland Rice), when Notre Dame went 10-0 and defeated Stanford in the Rose Bowl to claim the national championship.
It was at this time that the nickname "Fighting Irish" came into general use. There is no agreement about the term's origin, but by the early 1920s a Notre Dame alumnus and journalist, Francis Wallace, had begun to popularise it in his column in the New York Daily News. With Rockne and his team travelling the nation to defeat the great and good, the little Catholic school from the midwest quickly became a symbol of the "triumph of the little man" for thousands who had no direct connection with Notre Dame, or, for that matter, any expectation that education at any university was within their social realm.
And they didn't have to be Irish: there were as many Kowalskis and Sehickelgrubers as Murphys (indeed, it seems the Polish gene pool is awash with chromosomes labelled "tight end"). And today there are as many black faces in the football squad as white, although one suspects it will be a few years before they appear among the supporters in any significant number.
Rockne died in a plane crash in 1931 (ensuring his immortality), but the legend of the Fighting Irish shows no signs of dimming.
Of course, that is in part because there are some vested interests determined to ensure it does not: there is an awful lot of money at stake here. Manchester United could learn a thing or two from Notre Dame's gift catalogue and other subsidiary ventures. The college has its own NBC television affiliate in South Bend; it's the only school whose every game is broadcast internationally; the typical match programme distributed at the ground is 150 pages. The school has its own credit card.
But the often crass commercialism associated with the school's football programme is only a byproduct of the "Notre Dame experience", not the cause of it. Which brings us back to tradition and faith.
One of the great traditions of a football weekend in South Bend is the Friday night "pep rally", scaled down versions of O'Connell's monster meetings (one is planned for the RDS: on one level, it will be more entertaining than the match). It's more than the band and the cheerleaders and the fight songs, more than three cheers for old Notre Dame; it's like Billy Graham on steroids. One recent speaker was the (brave) American pilot shot down over Bosnia who evaded capture for several days.
Speaker after speaker bellows the virtues of duty, honour, truth, family, country, bravery and faith. By the end of the evening everyone is prepared to embark on a righteous crusade to annihilate the enemy in the name of Notre Dame, Rome and the American Way.
It's an acquired taste.
The cavalcade arrives in Dublin on Wednesday. Prepare to shake down the thunder.
