On Frozen Blog

The second-best pastime in frozen conditions may well be football in the snow. Playing tackle football in the immediate aftermath of a serious snowfall ranks among the favorite recreations of my Washington youth. White-out football is also great to watch on TV. But even better is being in four or five layers, all rosy-cheeked, on one of America’s most beautiful college campuses while it’s covered in a fresh deep blanket of snow.

I found out about my favorite winter conditions settling in on South Bend, Indiana, early Friday afternoon, and with the aid of a Chicago snow angel named Jennifer managed to pull off last-second arrangements for a memorable return to my favorite sports shrine for the pigskin party in white.

Truthfully, leading up to Friday, I’d had precious little enthusiasm for trekking out for  Saturday’s Notre Dame-Syracuse football game — two lousy teams playing on the Saturday before Thanksgiving in a virtually meaningless game. However that was before I learned of the major winter storm that deluged South Bend all of Friday. I’d never visited ND in the snow, and the university issued an announcement Friday afternoon containing a dire warning of parking pain associated with the plowed powder. I was hooked — how long might I have to wait again for the coincidence of wintry Mother Nature and a football Saturday in South Bend?

All I had to arrange approximately 20 hours before Saturday’s kickoff was travel, grounds transportation, lodging, and insulated-for-the-Iditarod spectator gear — and a companion to use my second ticket for the game.   

I made a new friend on a business trip to Chicago last month, an investment consultant named Jennifer who hailed from Chicago and informed me over a few Chicago steak house beers of her admiration for the Fighting Irish. She’d be the perfect companion for the game, particularly as I had to land in Chicago and would need a ride East to South Bend.

There’s impulsive and then there’s what I laid on Jennifer on a call to her office at 4:00 Friday afternoon: how about fetching me at O’Hare at 7:30 the next morning, chauffeuring me to a college campus two hours away, and sitting on an ice- and snow-crusted wooden bench for nearly four hours? Good Irish Catholics, however, heed such a Saturday call.

Still, what I was asking of Jennifer was extraordinary, and I was requesting on extraordinarily short notice. My plan, which by 4:15 Friday had become a passion-calling, would die without her participation.

“I’ll bring Baileys,” she told me with excitement over the phone.

Jennifer, my snow angel.

My 4 a.m. Saturday alarm wasn’t all that well received by my bones, but a hot shower and the reality of so novel a voyage to so special a destination quickly re-ignited my passion. That football stadium in that otherwise obsolete sliver of Indiana pasture was just about my favorite place on planet Earth, and on this Saturday I was going to share the experience with a new and likewise Fighting Irish loving friend in Christmas card conditions.  

That forecasted nightmare traffic leading into South Bend never materialized as we arrived near 11:45 South Bend time (one hour later than Chicago’s Central timed clock). Kickoff was at 2:30. I knew the day was going to be special when I ran into former Irish Head Coach Gerry Faust in the campus bookstore. In his book The Golden Dream Faust describes his emotions watching the storied football team run out onto the practice field for his very first practice with them. The passage makes my eyes tear up with each and every re-reading. The coach and I share an alma mater, and so it was a terrific thrill to have him pose for a photo with me. We had a nice chat, too.

I picked up a copy of the Notre Dame student newspaper, the Observer, and delighted in the thousands of words of raging, editorial debate pertaining to parietals. That’s long been a sore spot for the student body — the university’s unyielding policy of single-gender dorms and, from the vantage of the young and in lust, severely restrictive visiting hours in them. In the weather Jennifer and I were encountering Saturday, co-ed cuddling seemed the least the priests could sanction.

The Observer also brought interesting recruiting news. Hockey coach Jeff Jackson earlier in the week inked what may well prove to be the most talented class of hockey players in the history of the school’s hockey program, highlighted by certain future NHL first-rounders Cam Fowler and Riley Sheahan. On this frosty weekend in the Midwest Jackson’s 5th-ranked Irish pummeled Bowling Green in a home-and-away set of games Friday and Saturday, outscoring the Falcons 14-2 in the process. 

Another recruiting story in the student paper caught my eye: the football team this weekend was hosting the most coveted linebacker in the nation, Manti Te’o, a Hawaiian. No doubt he knew weather in Indiana in late November would be no rival to that of his island home, but his visit also delivered his introduction to snow and bone-jarring wind chill. College football teams understandably want terrific weather for the visits from prized recruits, but I wondered if Friday’s blizzard might not have been novel enough to have made a positive impression on the 5-star linebacker.      

Did I mention that it was cold? At kickoff the public address announcer informed us that we were seated in 19-degree wind chill. That was a high for the day, as far as Jennifer and I were concerned. Friday’s snowfall was so thick and furious that stadium maintenance personnel were powerless to clear off more than the seating surfaces, which presented the student body of perhaps 8,000 strong on Saturday with a tormenting temptation: eight-plus inches of snow at their feet for snowballs.

The winter weapons rained down fast and furious from the student section, pelting NBC cameramen, cheerleaders (for both schools), players, coaches, and ushers. And of course, the public address announcer’s pleadings for a cessation fell on muffled undergraduate ears. At the onset of halftime I swear 5,000 of the students unleashed a massive fight of balled white that looked like the arrival of another blizzard. I was jealous of being older and more mature in that moment.

And that moment made me think of the high profile Hawaiian linebacker; Notre Dame seats its football recruits smack in the insanity of the student section, and I found myself wondering if Te’o was making his first-ever snowballs and defending himself.

The game itself was another kick in the groin for the Irish team: a last-minute Syracuse touchdown, completing a 13-point, 4th quarter comeback, followed by a failed desperation 50-plus yard Fighting Irish field goal attempt as time expired. But Saturday’s loss carried less sting for me in such skin-stinging conditions and such winter wonderland panoramic beauty. Jennifer and I, huddled under a heavy wool blanket, endured all four quarters, and everyone seated around us seemed ebullient in the extreme conditions: we were
the heartiest of hearty football fans, packing a stadium in a disappointing season when 99 percent of Americans would choose instead recliner seats by the home hearth.

We were frozen to the bone walking in the dark back to the car, the crunch of snow under our feet the only intrusion on peaceful silence. Warmth arrived minutes later when I learned that angels drink Baileys.