Michicanery
UHND.com - Ronny
P. Kaye
August 8, 2001
One reason among many as to why Shakespeare was and is the greatest of all writers is the unending volume of scholarship the man‘s career produced. In our contemporary context, from the sporting perspective, we can identify the exceptional among the ordinary on the same terms: consider how much has been written about the New York Yankees, for example--books, poems, plays, screenplays, and so on. The same is true of the Notre Dame experience: no other collegiate sports program has been the subject of more scholarly entertainment than has Notre Dame football. It’s not about sports alone; it’s a sociological phenomenon, a mythology. And the breadth and depth of writing on this topic through the decades is itself remarkable.
Some books about the ND experience are bad but essential to the historian’s collection--The Glamor Game is an example. Some texts are non-essential (The Fighting Spirit comes to mind). Some are bad and non-essential (The Gipper’s Ghost). But many are both good and essential. Two that belong to the last category are Natural Enemies, by John Kryk, and The Biggest Game of Them All, by Mike Celizic. The former, written by a Michigan grad, details the ND-Michigan rivalry; the second, authored by a Domer, presents the 1966 ND-MSU game as the leviathan encounter that modernized college football.
Growing up in New England, as I did, the state of Michigan was imagined as some misty grey Hyperborea where it was said one hundred thousand souls came out for football games and college students paid a $5 fine when they were caught smoking pot. This policy seemed cool in those days--the only problem was, we could never distinguish between the two behemoth factories out there in Auto Land. Which campus was it where the local laws were lax--Michigan’s or Michigan State‘s? Which team was the Spartans and which the Wolverines? Which ones had the groovy helmets? Which one’s student body numbered in the tens of thousands? Which team did Bubba Smith play for? And which one was Notre Dame’s huge rival?
As it turns out, both gargantuans were and are Notre Dame’s rivals, but as we learn from the two texts cited above, Michigan State has largely played the role of the talented but troubled kid at the end of Notre Dame’s block, whereas Michigan has spent most of the past 114 years pretending its kid brother--i.e., the Irish--hasn’t grown up and far, far surpassed its elder brother in accomplishment, prestige, and mystique many decades ago. The paranoid jealousy that defines Michigan’s approach to its superior, younger brother to the south is itself worthy of psycho-sociological investigation. Keith "Retiree" Jackson is fond of regurgitating the overworn adages about how Michigan taught Notre Dame the game back in 1887, but he always leaves out how Michigan, in danger of losing in just the second game ever against its mentees, cheated its way to victory so blatantly that Notre Dame threatened never to play them again.
The role of huffy whiner soon fell permanently to Michigan, however. After Notre Dame thumped Fielding Yost’s boys in 1909, Michigan stormed off and hid for 32 years, claiming, as soreheads are wont to do, that Notre Dame wasn’t really a worthy opponent and that Michigan hadn’t really tried to win that cursed 1909 game. In 1942, Michigan visited South Bend and, in a pattern that would repeat itself in the present, came from behind in the second half on the road and beat the Irish, shocking even themselves, all the while proclaiming that this wasn’t really a "big" game for them. Notre Dame rode up to Ann Arbor the next year and annihilated the Wolverines, whereupon the latter promptly holed up like ancient China before the West for another 36 years. As John Kryk points out, Notre Dame’s and Michigan’s rivalry has been brutal, nasty, extraordinarily competitive--and mostly off-field for more than a century. And as Kryk tactfully notes, each time Notre Dame appeared to have seized a definite competitive advantage in the series, which was most of the time, Michigan has sulked back to the north, pretending that getting to the Rose Bowl has been its only true goal all along. Author Kryk notes how Michigan has long prided itself on its all-time winning record against the Irish, one of the few teams able to make that claim. But even this claim is specious: Michigan holds a 17-11-1 advantage in the series, true, but the Wolverines were 5-0 against Notre Dame in the 19th century, won the first eight games the two teams ever played (between 1887 and 1908), and is losing the series ever since. Not only that, but Michigan played Iago to Notre Dame’s Othello all along during Notre Dame’s repeated bids to join the old Western Conference, knowing, as Michigan did, that the Wolverines’ supremacy in what eventually became the Big 9/10/11 would vanish should Notre Dame become a member. Extrapolating the historical record of Notre Dame versus its opponents, had Michigan not hidden from Notre Dame for 69 years, Notre Dame would today lead the series by twice as many victories.
The Teutons of the Huron cannot live with that knowledge. Think Yost, Crisler, Oosterbaan, Schembechler, Moeller, Carr--you don’t suppose that hardcore Aryan hatred and suspicion of "others" has had anything to do with Michigan’s neurotic fear of Notre Dame all these years? But perhaps the most annoying fallacy about UM through the ages has been its undeserved reputation as a "good" school with a "clean" sports program. As author Murray Sperber’s recent books demonstrate, nothing could be further from actuality. The truth is, Michigan’s has long been among the most decadent of athletic programs, its perfidy camouflaged by fond reportage and phony graduation statistics. No, Michigan doesn’t cheat blatantly the way the southern schools do; Michigan’s style is systemic. The payola stretches back to the origins of its program in the 1870s and has only grown inflationary since. But when every important civic and political figure in the state has ties to the place--the same being true in Alabama and Oklahoma and Texas, of course--there will be no outcry for reform. Just win nine games, baby.
Most amusing of all is Michigan’s pose as the "Harvard of the Midwest". To the good citizens of Ann Arbor I can only say, There’s only one Harvard on this planet, folks--and you ain’t it. Michigan State, in contrast, intrigues one. Three of the big surprises for me when I lived in Detroit for several months was discovering that first, the media in Detroit seemed not to know there were any sports events happening outside the state lines; second, the majority of football fans in Michigan despised Notre Dame (forget all that yuck about "respect" among Notre Dame and the Michigan institutions--it isn‘t so); and third, Michiganders largely rooted for Michigan State over Michigan. In simple terms, MSU was the masses’ choice, with Ann Arbor viewed as an arrogant preserve of self-anointed privilege--kind of like the "People’s Republic of Cambridge" syndrome in Massachusetts.
And this is why I don’t mind Michigan State winning a few times over Notre Dame (of course, I also know this is just a lull before Notre Dame rips off another of its customary eight or nine straight victories over the Spartans, starting this year). Michigan State doesn’t pretend it’s anything more than a sports factory: the Spartan Foundation pays the players, no one in East Lansing cares if the Spartan athletes attend class or even pretend to be "students"--in a weird way, it’s a more honest set-up than the posing in Ann Arbor, where the same darn thing happens but gets buried by the insiders. Michigan State cheats and wins, gets caught, pays the price, loses for a while, continues cheating, gets good again, wins for a while, gets caught cheating…It’s a beautiful system. The motto of the Spartan man hasn’t changed since the day Magic Johnson responded to the question of whether he was staying in "school" or leaving with, "I be going pro." It’s a broad Elizabethan tangle of complicity and deceit that connects these three institutes. It’s hard to stay mad with Michigan State when you remember that they kept playing Notre Dame in the days of yore despite pressure from the snobs downstate not to do so. It’s hard to think positive thoughts about Michigan knowing that hypocrisy and chauvinism are the natural order and that UM was likely a driving force behind the recent sanctions laid on Notre Dame by that other bastion of integrity, the NCAA. It‘s tough to stay calm listening to know-nothing sportscasters portray Michigan as one of the "heroes" of the NCAA.
Of course, "nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Just ask Hamlet. Playeth like a champion today.
Ronny P Kaye