The forgotten legend of Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy

Editor's note: This story is an excerpt from the book "American Coach: The Triumph and Tragedy of Notre Dame Legend Frank Leahy," by Ivan Maisel, published on Sept. 16 by Grand Central Publishing.

They came from near and far to the gleaming new Athletic & Convocation Center at Notre Dame to honor the football coach they once called The Master.

The calendar said that Frank Leahy was sixty years old on that last night of January 1969. One look at Leahy would have labeled the calendar a fabulist. He still stood erect, five foot eleven, and his waistline barely had wavered from those postwar days when he strode the Fighting Irish sideline, an American celebrity at the peak of his command. But the crevasses in Leahy's face, the ruddy cheeks, and the thinning gray hair indicated the ravages taken by time and leukemia.

Once he had radiated a fiery mettle fueled by his desperate need for success. In many ways, Leahy personified the American Dream narrative that served as the backbone of national culture for most of the twentieth century. He had come from nothing. He had worked hard, gone to church, used football to go to college, married the right girl, climbed the coaching ladder, all at a furious pace. He was a head coach at thirty, the Notre Dame head coach at thirty-two, a national champion as a player and a coach.

As a player, he took motivation from the doubts of a hometown friend who told Leahy that he would never make it at Notre Dame. As a coach, the more Leahy won, the more pressure he applied to himself to match public demand. Leahy drove his players hard, and in return they played so fiercely that his Fighting Irish teams lived with accusations of dirty play. They fought hard because Leahy demanded it. He tried so hard to live up to the Notre Dame legacy of success that losing devastated him. At the end, winning did, too.

When he played, his drive cost him his health. His body could not withstand what he put it through. Leahy won a job as a starting tackle in the preseason of his junior year, yet the number of games he actually started in his Notre Dame career could be counted on one hand. When he coached, his drive cost him his health again, which in turn cost him his coaching career at the age of forty-five, cost him the one job he ever really wanted.

Fifteen years to the day after Leahy and Notre Dame parted ways, he wore a red blazer, a crisp white shirt, and what in his later years had become his trademark bow tie. Leahy long ago had given up wearing a traditional necktie. So many times in a restaurant, a fan had interrupted Leahy's meal. The coach, ever polite, would stand in greeting and drag the bottom of his necktie through his soup.

More than 1,000 guests came to the dinner at twenty dollars a plate, back when that was a good portion of a daily wage in South Bend. They came, men and women but mostly men, to honor Leahy and to benefit him (those blood transfusions weren't cheap), to remind him and surely themselves of who he had been, what he had meant to them. And they wanted to remind others, namely the men who for more than a decade had refused to vote Leahy into the College Football Hall of Fame.

No coach in the last forty years had been more singularly identified with his university than Leahy had been with Notre Dame. He loved the campus, loved the statue of Our Lady (English translation of Notre Dame) atop the Golden Dome, loved it from the day he first laid eyes on it as an eighteen-year-old freshman in the winter of 1927. Like so many Catholic boys in small towns and big cities across America, Leahy, a shy innocent from the South Dakota prairie, had dreamed of playing for the great Knute Rockne. Unlike nearly all of those boys, not only did Leahy play for Rockne, but when a knee injury ended his career, he became his coach's protégé. Rockne saw not only the hunger in Leahy but a keen mind for the game. The coach arranged for his protégé to become an assistant coach at Georgetown. Three months later, Rockne would be gone, perishing in a plane crash on a Kansas farm.

Leahy spent one season at Georgetown before moving to Michigan State and then to Fordham, where he attracted acclaim for developing the offensive front forever known as the Seven Blocks of Granite. One of those blocks, a squat Italian with a quick temper named Vince Lombardi, became a coach, too.

In the winter of 1939, at the age of thirty, Leahy became head coach at Boston College, where he took a commuter school that consisted of four buildings (none of them dorms) and in two seasons went 20-2, including an 11-0 record in 1940 that concluded with a 19-13 upset of mighty Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl.

But Notre Dame came calling, literally the same day that Leahy signed a five-year extension with Boston's Eagles. Eleven days later, Leahy left Boston College and that new contract behind. This was Notre Dame, his school, the school that had taken in a poor boy and made him a man.

Rockne, by dint of his success and a personality born for marketing, had put Notre Dame on the American cultural map. Rockne fomented the image of a small Catholic university in a remote Midwestern town as the premier college football program in the nation. It is easy now, with the benefit of hindsight, to see Notre Dame as a monolithic power in college football for most of the twentieth century. But in January 1941, you could make the case that Notre Dame's success during Rockne's 13 seasons belonged to the coach, not the school. In the 10 seasons after Rockne's death Notre Dame neither went undefeated nor won a national championship. Two head coaches tried and failed to maintain the Fighting Irish at the level to which Rockne had taken them.

Leahy returned to his alma mater, bristling with energy, and made Notre Dame Notre Dame again, not only restoring Fighting Irish football to its pedestal but transferring the imprimatur of winning from Rockne to the university.

When Leahy retired from Notre Dame after the 1953 season, he had the second-best record in the history of the game (107-13-9, .880), second only to Rockne.

Rockne went undefeated five times in 13 seasons at Notre Dame.

