University of Spoiled Children
UHND.com - Ronny P. Kaye
September 6, 2001

I didn’t actually begin to loathe USC until the 1972 Anthony Davis game.  And I now view my detestation of the Trojans as part of the bigger picture that is "Notre Dame Football, the Grand Morality Play." Those like me who agonize second-by-second throughout those psychological stamina tests on Notre Dame Saturdays, part-wishing you didn’t care so much, partly dying with every negative comment or episode during the contests, always awaiting
that desperately euphoric moment when the guys in the blue-and-gold come through for you once again--you know what  I’m writing about.    

The Grand Morality Play that is Notre Dame football is peopled with a universe  of types--the good, the bad, and the ugly, the heroes and the villains, the decent and the dumb and the treacherous--with the Eternal Protagonist role filled by Notre Dame. All the other characters in the Play are not as good, though some are okay.

Who are the worst? Michigan is a total cad, naturally. Snobs. Big hats, no cattle. Michigan State? Tough bunch from that "bad" neighborhood on the other side of town. Purdue? A tough rival, but not one that goes out of its
way to stick the knife in, the way Michigan does. When Purdue bloodies your nose, you don’t go away plotting a horrific revenge for months to come. Northwestern? Well, they mean well. Like with Purdue, when they’re not
playing you, you root for them to win.

What about those other dudes that show up on the schedule, or used to?

Like Penn State and its mean Pennsylvania mining town kids. That was a duel you always looked forward to and also dreaded, figuring you’d probably win, then finding yourself wishing you hadn’t played them even when they weren’t
very good. Boston College--major pains in the neck. You slap them around, they keep getting back up, throwing dirt in your eyes, shrieking obscenities, and worst of all--fighting to win the darn game. 

Miami? Now, that was a problem for a spell. Not only did they suddenly, somehow get real good (which couldn’t have had anything to do with all that drug money floating around Florida in the Miami Vice era, could it?), they relished humiliating you. They slammed you down on the beach and then stepped on your hands when you tried to get up. Good thing Lou came along and stuck his fingers in their eyes. Well, anyway, they went to jail and haven’t been the same since they got out, despite all the accolades Brent Musburger piles on them.

Florida State? Very slick. Pinstriped zoot suits. Panama hats. Tons of easy cash. The players aren’t annoying--they don’t even know they’re on a college campus. But that hokey, lyin’ sack of a coach…Problem is, one of his sons will inherit the system, payola and all, and they’ll probably keep winning. They look good on TV.

Well, we can go on talking about the Texas schools and Alabama and Nebraska and the rest, but at some point we have to fess up and face up to the truest villain of all in this drama, the one who’s been murdering and stealing and perjuring and forgering for decades and tormenting the Irish in the process--yes, USC, the University of Spoiled Children, as they are known to non-Trojans in Los Angeles.  You can talk about your cheating and your ducking and your hiding and your gun-toting and your domestic assaults and everything else that’s been going on in the SEC and the Big 12 all these years, but when you find the center of things, the naked lunch on the end of the fork, there is nothing in Notre Dame’s universe as evil as the Trojans. They are the cleverest and most malicious of all antagonists. They are utterly without principle. Amoral doesn’t begin to describe. If Notre Dame is the Federation, in original Star Trek terms, then USC is the Klingons (Michigan is the Romulans--there is a modicum of commonality between Michigan and Notre Dame, as there  was between the Romulans and the Vulcans). USC makes Lady Macbeth look like the poster girl for "Got milk o’ human kindness?" USC is Snidely Whiplash to Notre Dame’s Dudley DoRight. Most infuriatingly, USC actually has allies in the media. (Gee, who could that possibly be? Maybe some portly fraud who’s un-retired one too many times now?)  You can keep picking at the scar that represents Miami’s reprehensible treatment of Notre Dame in the 1980s, but do not forget that it was John McKay’s USC in the late 1960s and early 1970s that set the stage for the shameless grandstanding and taunting that Jimmy Johnson’s Hurricanes made into an art form  a decade later. Have you forgotten that dance Anthony Davis laid on the Irish back when? And no, it doesn’t make me recall him any more fondly knowing what a thorough washout he was on the pro level. He was never in the elite back category, which makes those eleven end zone dances he performed against Notre Dame from 1972 to 1974 all the more galling.  Oddly, had it not been for the circumstance of a fellow my age moving to my neighborhood from Southern California in 1972, I might have gone on naively viewing the Trojans as worthy, noble rivals. After all, one of my fondest memories is of our whole family sprawled before the black-and-white Motorola on a November Saturday night in 1968, watching USC flash-and-dash to a thrilling 21-21 tie against the good old Hanratty-and-Seymour Domers. That game excited me. I didn’t yet recognize the menace that lurked within the forms of bevies of redshirt mercenaries--another John McKay innovation--in USC colors.

