The Pluck of the Irish E-Book

Jim Hayden

• Herausgeber: anna ruggieri
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

10 Biographical sketches of notable Notre Dame alumni. The Fighting Irish participate in 23 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I intercollegiate sports and in the NCAA's Division I in all sports, with many teams competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Notre Dame is one of only 16 universities in the United States that play Division I FBS football and Division I men's ice hockey. The school colors are gold and blue and the mascot is the Leprechaun. It was founded on November 23, 1887, with football in Notre Dame, Indiana.

Leseprobe

thePLUCKof theIRISH

10 Notre Dame sports figureswho made a difference

By Jim Hayden

BACK STORY PUBLISHING, LLC

www.backstorypublishing.com

The Pluck of the Irish

10 Notre Dame sports figures who made a difference

by Jim Hayden

Copyright © 2018 by Back Story Publishing, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or stored in any printed, mechanical, or electronic form, or distributed or held or stored for distribution by any physical or electronic means, without written permission from Back Story Publishing. Trademarks that appear herein are the property of their respective owners. Please respect the rights of authors and publishers, and refrain from piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you.

ISBN: 978-0-9993967-5-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941354

Paperback editions printed in the United States of America. For information on quantity discounts or special editions to be used for educational programs, fundraising, premiums, or sales promotions, please inquire via electronic mail at [email protected], or write to Back Story Publishing, Post Office Box 2580, Rancho Mirage, California 92270 USA.

News media inquiries may be directed to [email protected]

Credits

Jim Hayden graduated from Notre Dame with a bachelor’s in fine arts. He then earned an MBA at Central Michigan University. Some of the people in this book were his classmates. Jim worked in the advertising industry in New York and Los Angeles, where he was a Senior Partner and Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather. He won numerous national and international creative awards. He is a longtime volunteer for the Braille Institute, broadcasting weekly news for the blind and reading disabled. He lives in Beverly Hills, California.

Designer: Stuart Funk

Back Story Publishing Editorial Director: Ellen Alperstein

www.BackStoryPublishing.comeBook by ePubMATIC.com

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

By Laura Ornest and Bill Dwyre

INTRODUCTION

Shaping History — Father Theodore Hesburgh

CHAPTER 1

Hard Times Forged a Legend — Johnny Lujack

CHAPTER 2

First, You Survive — Haley Scott DeMaria

CHAPTER 3

The Elegant Explainer — Red Smith

CHAPTER 4

Hard Lesson on the Hardwood — Muffet McGraw

CHAPTER 5

The Voice in the Wind — George Blaha

CHAPTER 6

The Impact Player — Pete Duranko

CHAPTER 7

To Tell the Truth — George Dohrmann

CHAPTER 8

The Agent of Change — Tommy Hawkins

CHAPTER 9

Down, But Never Out — Rocky Bleier

Fun Fighting Irish Facts and Tales

FOREWORD

MY FATHER,HARRY ORNEST

It was 1948. He was 25 years old, and at his job at the ice rink. He was a hockey referee in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1983, he owned the arena where he used to referee — 35 years earlier.

Harry Ornest is the only man in professional league sports ever to have done that. Harry Ornest was my father.

He was born in Canada. His parents were Jewish, and they had come from Poland to live in a free country. It wasn’t easy for them. His dad worked in a grocery store, and didn’t make much money. His mother barely spoke English. They raised four boys, and my dad, Harry, was the oldest.

The boys were expected to do well in school, but they also had jobs from an early age. By the time he was 7 years old, Harry was delivering newspapers and selling programs at the local ice rink in Edmonton, Alberta. As a little kid, he had found two things he would love his whole life — reading and sports.

SOURCE: ORNEST FAMILY

When he was 25, Harry Ornest was a hockey referee in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1983, he owned the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League, as well as its home ice, St. Louis Arena — the same rink where he once refereed.

