Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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where have you gone? Chris Yura, 1999-2002 Running Back Saving the environment with a new line of clothing By Dan Murphy C hris Yura is used to people asking him what he is wearing. Now, more often than not, he can say it's a mixture of used water bottles and old scraps of cotton. The former Notre Dame running back has taken an unorthodox path to get from playing in South Bend to owning his own eco-friendly apparel company in Morganton, W.Va. Yura, 32, is the founder of SustainU, a budding clothing company that makes all of its products in the U.S. using 100 percent recycled material. In between there were stops in Miami, New York City and Europe, where he worked as a professional model. Yura's trip down the catwalk and back again began, of all places, in the Notre Dame weight room. He fell in love with the weight room during his four-year career with the Irish and thought he wanted to become a physical trainer or a college strength coach when he graduated. He decided to test those waters in Miami, where he found a job as a trainer at the recently renovated gym inside the city's Four Seasons hotel. Shortly after he started working at the hotel, the Miami Herald asked him to pose for a picture to run with its feature story about the new weight room. They dressed Yura in a formal tuxedo and gave him a dumbbell and a glass of champagne to hold for their cameras. "They took a terribly cheesy picture, but I didn't know anyone in Miami so it was kind of funny," he said. "Sure enough it ends up being on the cover of the Miami Herald." Yura may have been embarrassed, but local modeling agencies liked what they saw. He soon started getting requests to pose for advertisements and eventually decided to move to New York to pursue modeling as a full-time career. "It's not the usual path for a Notre Dame football player, especially one who was once 230 pounds," he said. "If I would've been told that's what I was going to do after college when I was at Notre Dame, I would have probably laughed." Yura sat in on marketing meetings for many of the products he modeled and realized that a lot of the companies claiming to have clothes that are better for the environment and for the people that make them were disingenuous. He started researching the industry at the New York Public Library and found that less than two percent of the clothes Americans wear today are made in America. More than a mil-