Apparently, Lou Holtz had a South Carolina clause in his retirement.
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The understanding has always been that old Notre Dame coaches, the good ones at least, do not coach again after leaving South Bend. The job comes with an annuity, that being that Notre Dame has conferred an undiminishable pedigree, the last line on the resume, like being a perpetual Olympian or an ex-president.
I mean, did Jimmy Carter run for Congress?
This is a tradition begun with Knute Rockne, who had the prudence to die in office. His successors, like Ara Parseghian and Holtz, have had to turn to television, which is only occasionally the same thing.
Here’s the point: If Notre Dame is the best football job in the world–and Holtz was as loud as any in insisting it is–what is Holtz doing slumming among the Gamecocks?
“Our goal is to win the national championship,” I heard Holtz saying the other day, just as fervently and calculatedly as he used to at Notre Dame, where, in fact, he was able to do just that.
Unlike Albert Belle, who insisted that from down in Louisiana he was still able to follow his favorite childhood team, the Baltimore Orioles, Holtz did not go so far as to say his career goal always had been to trod the sacred sidelines of Williams-Brice–the stadium, not the nuptials.
But Holtz had been there before, as an assistant, hired by one coach, insulted by another. Paul Dietzel told the 29-year-old Holtz that he was in the wrong profession but kept him around because Holtz had a contract and Dietzel didn’t know what else to do with him.
At this low point, Holtz created his list of things to accomplish in life, one of which was to coach at Notre Dame. Another to skydive. Another to appear on “The Tonight Show.” And so on and so on, through No. 107.
Nowhere on that list was a vow to return, at 62, to coach the school that had, in effect, caused him to second-guess his career choice. Nice story, if true, and maybe it will be the next time Holtz tells it.
I hope Holtz does a great job at South Carolina. It is hard to see how he can, but I once laughed in Howard Schnellenberger’s face when he said he would win the national championship at Miami, a place at the time that was wondering if it had dropped the wrong sport when it kept football instead of basketball.
Holtz may not have enough time to do for South Carolina what he did for Notre Dame, or for the other football programs he always improved, though he did point out that in a state with U.S. senators aged 96 and 76, he could be considered a pup. And how quickly the world seems to have forgotten what Holtz did for Notre Dame.
He rescued it from its own arrogance, which was to believe that it was the place that made the coach and not the other way around. Five years of Gerry Faust had reduced Notre Dame to a postscript, worse than what six years under Dave Wannstedt has done to the Bears.
Holtz revitalized Notre Dame football almost entirely with the force of his personality, plus his singular ability to be the best game-day coach I have known. Holtz restored the Irish to the glory that Bob Davie has inherited, and my two-year reading of Davie is that he is a lot closer to Faust than to Holtz.
Notre Dame became a national football presence again under Holtz, with its own TV network, and the expanded Notre Dame stadium is because of Holtz, not any other reason.
I believe this as well: If Holtz had this year’s Notre Dame team, this 9-2 team, it would be in one of those $12 million bowls it missed out on. Why? Because Holtz would have made the edge-of-the-precipice season the Irish endured seem like the greatest survival of the human spirit since Bataan.
What Notre Dame misses right now, more than a second quarterback, is a sense of grandeur that Holtz could create out of thin air.
Will he be able to do the same for South Carolina? Of course not. The ghosts are not as large nor the glory to be had as great. Following in the steps of Rockne, Leahy and Parseghian is not the same as following in the steps of . . . can anyone think of a South Carolina coach greater than Holtz himself?
By taking a lesser job at the end of his career, Holtz is admitting at least two things. First, he is a football coach, not a talk-show host, not a magician, not a philosopher, not an author, as anyone who has tried to get through his semi-selling advice book could testify. Holtz is simply a football coach who needed a football team to coach.
The more telling thing is that Notre Dame is just another place. Certainly more so than when Holtz was its football coach.
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