Friday, December 03, 2004
We Are N. D.
It’s no mere accident that the most imposing image of Christ on the Notre Dame campus is known as “Touchdown Jesus.” That one phrase (connected as it is with the Hesburgh Library), I would venture to say, names the very heart of the university, invoking together in one colossal icon football, Christianity, and education. And we know very well which person of that trinity stands foremost in the minds of alumni, as in the minds of those of us who admire the school from a distance. Of course, my wife, a Notre Dame alumna, insists that I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to Notre Dame. But who’s been to more football games? huh?
At the University of Notre Dame, football is a religion. I don’t mean that in the sense of the everyday trite and comfortable analogy, but as a statement of fact. The question isn’t, how is football like a religion? but instead, what kind of religion is football? Certainly analogies apply, as they do between any two religions. College football has its rituals, its hymns, its saints and icons, its sacraments, and its holy scriptures—and nowhere more so than at Notre Dame, whose stadium is one of the oldest and most sacred cathedrals of what people so quaintly call “the game.” But college football isn’t a game in the usual sense. True: there are rules and strategies. There is winning and losing. The game-like elements are obvious enough. But the individual games bring the community together for a ritual interaction that promises—even if it doesn’t always or completely deliver—nothing less than salvation. Like all rituals, the game must be repeated, not because its power weakens over time, but because we are still not saved: because the truth of our salvation is eternal, but we are creatures of time. Spiritual rituals are the means by which mortal beings communicate with an immortal power and, for one eternal moment, put on that power. Here that power is called “the Notre Dame tradition,” which is a tradition of “winning football.” In this sense, any single game is only a way into something larger and transcendent—or, on the contrary, if the ritual fails and the team loses, the game represents a tragic barring of that way.
So, what kind of religion is college football? Football is a religion of this world, not of the next. The gridiron stands for earth, not heaven. Its immortality is the pagan immortality of heroes, not saints. In this sense, the ritual of the game is necessary to achieve the complementary goal of awakening and preserving the memory of heroes past. Back in the days when Christianity was not a handmaiden to money and politics, football, like money, might have been called a secular god. Let me be clear about this: I am not a pure-hearted critic of this secular religion. I confess, I’ve watched many hours of college football. I love it. I love it the way a sinner loves his sin. I have lusted after victory. Today, the god of football is even greater than the god Mammon. Winning is worth whatever it costs. Any self-respecting major university would sacrifice everything to arrive at that earthly paradise where Touchdown Jesus is at last incarnated in the person of the coach of a national championship team. What is true of the others is true twenty times over for the school where Touchdown Jesus was born.
Until that great day, a coach is only a teacher or a prophet, not a savior; and what we want in any coach is a savior. Don’t ask whether this expectation is fair to the coach. Perhaps it isn’t fair to many coaches—but a god, a god can do anything.
Coach Tyrone Willingham was fired this week, and now once again we are waiting for the Messiah. Will he come?