cover image Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football

Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football

Steve Delsohn. William Morrow & Company, $24 (364pp) ISBN 978-0-380-97504-4

There is no end of books about football at Notre Dame, but this contribution is exceptional because so many quarters have added their voices. The result is a largely honest, well-rounded history that gives readers the benefit of the view from the administration building, the coach's office and the players' locker room. It concentrates primarily on the coaching from 1934 through 1996, emphasizing the regimes of Frank Leahy, Terry Brenna, Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine, Gerry Faust, and Lou Holtz, all of whom felt constant pressure, not just to win but to win by huge margins, and who were eventually flattened by the pressure. The iron-handed, velvet-gloved maneuvers of Fathers Hesburgh and Joyce, who ran the sports program for most of the decades covered, also give the lie to any pretense of democracy in the programs, especially when a coach decided to ""retire."" The input from players like Angelo Bertelli and Joe Montana, most of whom appear to have been very forthright with Delsohn (co-author with Jim Brown of Out of Bounds), rounds out the pictures of the hard-driving, soft-spoken Leahy and the quiet but efficient Holtz. The coach who comes off worst is Faust, who had triumphed as a high school coach but flopped at the college level and is depicted here as a priggish backstabber who blamed all his troubles on subordinates. In short, there are interesting revelations on every page in this evenhanded study. 16 pages b&w photos not seen by PW. Editor, Patricia Grader; agent, David Black. Author tour. (Sept.)