June 2021

Though the Odds Be Great or Small

Notre Dame’s 1957 Comeback Season and the Year That Changed College Football

On November 16, 1957, an unranked Notre Dame football team squared off against the No. 2 Oklahoma Sooners. It was supposed to be an easy Sooners win. But despite being 19-point underdogs, the Fighting Irish, guided by their young and tenacious coach Terry Brennan, maneuvered their way to a 7–0 upset, ending the Sooners’ NCAA-record 47-game winning streak.

Though the Odds Be Great or Small chronicles the story of legendary coach Terry Brennan, from his days as a player at Notre Dame under Frank Leahy, to his selection as the head coach in 1954, to the high-intensity comeback season of 1957 in which Notre Dame finished in the top 10 overall. This book provides the social, cultural, and athletic context to understand college football before and after 1957—a year that changed how the game was played at Notre Dame for decades.

The 1957 season remains one of the most important seasons in Notre Dame football’s storied history. In Though the Odds Be Great or Small, Coach Brennan shares his version of what happened in the trenches and on the sidelines during a time when a college football game had the power to keep an entire country on the edge of its seat.

Scheduled for an August 2021 release and available for preorder: $17.99, plus shipping and handling. Click the link below.

 

 

Inviting Laughter in Baseball

by Ken Hogarty

After the ball caromed off our coach and over the third baseman’s head into left field, the Bellarmine team looked sucker punched. The San Jose high school team’s superiority, buttressed by a commanding fifth inning lead, took a hit. Mouths dropped like a Sandy Koufax curveball. I turned to a fellow Sacred Heart High School teacher at San Francisco’s Funston Playground, near where Joe DiMaggio spent his formative years. Exchanging a knowing look, we burst out laughing.

Tom Hanks’ League of Their Own character famously proclaimed, “There’s no crying in baseball.” There’s also a paucity of laughing. Seemingly, only the baseball itself is in stitches (108 double ones) during a game. While professional ballplayers occasionally break into smiles on the diamond, “game faces” limit laughter, not surprising since Ring Lardner called the ultimate MLB prize the “World’s Serious.”

Players or fans rarely laugh during a taut game or season. Keeping listeners attentive during a broadcast in the midst of a dismal season, however, begs laughter. That’s when a Dizzy Dean, a Bob Uecker, a Harry Caray or contemporary broadcasters engage audiences with funny stories that turn tears to laughter.

In many baseball yarns, players are pranksters or good-natured butts of jokes as subtle as that of junior high boys. The player who gets a hot foot, icy hot in his jock, or a pie (if not shaving cream) in his face or the rookies dressed in drag on a late season flight assume victim roles.

Blooper highlights (e.g., the minor league outfielder running through a fence to make a catch or the 1999 footage of Manager Bobby Valentine sneaking back into the dugout in disguise after getting ejected), movie excerpts (for example, from Major League), and broadcasting anecdotes (from an Ernie Harwell or Vin Scully) evoke laughs, but typically the laughter’s after the fact.

Quotes by baseball figures also evoke laughter. The aphorisms of Yogi Berra (“ninety percent of the game is half mental”), explanations by unique personalities like Bill “Spaceman” Lee (“I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.”), and anecdotes by story tellers like Casey Stengel or Tommy Lasorda drew guffaws.

My favorite funny baseball quote, however, came from the Sultan of Swat himself. While he held out for an $80,000 contract during the Depression, reporters chastised Babe Ruth for wanting more than President Hoover. He replied, “I had a better year than he did.”

Baseball surely conjures smiles, especially when the home team does well or a player does something extraordinary. Laughter, nonetheless, is not the same as a smile. I do, however, laugh outrageously every time Pete Fatooh, a friend since Kindergarten, recounts umpiring in the California League in the early ‘70s. Teamed with a Jewish partner one year and an African-American partner the next, my swarthy Lebanese classmate probably didn’t stand much of a chance in that era’s rural Central Valley towns. Umping a game in Reno, Pete made national news when wire service photos showed a close-up of him being spat upon while face-to-face with Lodi Orions’ manager, Jimmie Schaeffer, who would later coach on the Kansas City Royals’ 1985 world championship team

The resulting Schaeffer suspension took a few days getting upheld. It began when Lodi played their next home game. As Pete tells it, it was Jimmy Schaeffer Appreciation Night. Before the game, the one-time major leaguer (though from Coopersburg, PA, his 300+ MLB at bats would never qualify him for Cooperstown) came to the mound with wife at his side and babe in arms to receive the plaudits of the fans. The public address announcer then intoned the words Pete still repeats with a shudder: “Manager Schaeffer will not be able to participate in the game tonight because he has been suspended after his recent clash with Umpire Peter FAT TWO [mispronounced], tonight’s home plate umpire.”

