From the broadcast booth, Howard Cosell, in the overtly theatric tone he summoned for moments like these, bellowed into his microphone: “This is the dream matchup: Notre Dame-Alabama. At Notre Dame, football is a religion. At Alabama, it is a way of life.”
Thirty-nine years ago, there was a college football national championship game arranged not by computer rankings or a rubric of poll results like this season’s Alabama-Notre Dame matchup for the Bowl Championship Series title, but by the kind of primitive challenge heard in a sandlot.
In 1973, Bear Bryant, coach of undefeated Alabama, sent a wily message from the tradition-rich football fields of the Deep South to a single football-centric university in northern Indiana. Bryant was taking his No. 1-ranked squad to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, and his stated opponent of choice was a team that Alabama had never played: Notre Dame.
The undefeated, untied Fighting Irish, who entered the 1973 bowl season ranked third, had been tempted by a more lucrative offer from the Orange Bowl. But a dare was a dare, especially one with the national championship on the line. Notre Dame Coach Ara Parseghian committed his team to the Sugar Bowl matchup, a contest immediately billed as the game of the century.
“It was the North against the South, Bear Bryant against Ara Parseghian, the Baptists against the Catholics,” Parseghian said last week from his home in Florida. “It had all these compelling comparisons. And it was played on New Year’s Eve, not New Year’s Day, so we had the national stage to ourselves.”
Bryant called it “the biggest game in the South’s history.”
Parseghian said a host of coaches from north of the Mason-Dixon line, and across the country, called to offer encouragement.
“None of them had gone down there and beat Bear,” Parseghian said, laughing.
by Bill Pennington, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Joe Raymond/Associated Press