Leahy did so six times in only 11 seasons.

In the 71 seasons since Leahy's retirement, the Irish have finished the regular season undefeated only five more times.

Leahy also won four Associated Press national championships (an award that the AP didn't give in Rockne's time).

Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost who became an American icon during the Roaring Twenties as an All-American back at Illinois, became an analyst in the early days of college football telecasts, which also happened to be the prime of Leahy's championship run at Notre Dame. In that era Grange called Leahy "the greatest college football coach who ever lived. He's greater than Knute Rockne ever thought of being and I'm not knocking old Rock."

As Leahy made the Irish dominant again, he made himself into an American colossus, one of the best-known sports figures in a postwar nation craving a return to normalcy. In the years after World War II, major American sports consisted of Major League Baseball and college football. The New York Yankees and Notre Dame became synonymous with greatness, interchangeable icons, loved by their faithful and hated by every other fan in America. From 1946 through 1953, the Yankees won six World Series and Notre Dame won three national championships. The Fighting Irish didn't lose a game from 1946 to 1949, then handed the baton to the Yankees, who didn't lose a World Series from 1949 to 1953.

During this postwar run, Leahy made the cover of Time magazine, celebrity real estate typically reserved for political leaders and authors. "In the old culture," essayist Lance Morrow wrote in The Wall Street Journal, appearing on the cover of Time served as "a secular version of being beatified by the Catholic Church."

Leahy succeeded just as the GI Bill poured billions into American higher education, and just as postwar anti-Catholicism surged. Catholics across the country clung to the Fighting Irish as a ticket to assimilation. Nuns lit candles for football success. As a significant portion of American life centered on universities, Leahy cemented Notre Dame's stature as not only the most prominent Catholic university but a symbol of athletic greatness.

Leahy's successes bolstered the university so that it could take advantage of its football renown to transform into the premier Catholic institution of American higher learning. In theory, it's not impossible for football dominance to exist on the same campus as academic prowess. In reality, when Notre Dame football toppled off its pedestal in 1950, losing eight games over three seasons, no one had to look far to find the culprit. Father Theodore Hesburgh, then the university vice president, was as confident as he was dynamic. Hesburgh wanted to shift Notre Dame's focus toward academia. "Father Ted" capitalized on Leahy's football success even as he stunted it. He used the spotlight that shone on the university because of football even as he reined in Leahy. Hesburgh wanted to illustrate to the coach (and the world at large) which was the dog and which was the tail.

The friction between two ambitious men who envisioned Notre Dame from opposite poles put neither man in a favorable light. Leahy, as his team tumbled from four consecutive undefeated seasons to a 4-4-1 record in 1950, never fully trusted Hesburgh again. Hesburgh, as driven in his dream as Leahy had been in his, became as successful in making Notre Dame a world-class university as Leahy had been in restoring Notre Dame football to greatness. Hesburgh ascended to the presidency of Notre Dame in 1952, a job he would hold for thirty-five years. In later life Hesburgh felt remorse about his relationship with Leahy. He would give voice to that remorse at the dinner honoring the former coach at the new Athletic & Convocation Center.

"You battled a lot of odds," the priest, looking down the dais, said to Leahy, "including me."

Hesburgh recalled to Leahy how he coached with "chin out and a glint in your eye, instilled dedication, drive, discipline, and character in your players so that while they may have groused some at the time, there developed in them a great pride that will remain in them forever."

Hesburgh, who knew how to deliver a homily, said, "If Leahy isn't named to the Hall, the whole idea seems to be useless...Frank Leahy, you are long overdue in Football's Hall of Fame!"

The cheer that arose from the floor and bounced off the walls of the Convocation Center woke up the echoes of cheers for Leahy's teams long before.

Soon the guest of honor stood to speak. Leahy began to employ his trademark flowery language in his round, lyrical tone. He turned to the reason that the Convocation Center had filled on this twenty-nine-degree night.

"I never thought anything this nice would happen to me," Leahy said. "But let me tell you this, with all the sincerity that I can command, that none of this would be possible if it weren't for the truly wonderful players and assistant coaches that it was my great fortune to work with here on the campus of Our Lady."

Leahy regularly exhorted his players to "pay the price." He certainly did. Several times over the course of his adult life, Leahy suffered from what was labeled "nervous exhaustion" or a "nervous breakdown." The American Dream had a dark side, the side that authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur Miller had revealed. Frank Leahy, who tried and succeeded more than millions of others to live his life in superlatives, paid a price for success. Turns out that Leahy was human.

By the 1953 season, Leahy's health problems became so severe that he collapsed in the locker room at halftime of the Georgia Tech game. A campus priest summoned from the stands administered Leahy the last rites of the Catholic Church. He had suffered an attack of pancreatitis, exacerbated by stress. Leahy recovered well enough to finish out the season, coaching the Irish to a 9-0-1 record and No. 2 ranking. But he was done and he knew it.

Today, Rockne remains a touchstone of the university campus. Leahy, seven decades after his resignation and five decades after his death, has become a name in a record book. But if there had been no Leahy, there's no guarantee there would be the Notre Dame football that college football fans continue to love-and hate. Leahy left an enormous impression on the Notre Dame campus. He came so far. He would not fail.