He was a good athlete who played professional baseball in his early 20s. But in the 1940s, no one got paid much for playing sports, so he also had a job in the concession stand, at Renfrew Park in Edmonton. And even though he was good at sports, he wasn’t good enough to play at a higher level.

“At 17,” he once said, “I was a prospect. At 22, I was a suspect.”

Dad had good sense of humor, and he loved to laugh, even at himself.

He became a hockey referee and a baseball umpire, traveling around the United States — if he couldn’t play, he made sure he wasn’t far away from the game.

In 1952, he married my mother, Ruth. She was also from Canada. They lived in Edmonton for a few years, then moved to Vancouver before settling in Los Angeles in 1962. I’m the oldest of four children. From the 1950s to the 1970s, we grew up listening to Dad talk on the phone, trying to talk his rich friends into buying a sports team, and letting him run it. He knew he could take a struggling team, build it up, and make it successful — he had what they call “vision.” He just didn’t have the money. Yet.

To support the family, dad went into the vending machine business. But he never stopped trying to get into the business of sports.

In 1978, the Pacific Coast League was expanding. That’s a Triple A minor baseball league where major league players sometimes get their start. The expansion teams weren’t too expensive, and Dad finally made his dream come true — he bought not just one, but two professional sports teams, the Vancouver Canadians, and, for his brother Leo, the Portland Beavers, in Oregon.

We were all thrilled for our dad.

At the time, I was working as an editor’s assistant at a Los Angeles news radio station. It was a low-level job, and when Dad invited me to work for him and the team in Vancouver, I accepted. I learned the business from the ground up. I started by selling hot dogs at the concession stand, and Dad soon gave me the title of assistant general manager.

For a lot of team owners, minor league baseball is a hobby. Not for my dad — it was his business, and he had to make a living from it. And just as he had known all those years ago, he was good at it. Three years after he founded the Vancouver Canadians, he sold the team for a profit. Now, he didn’t need other people to buy him a team, he could buy it himself, and he loved making the deals.

In 1983, the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League were losing money, and the team’s owners wanted to sell it. It was much more expensive than a minor league baseball team, but Dad found a way to buy it, and the arena.

He was excited. He was stressed out. He had a lot at stake, but he knew what he was doing. He turned that team around, and in 1986, sold it for a nice profit. Three years later, he did it again, buying, then selling the Toronto Argos of the Canadian Football League. He was a sports mogul!

Even though Dad owned the team, he liked to answer the office phone sometimes. He wanted to hear from fans, whether they had something nice to say, or if they complained. I remember one letter from a fan he had talked to who wrote to say how impressed he was that Dad had taken the time to listen. Dad sent him some free tickets.

Sometimes during games, Dad would sit with the fans in the cheaper seats. If he saw trash in the arena, he would pick it up and throw it away. When a player got hurt, he went to the locker room to make sure the guy was OK.

Dad always loved the people and the games as much as running the business. And he still loved to read about them. He read books and, especially, newspapers, sometimes as many as four a day. This was before the internet, and often, he would read the paper with a scissors in one hand, and a pen in the other. If he saw an article he thought would be of interest to a sports writer, a friend, his lawyer, us kids, he would cut it out and send it to us with a note. Many people got thick envelopes filled with Dad’s newspaper clippings.

Dad was a fast typist, and would type his own letters. He cared about the English language, and using it properly was as important to him as the value of a dollar.

Harry Ornest died too young. He was 75. He never stopped dreaming of owning another sports team, and he worked hard all his life to make it happen. My brothers, sister, and I are very proud he was our dad. We miss him. We hope these stories of notable Notre Dame sports figures inspire you as much as our dad inspired us.

— Laura Ornest, 2018

MY FRIEND,HARRY ORNEST

People connect with Notre Dame in a thousand different ways. They know about the university from movies, newspapers, and websites. Even though Notre Dame is in the middle of the United States — in South Bend, Indiana — people all over the world have heard about the “Fighting Irish” of Notre Dame.

