Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/87622
'Notra Dame' And 'The Pope' THE FIFTH QUARTER LOU SOMOGYI are mayor of New York, President of the United States and football coach at Notre Dame, and not necessarily in that order." — Beano Cook, about 40 years ago "The three toughest jobs in America C lege Football" passed away Oct. 11 at age 81. No one on this earth knew more about college football, or possessed a greater historical passion for it, than Cook. A good friend of Blue & Gold Illus- ESPN's acknowledged "Pope of Col- arroll "Beano" Cook might have been the only Pope who didn't always root for Notre Dame. trated since 1985, Cook had a love-hate relationship with the school that for him phonetically always was "Notra Dame." He loved what the Fighting Irish meant to college football and respected the university overall, referring to Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., as the greatest college president of the 20th century during his 35 years in office from 1952-87. What he detested was the incessant whining from its fandom about academic standards at the school when, "Notre Dame gets more mate- rial in football than 95 percent of the schools out there." "Any coach can average seven wins a year at Notre Dame," he told me in the late 1980s. "It's just that when you get a Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian or Lou Holtz, then school's out." Sure enough, Bob Davie (35 wins in five years), Tyrone Willingham (21 wins The late Beano Cook was famous for his quips that often included Notre Dame. PHOTO COURTESY ESPN IMAGES in three years) and Charlie Weis (35 wins in five years) each averaged ex- actly seven wins per year. Anytime the football team would lose to Stanford, or hockey to Yale, or if the Irish would fall to Princeton or Harvard in crew, he couldn't resist tell- ing us, "I hope you don't use academics as the reason for losing that one." He also didn't care for the way the school would come across too sanc- timoniously at times, or how Notre Dame's football championships were attributed to its religious spirit and be- cause it was "God's school."