This fellow who moved to our neighborhood changed my entire opinion of USC football. I used to think good thoughts about California teams. But this guy laughed when his teams beat my favorites. He rubbed it in and gloated. He hid when his teams lost. He was a perfect Trojan fan, in other words. And from that time forth, I never saw USC as anything other than pure evil. Even today, if Notre Dame went 11-1 and the one loss was to USC, I’d be dismal.   If the Irish went 1-11 and the "one" was USC, then I’d call it a successful season. How sick is that?

It was that 1972 Anthony Davis game. The end zone jigs on his knees. The cocky flip of the football to the ref wearing zebra stripes over his USC tee-shirt. Fingers thrust tauntingly  in the faces of my beloved, exhausted
Irish gladiators. The jerk from Orange County cackling with glee on my own couch…That hideous white stallion!

USC’s dastardliness far predates 1972, of course. If you want to take your life in your own hands, ask Ara Parseghian some time why his 1964 team "blew" that year’s USC game and lost a consensus national title. Then
find the video for that game and see how the officials invented call after call to keep USC afloat long enough to steal the game. I only vaguely recall heartbreak in our home over that one; the focus of my personal grudge is the
horrendous period from 1967 to 1982 during which the Trojans "won" twelve of the sixteen games between the two teams, while the Irish won only two and tied two others. Notre Dame leads the all-time series with USC 41-26-5. In
other words, take away that sixteen-year span noted above, and this series is a laugher. But the twelve losses to USC are on the books, and it’s too late for a deus ex machina to swoop down and restore justice.  The year after the Anthony Davis game, Notre Dame punched out the Trojans at home and won the national title. But the following year, 1974, concluded with the 55-24 horror show at the Coliseum that I realize I still haven’t gotten over.  Watching the game nowadays on ESPN Classics makes me physically ill. Like one who enjoys self-torture, I even taped the thing so I can relive the hurt again and again.  The taunting, the sheer glee in Keith Jackson’s tone at every USC moment… Nevertheless, as bad as things got for the Irish that sick, sad afternoon in Los Angeles, Drew Mahalic made a play to stymie a two-point conversion try by Pat Haden at the end of the first half that is still today the single greatest effort I’ve ever seen on a football field. Watch it, and you’ll agree.   When the Irish lost the next two years as well, I darn near surrendered. But then came 1977, and atonement. The tide had turned. Until the following year.

In the fourth quarter of the 1978 game, with the Irish trailing 24-6 and less than ten minutes to play, Joe Montana hit Kris Haines with a bomb to cut the deficit to twelve, then put on a performance that prefigured the comeback
that was to be against Houston in that year’s Cotton Bowl, turning USC inside-out over the next several minutes in an exact reversal of what had happened to Notre Dame in 1974. When Dean Masztak slid into the end zone with
under a minute to play, a Montana bullet stapled to his thigh and the Irish \now owning a 1-point lead, you had to believe Southern Cal had never been hit so hard, so fast, so devastatingly in their history. The bummer came when
Notre Dame botched the 2-point try moments later, giving USC and Keith Jackson hope.

