Navy whip up a storm

No one is quite sure why they’re called the Fighting Irish, but it seems like everyone has an explanation.

Some say it’s to do with Notre Dame’s third president, Fr William Corby, who was a chaplain for the Union’s ‘Irish Brigade’ during Gettysburg and granted general absolution to troops in the middle of battle. Others say it was down to a turn-of-the-century game against Michigan when a side full of Irish-sounding surnames entered the dressing room trailing and were met with roars of, “What’s the matter with you guys? You’re all Irish and you’re not fighting worth a lick”. What is known though is the university was founded by a French priest and any links with here are tenuous at best.

In fact, in Lansdowne Road today, it’s the Navy that are technically at home and it’s they that are hosting a circus that began before the teams had even gotten off their planes. Earlier in the week, former Notre Dame running back and current university radio analyst Allen Pinkett was banned from the game for saying they need more bad guys and criminals if they are to return to winning ways that completely vanished in the mid-1990s. Oversensitivity to misunderstood words is just another contradiction that goes with America’s true game.

Of course it has its problems. Education has long been an excuse rather than a priority when it has come to college football in many of the bigger universities while the Joe Paterno case at Penn State earlier this year, where the importance of the sport bred a culture that covered up a child sex abuse scandal, shows just how bloated it has become. When plans to introduce a four-team play-off to decide the champions were muttered months ago, it even drew a reaction from Barack Obama and had a subcommittee formed in Congress.

Perhaps it’s because the game has grown so quickly that it all got out of hand. From Notre Dame being on the verge of bankruptcy during World War II until the Navy offered to open up a training programme there, to a special performance by a young USC running back called Sam Cunningham changing Alabama attitudes to allowing black players on their team after the Civil Rights movement, to the game being seen as a sliver of American society that should be enlarged and embraced as the Soviet Union looked to get the upper hand during the Cold War. Step by step it has walked beside the evolution of a nation and taught as well as learned from its surroundings.

Even if Notre Dame and Navy is the most lopsided fixture in the sport — the Naval Academy lost 43 straight games between 1964 and 2006 — it’s still special.

After all, this is the longest running annual non-division game having started in 1927 and having seen its importance grow because of that helping hand given to Notre Dame during the 1940s.

Indeed, they are too powerful to be playing the game year in, year out, but more importantly it is seen as returning the favour. In that way, it’s a friendly rivalry and that makes it unique.

The Navy may not win often, but that makes it all the more important when they do. Years after their famous victory in 1963 that was the feast before a famine, at a change of command, a three-star admiral was introduced as the new leader of an important and prestigious command. He rose and introduced himself by saying, “I was a member of the 1963 Naval Academy football team: the last team to beat Notre Dame.” That was the year John F Kennedy was assassinated and Martin Luther King gave his famous speech but for any student from either institution at that time, that game sits comfortably beside those events.

Little wonder when you consider the context because while it’s an amateur sport, it’s a multi-billion dollar business. Texas Longhorns made $70m (€55m) profit last year, and Forbes believe they are worth $129m (€102m). Last May, the Pac-12 agreed a television contract worth a record $225m (€178m) per annum for 12 years. Five schools averaged more than 100,000 fans per game last year, this season 59 colleges have stadia bigger than Lansdowne Road and 19 bigger than Croke Park. But while the spectacular numbers make it so glitzy, it’s the little things that make it accessible to Americans in a way professional franchises will never be.

It’s about the local and it’s about the community and while so much of what goes on today won’t be understood by us real Irish as opposed to the Fighting Irish, that aspect should make it feel oddly familiar.