Notre Dame is a university with high academic standards. The name is French, for “Our Lady,” which refers to the Virgin Mary. Notre Dame was founded in 1842 by French-speaking priests as a Catholic university. You have to be a very good student to go there. But most people know about it because of sports.

The mascot of Notre Dame is the leprechaun, and the sports teams’ nickname is the Fighting Irish. Supposedly, that name came from Irishmen who came to the U.S. and fought for the Union in the Civil War.

Many people have heard about “winning one for the Gipper.” Those words refer to George Gipp, who played football for Notre Dame 100 years ago. The words were spoken after he died, by his coach, Knute Rockne, another famous Notre Dame name. He wanted the team to remember Gipp’s fighting spirit, his will to win.

Some people have heard about “Touchdown Jesus.” That’s a nickname for a mural that overlooks Notre Dame Stadium — it’s 134 feet tall, and depicts Jesus holding his arms high in the air, like a football referee signaling a touchdown.

Harry Ornest didn’t attend Notre Dame, nor did any of his children. Like most people, he knew about the school and the Fighting Irish through movies and, especially for Harry, by reading about them in the newspaper. Harry, who died in 1998, 20 years before this book was published, was Jewish, and he never went to college. But Harry knew Notre Dame better than a lot of people.

He knew Notre Dame because he loved sports, and because he loved to read about sports. For many years, he lived in Los Angeles, and was a friend of a sports writer for the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper in the western U.S.

Harry loved newspapers. He loved the words, the stories, the little surprises you get reading a good newspaper sports story.

Several years after he died, his children — Laura, Mike, Cindy, and Maury — wanted to honor his memory by honoring what he loved. They formed a charity, and one of its programs was the Harry Ornest Internship. Every summer, for 10 years, the internship sent a student enrolled in a special program at Notre Dame — the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics and Democracy — to the Los Angeles Times. The student got to work in the sports department of the paper, and it was a very big deal.

Every one of those interns deserved that job. They all did great work, whether they were writing about the Dodgers or dodgeball. After graduating from Notre Dame, some of those young people stayed in the newspaper business; some took other paths. And they all knew who Harry Ornest was, and what he stood for. They all knew that he, and his family, had given them a valuable gift in their Notre Dame education.

This book honors Harry Ornest in another way, a way we hope Harry would like.

These 10 stories are about people who are or were associated with Notre Dame and its sports community. Some of them are famous athletes — a quarterback who broke records, a running back who was a Vietnam war hero, a basketball star who pioneered race relations. There’s a story about a hall-of-fame coach, a swimmer whose accident almost left her paralyzed, a broadcaster who wasn’t good enough to play sports, but excels at describing them. There are stories about Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, who explained what happened on the playing field, and also why.

And to begin, is the story of a priest who made sure that everyone at Notre Dame was a good person as well as a good athlete, coach, or teacher; a leader who made a difference at his university, and all over the world.

Harry Ornest never knew any of the people in this book. But their stories, and this book, are dedicated to him. We honor and thank him and his family for their gifts to the University of Notre Dame.

— Bill Dwyre, former sports writer, Los Angeles Times

INTRODUCTION

SHAPING HISTORY

Father Theodore Hesburgh

In 1927, airplanes were fairly new, and a lot of people had never seen one in person. That was almost 100 years ago, when 10-year-old Ted Hesburgh was a kid in Syracuse, New York, with a lot of energy and imagination. He loved the idea of flying. He built model airplanes, and, in his mind, flew them to exotic places all over the world.

One day, a barnstormer came to town. In the 1920s, barnstormers were daredevils, they were pilots who did stunts in an open-cockpit airplane. The planes were powered by a propeller, because jet engines hadn’t been invented. Barnstormers were like circus entertainers in the air, doing fancy tricks, and giving people rides.

Ted talked his parents into letting him go for a ride with the barnstormer. The wind blew around his face as he looked up into an endless blue sky. He looked down, onto an endless world, a world even bigger than his imagination. He was thrilled! From his view in the heavens, Ted felt like he could do anything he wanted, now and forever.