The capper according to Pete? “It was ten-cent beer night. By the fifth inning the home fans were practically climbing the backstop.”

Oftentimes, the best laughter-inducing incidents during actual games occur when kids play. Most of us have watched a T-ball game where a youngster hits the ball and runs the bases backwards, or doesn’t run at all, or circles the bases again after completing a first time around.  You’d think it might be different by the time kids got to the high school level.

Our school, now called Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep, enjoys a venerable baseball tradition, boasting Hall of Famers Joe Cronin and Harry Heilmann among alums that also include Dolph Camilli and Babe Pinelli (a player, and the umpire behind the plate during Don Larsen’s World Series Perfect Game in 1957).  Truth be told, though, Peninsula and South Bay schools in the West Catholic Athletic League during the ‘80s and ‘90s usually dominated us.

Barry Bonds, to name an adversary, had starred for the Serra Padres before his graduation in 1982, and in the next decade Serra would feature another future star, Tom Brady, who, to my mind, was a better high school catcher than quarterback. In 1985, Serra was led by Gregg Jeffries, who had a long and illustrious major league career.

In one game against a South Bay juggernaut, our frosh pitcher was getting lit up. John Scudder, who served as President much later when I was Principal and the school had been renamed Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep, coached freshmen baseball in the early and mid ‘80s.

With a man on first, Coach Scudder tried to inspire his novice hurler to induce a double play: “Throw a double play. Throw a groundball to second. The perfect pitch, a little ground ball,” he bellowed. Taking Scudder literally, the inexperienced pitcher stepped off the rubber and rolled the ball directly to his second basemen. The realization of what happened elicited many laughs.

So, back to Funston Playground around the same time: 1985. Troy Onorato, a senior, who won our team’s “Most Inspirational Player” award that season, often coached third base. We were actually pretty good that year, ranked as high as seventh in the state.  Still, despite the team’s success, the Irish, who finished the year 19-8, lost three games each to Serra and Bellarmine. Troy, who today runs Hat Trick Racing with horses that have run and won at Santa Anita, Del Mar, and Golden Gate Fields, had settled into his position in the third base coaching box. One of our lefties swung late at an outside fastball and rocketed the ball just wide of third. The ball caromed off Troy and shot over the third baseman’s head. “They looked at me like I was Superman,” Troy intoned after the game.

Of course, I and my companion in the stands, other S.H. rooters, and the team itself all knew what the Bellarmine players didn’t. Troy Onorato wore a prosthesis. It was as if the ball had been batted twice, just as hard each time, before shooting to the outfield off Troy’s leg. The Bellarmine players had a new-found respect for their city foes. By the time Coach Steve Franceschi visited his charge, ostensibly to check his well-being, Troy himself had read the looks of his opponents and played the resulting coaching visit to the hilt, puffing up as if he could take on a Pete Rose slide home. The Bellarmine players joined in a round of applause when Coach Fran departed, and Troy sauntered back to his coaching box. I couldn’t stop laughing.

Clearly baseball invites laughter before and after games, fitting since the game itself lives as a subtle continuation of the frontier experience it celebrates, when cowboys told tales and evoked laughter around campfires and before their own winter hot stoves. Though it’s rare to laugh during the actual play of the game itself, the stories baseball invites elicit genuine mirth.

In a great baseball novel and movie, Bang the Drum Slowly, the learned professor from the West, Red Traphagen, responds to a player’s remark about the wasting away of Bruce Pearson, the dying catcher played by Robert Di Niro in the movie. That player says, “It’s sad; it makes you wanna cry.” Red responds, “No, it’s sad; it makes you wanna laugh.”

Whether a Cubs or a Red Sox fan when they suffered through Biblical pennant droughts, a fan of one of the twenty-nine teams that doesn’t win the World Serious in a given year, or my high school compatriots who would often see our home nine fall short against stalwart league opponents, losing in baseball almost demands laughter as an antidote.

Ken Hogarty recently retired as a high school English teacher and principal. Since, he’s had two short stories, three news features, a memoir, and over 20 satires and comedy pieces published. He lives in the East Bay with wife Sally. He’s attended World Series games every year (starting with Game 6 in 1962) his SF Giants have participated in and loved, after waiting 56 years to attend himself, dismissing 1,300 students early for the 2010 victory parade. The connection between baseball and the frontier experience germinated as part of the introduction to his MA English thesis, “The Metaphor of Baseball.”