Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/561665
BY LOU SOMOGYI As a New York native and Catho- lic from a working class family, Frank Pomarico grew up believing Notre Dame was the closest symbol of heaven on Earth. When he received a football scholarship to enroll at the school in 1970, it was a calling to him beyond being an- other student-athlete. In his recently re- leased 256-page book Ara's Knights, pub- lished by Triumph Books and co-au- thored by Ray Serafin, Pomarico details in 18 chapters his journey to Notre Dame and what it meant to play for Ara Parseghian, who was 95-17-4 in his 11 seasons, nine of them with top-10 finishes, won two consensus national titles (1966 and 1973) and a share of a third (1964), and just missed out another his freshman year in 1970. Although it centers on the 1970-73 seasons that Pomarico played at Notre Dame — with a spe- cial emphasis on the '73 national title in which he was a tri- captain at guard — there are extensive chapters that delve into what winter, spring, summer and fall are like on the Notre Dame campus, the political unrest of the 1960s that carried over into his time as a student on a college campus, the origi- nal mixed feelings about Notre Dame admitting women as students in 1972, or even how back then players stayed on campus the Friday of home games and walked to the stadium on their own BECOMING A KNIGHT Former Irish captain Frank Pomarico details his experiences under Ara Parseghian and life at Notre Dame