Sister Mary Ann Mueninghoff knows violence when she sees it, and she sees it on the football field.
“I actually hate football,” she said. “I find it to be a vicious sport.”
But humans can be complicated, inconsistent, even contradictory, especially when it comes to matters of the heart, and, apparently, matters of pigskin, which brings her to Notre Dame.
“All of my principles,” she said, “go right out the window. I think I speak out of both sides of my mouth when it comes to Notre Dame playing football.”
Forgive Sister Mary Ann, an administrator at Dominican University in River Forest, for her love of Fighting Irish football. After taking a rector’s position at the University of Notre Dame nearly 20 years ago and being persuaded to attend a game, she ended up going to nearly every single home contest for 12 years.
Now she writes the times Notre Dame is playing in red ink on her calendar. If at all possible, she pulls on her Notre Dame sweatshirt and parks herself in front of a television, where she has been known to cheer at high decibels.
The fun continues Saturday when University of Pittsburgh visits South Bend, Ind. Win or lose, it’s extra exceptional to be an Irish fan this year, the 125th of football at Notre Dame. The team is a perfect 8-0, ranked fourth in the nation.
It’s safe to say that Notre Dame football has occupied a remarkable place in sports for a long time. The Fighting Irish have earned more national championships, 11, than any other college football program. It’s been the centerpiece for two popular, feel-good sports movies: “Rudy,” released in 1993, and “Knute Rockne All American,” released in 1940. Some go as far as saying the legendary coach depicted in the film invented the contemporary game.
And no other college football program is paid $15 million to $20 million a year by NBC to televise its games.
All of it and more coalesces into a passion that always runs deep and wide. But this year is special, say many uber-fans.
“It’s been amazing,” said Chris Perrin, a 1983 grad whose father, brother and sister graduated from Notre Dame and whose son is a junior there. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen them play this well. I kept waiting game after game for the other shoe to drop. We’ve been burned too many times in the past, but everything seems to be coming together.”
Like many Irish fans, Perrin, 52, of Springfield, has several stories woven into the Notre Dame football experience. With the help of a plane pulling a banner above the stadium, he proposed to the woman who became his wife while the two attended the 1989 Notre Dame-University of Southern California game.
The crowd around them repeated the chant, “Just say yes,” Perrin recalled.
His father, Charles, who also graduated from Notre Dame Law School, wore a Notre Dame football T-shirt from the late 1980s for every game. When Charles Perrin died last year, Chris Perrin’s siblings gave him the shirt, which he wore to watch the Fighting Irish’s first game this year.
When the team won, Perrin kept wearing it for every game, whether he attended or was watching on TV. The wins have piled up, and he vows to keep wearing the shirt for every game, which poses somewhat of a fashion challenge on Nov. 24. Notre Dame plays USC that day — possibly an evening game — and Perrin is attending the black-tie Beaux Arts Ball in Springfield.
If the Irish keep winning, he’ll be the guy in the tuxedo and slightly used white and blue Notre Dame T-shirt.
John Gibbons also knows the value of employing slightly used items to rally for Notre Dame.
For nearly 30 years, Gibbons, an attorney from Western Springs, his brother Ed and their friend Jim Waclawik have parked their converted orange van in a prime location outside Notre Dame Stadium for every home game. They have opened it to nearly anyone who wanted to visit.
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Several hundred will do so on big games. Over the years, those have included some famous folks such as Tom Mendoza, whose $35 million gift to the university created the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame, and NFL Hall of Famers — and Notre Dame stars — Joe Montana and Dave Casper.
Back in the mid-1980s, Gibbons and his group pooled their money to buy a tailgating van for $3,000. They cleared out its interior and installed shelves for maximum storage and pregame party use. For a few years, they drove it between South Bend and Chicago.
But the van kept breaking down. When it finally died, they bought another, cleared it out, painted it orange.
Today these ardent Irish fans are on their third orange van, and it has become a landmark of pregame festivities. They still serve the same fare they did back in the 1980s: burgers, brats, hot dogs, beer, soda, water and chips.
“It kind of reminds us that we started with very little,” Gibbons said, “and that’s the way we want it to stay.”
Like Gibbons, so many Irish fans live in the Chicago area that the Oct. 6 Notre Dame-Miami matchup at Soldier Field was considered a home game. But Notre Dame has developed a national, even global, following. The reason distills to one element: Catholicism, said Kevin O’Malley — a Boston College grad — who works as a TV sports consultant and was for years a CBS and Turner Sports executive.
“The working men in large urban areas didn’t cheer for a college team,” O’Malley said, “but they rooted for Notre Dame because they were Catholic.”
No other Catholic academic institution capitalized on that widespread Catholic population, O’Malley said. The teams’ football prominence early and often in the last century was coupled with robust fundraising in recent years — Notre Dame’s endowment is estimated at $6.3 billion to $7.5 billion — and extremely loyal, far-flung alumni who love to visit campus, especially for the game-day experience, considered one of college football’s most dramatic, O’Malley said.
Those factors combine to create a fervor that exists below the surface when the team is mediocre, he added. When the Fighting Irish have a breakout year like this season, the passion explodes, O’Malley said.
“It’s kind of fascinating because it doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
Businessweek reports that sales of Notre Dame merchandise was second behind last year’s national champions, the University of Alabama, and jumped 68 percent from last year.
At the same time, TV ratings for Fighting Irish football are soaring. As of mid-October, Businessweek reported, TV viewership of Notre Dame football was up 45 percent from last year. An average of 4.2 million viewers are watching. And Nielsen reported that Notre Dame’s Oct. 27 win against Oklahoma drew the highest college football TV viewership this season.
Every Saturday she can, Sister Mary Ann is among those viewers, probably decked out in some of that Notre Dame merchandise. She and other Irish fans are starting to think it’s possible to finish with a perfect 12-0 regular season and a shot at another championship, their first since 1988.
And if the storybook ending doesn’t happen?
“The world won’t end even if they don’t,” Sister Mary Ann said, “but it’s so exciting.”