On the ensuing series, Notre Dame’s defense throttled USC’s rattled cowards.   On second down, quarterback Paul MacDonald collapsed under a ferocious assault from ND’s linemen, and up popped Jeff Weston with the football in his hands, doing his own Anthony Davis imitation. But before the defense could run off the field, there was USC’s best friend, as always, the homer ref, signaling that MacDonald had been in the act of passing when he’d fumbled. And before anyone could recover from this miscarriage of justice, there went a USC receiver fleeing through the demoralized ND backfield to set up the "game winning" field goal, as Keith Jackson howled in delight and his broadcast partner Frank Broyles mumbled disgustedly, "I can’t believe USC is gonna win this game on that call."

Afterward, QB MacDonald displayed his true USC credentials by telling reporters that he knew USC was going to win by the looks he saw in his teammates’ eyes during their final huddles. What I wanted to know was what MacDonald’s eyes looked like as two Notre Dame warriors were ripping the football from his fear-frozen fingers.

Just when you thought you would never see worse, though, you got fast-forwarded to the season finale in 1982, John Robinson’s first "final" game at USC  (his resignation probably arranged as a plea-bargain to keep him out of prison for perpetuating all the honorable traditions established by his coaching predecessor). On that dull afternoon, two mediocre teams wrestled each other until with five minutes left and trailing by three, USC began its final thrust to victory. As is so often the case when Notre Dame is not good, the head coach had the wrong guy on the field at the wrong time.   Gerry Faust used to love keeping cornerback Chris Brown in a game just long enough to blow a win.  Brown naturally got turned around and committed pass interference on the two-yard line, setting up a diving touchdown by USC for the win. Jubilation on the USC sidelines! Coach Robby leaping with joy!  The only stickler was the sight of a Notre Dame lineman holding the ball on the three-yard line, showing it to a ref who had a look on his face that said, "Now, we don’t want any trouble here, son. You just give me that football and get on over to your sideline, hear?" Turns out Notre Dame had stripped the ball from the diving USC back not on the one-yard line but on the two-yard line, mere acres from the goal line. In other words, the running back had traveled the last six feet into the end zone without the ball. The refs had signaled touchdown anyway.

A huddle of zebras. A hushed moment. Then--repeat of the TD signal.

Hurrah!

To this day, I wonder if Gerry Faust heard my teary scream from three
thousand miles away.

No, I can’t forgive and forget. I know, I’m a bad person. I can’t forget the cruel 1980 game when the refs canceled an early Notre Dame touchdown dive and handed the early momentum to USC to ruin another championship thrust. I
can’t forget unreliable Ron Powlus’s tipped interception that cost Notre Dame the 1997 game, or the homer call on Arnaz Battle’s non-fumble inside the USC five in 1998 that kept the Irish from the BCS. I can’t forget the antics
and the treachery and the arrogance all these years. As my hero Murray Sperber has written, USC football was infamously corrupt as early as the 1920s. Have you heard the one about the leopard and its spots?  And even if I were to momentarily lose my sense of reason and somehow find USC "not so bad," I’ve always got Keith Jackson around to restore my equilibrium.

In the Grand Morality Play that is Notre Dame football, in a realm where evil must exist so that we can know what is right and honorable, USC and its alumni who pilot slow-moving Broncos are well cast.  We must stand by the   righteous, even when the Chorus sings of disaster. When I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa and had no access to live TV, one of my happiest expat moments came when I picked up an International Herald Tribune one afternoon just after Thanksgiving in 1986 and gasped at the final score that read: Notre Dame 38-USC 37. I putt-putted home on my Moped and wrote a thank-you letter to Lou Holtz. I knew the worm had turned. I had once predicted Notre Dame would beat USC fifteen times in a row as recompense for all the cheating that had been done the Irish in years past. I  thought fifteen straight wins was realistic but also figured USC would find a way to
cheat its way out of such a calamity. How amazing, then, was it when goodness triumphed all eleven games from 1983 to 1993?

You must believe in the good, even in a universe that allows such an abomination as USC to exist. As James Dean’s character Cal said in East of Eden: "This is Notre Dame, Mother. Notre Dame is everything that’s good."  At least, that’s what I think I he said…

Play like a champion today.

Ronny P Kaye
kayesell@aol.com

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