Notre Dame Made Me

I don't really root for the Irish as hard as I once did. But growing up Catholic in Chicagoland, Notre Dame helped lay the foundation for the life I have today.

Photo by Steven Van Elk on Unsplash

Notre Dame and Chicagoland

I grew up in Vernon Hills, Illinois, born and raised Catholic.

I’m confirmed. Received First Communion. Did the whole nine yards.

And honestly, if you grew up Catholic in the Midwest—especially suburban Chicago—being a Notre Dame fan almost felt like a birthright.

My friend Dan Cameron and I loved Notre Dame so much that when we were kids at Hawthorn Junior High in Vernon Hills, we hosted a segment on our local public-access Channel 4 called The Irish Review.

Yes. Two junior-high kids doing a television show dedicated to Notre Dame football.

That’s how deep this went.

Dan used to say that every fall Chicago somehow became a suburb of South Bend, Indiana.

For Catholics around Chicago, he wasn’t that far off.

Grandpa George

As I’ve mentioned many times on my radio shows, my grandpa George was probably the biggest influence on my love of college football. My uncle Chris Colangelo had a profound impact on it, too. But nobody was bigger than Grandpa George.

Grandpa George and Grandma Carmen were devout Catholics.

And when I say devout, I mean devout.

These were the kind of Catholics who went to church in the morning and knew the priests. They volunteered at the St. Vincent de Paul food pantry. They helped clean St. Mary’s in Buffalo Grove.

I’m talking super Catholic.

There was no half-ass catholicing from Carm and George. Believe me.

And Grandpa George loved Notre Dame football. So naturally, I loved Notre Dame football. That’s how fandom works when you’re a kid. You don’t sit down with a spreadsheet and examine your options. You don’t study coaching staffs, television contracts, recruiting territories or NIL collectives.

Someone you love tells you that this matters.

And because they matter to you, it matters to you. Grandpa didn’t just give me a football team. He gave me a history.

He told me about Knute Rockne and Frank Leahy and Dan Devine. He taught me about Johnny Lattner, Angelo Bertelli and Johnny Lujack. These weren’t just names of football players who existed decades before I was born.

They became part of the mythology. Grandpa George was connecting me to people he had watched and stories he had heard, which connected me to generations of Notre Dame fans before either one of us.

Then I got to have my own guys.

Notre Dame Was College Football

Damn, did I love Notre Dame growing up. South Bend may as well have been the Holy Land to me.

The Golden Dome.

Touchdown Jesus.

We’re #1 Moses.

These weren’t buildings and statues. To me, they were monuments to greatness and glory. Walking around campus as a kid felt like Disneyland, only better. And Notre Dame still felt old then.

I don’t mean rundown. I mean old in the best possible way.

In the 1990s, you could walk around that campus and almost convince yourself that the ghosts were still there. The architecture, the traditions, the stories—it felt like Rockne couldn’t have been that far away.

For a kid obsessed with history and sports, it was intoxicating. Notre Dame wasn’t part of college football to me. Notre Dame was college football.

That sounds crazy now.

I have spent my adult life talking about this sport professionally. I’ve traveled around the country covering it. I’ve talked to coaches, players, commissioners and athletic directors. I’ve watched college football become a national, multibillion-dollar television product.

But when I was a kid?

I barely recognized that the SEC existed.

Isn’t that weird?

Today it’s impossible to imagine college football without thinking about Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Florida, Auburn and the rest of the SEC. But that wasn’t my universe.

My college football universe was Notre Dame and whoever Notre Dame was playing, with some Big Ten mixed in because that’s what surrounded us in Chicagoland.

The SEC may as well have existed on another planet.

That’s also a reminder of how regional this sport once was.

Before every game was on television, before conference realignment and streaming packages and social media made everything accessible everywhere, college football was largely something you inherited from the place and people around you.

And where I grew up, Notre Dame was everywhere.

Chicago really did become a suburb of South Bend on fall Saturdays.

Especially if you were Catholic.

My Guys

My falls revolved around Notre Dame. I idolized Lou Holtz. Jerome Bettis and Reggie Brooks were heroes. And then there was Raghib “Rocket” Ismail.

Those kickoff returns against Michigan became things of lore to me. I’ve probably watched those clips a thousand times in my life. To this day, I believe then play-by-play voice of the Irish, Toy Roberts, is the greatest announcer to ever call a game.

There are certain sports moments you watch when you’re young that somehow attach themselves permanently to your brain. You can remember the uniforms. The crowd. The announcer’s voice. The feeling you had watching it.

Rocket flying down the field was that for me. Also, Reggie Brooks getting knocked unconcious in the endzone in a touchdown run against Michigan. Those Notre Dame teams weren’t entertainment.

They were part of my childhood. And looking back, I realize they were doing something even bigger.

They were turning me into the person I would eventually become.

Before It Became My Job

I grew up in one of America’s great professional sports cities.

The Bears. Cubs. White Sox. Bulls. Blackhawks. Chicago will never lack for sports mythology. But somehow, college football got me. The lore got me.

And Notre Dame was the reason.

Long before college football became my profession, it was Grandpa George telling me stories.

Before I knew about television contracts, conference expansion, transfer portals, NIL, revenue sharing, playoff formats or any of the other things that consume so much of my professional life now, college football was incredibly simple.

It was Saturday. It was Notre Dame. It was Grandpa.

That’s probably why I still care so deeply about the traditions of this sport.

I’ve spent enough time around college football now to understand that change is inevitable. Some of it is necessary. Some of it has been good.

But I also know we’re playing with something precious.

Because college football isn’t powerful simply because millions of people watch it on television. It’s powerful because people hand it down. Grandfathers give it to grandchildren. Parents give it to kids.

Friends sit together in junior high and decide they’re going to make a public-access television show called The Irish Review because they can’t possibly talk about Notre Dame enough.

You inherit the stories, and eventually you add your own.

Rockne.

Leahy.

Lujack.

Lattner.

Devine.

Holtz.

Rocket.

Bettis.

Brooks.

Grandpa George.

Dan.

And me.

That’s my college football family tree.

My relationship with Notre Dame isn’t exactly the same today as it was when I was a Catholic kid running around suburban Chicago. How could it be? I’ve gotten older. I’ve spent decades working inside the sport and seeing things that the kid watching Lou Holtz could never have imagined.

College football has changed, too.

But there are moments when I see the Golden Dome or hear the fight song and suddenly none of that matters. I’m back in Chicagoland. I’m a kid again.

Grandpa George is telling me about Johnny Lujack.

Dan and I are talking Notre Dame football like we’re preparing for another edition of The Irish Review.

And South Bend, Indiana, once again feels like the center of the universe.

Maybe that’s what real fandom is. You can grow up. You can move away. You can spend your entire adult life learning how the machine actually works. But somewhere inside you, the game remains exactly as it was when someone you loved first handed it to you.

For me, that person was Grandpa George.

And the team was Notre Dame.