The Joyce Center was beginning to feel the way it did in the old days, when in the warmth of autumn or the windchill of winter, Notre Dame consistently established its athletic superiority.
There was a basketball luncheon Friday in an area adjacent to the arena where a sellout crowd of 11,418 would gather Saturday for the Irish’s second victory this season against defending national champion Connecticut, 68-66. Matt Doherty, the first-year coach of the Fighting Irish, spoke of competing for championships and the words no longer sounded like a fantasy.
When Doherty described the intense effort he observes all around him, not just within the basketball program but throughout the campus, he recalled his college days at North Carolina.
“It’s just like a team,” Doherty said. “When I was playing, I played with Michael Jordan. I couldn’t run, couldn’t jump, couldn’t shoot the ball. But I could screen, I could pass, I could dive on the loose ball. And that was what I was asked to do. I got to play a little bit and got to be a part of a national championship team. And that’s what we try to do within our team, but more important that’s what Notre Dame tries to do as an institution.”
Less than two months after the university’s first major NCAA violations became official, the supervisors of that effort continue to deal with a credibility crisis that has altered a management structure considered a national model for decades. Notre Dame’s athletic ambition, symbolized most recently by the emotional victories of Doherty’s basketball team, now exists against a backdrop of uncertainty that is unprecedented in the recent history of the university.
Mike Wadsworth’s forced resignation as athletic director and the removal of athletic responsibilities from Rev. E. William Beauchamp, the university’s executive vice president, marked a break in a line of command that extends back for nearly half a century.
The team of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s president, Rev. Edmund Joyce, executive vice president, and Athletic Director Edward “Moose” Krause merged effective oversight, athletic success and a sense of perspective decades before the reports of the Knight Foundation called for increased involvement on the part of college presidents. Hesburgh was a co-chairman of the reports, which were completed in 1993 and initiated significant reforms within the NCAA.
When Wadsworth returned to his alma mater to become athletic director in 1995, a polite question inspired smiles: Exactly what was there for him to do?
Notre Dame’s commitment to join the Big East Conference in most sports other than football had been made during the previous summer. The renovation and expansion of Notre Dame Stadium was scheduled to begin after the 1995 football season. The contract with NBC to telecast home football games was in place.
Here’s what there was to deal with: Kim Dunbar, more than two years after the beginning of her relationships with Notre Dame football players, chose to gain access to Friday football luncheons through a $25 membership in the Quarterback Club.
Nearly five years later, those invisible twin spires on the Notre Dame campus–perception and reality–had combined to link the circumstances at the end of Wadsworth’s tenure with those of discarded coaches and athletes in the university’s recent troubled past.
There was Lou Holtz, whose supporters continue to blame Wadsworth for his reluctant departure in 1996; John MacLeod, the former basketball coach who assembled the core of this year’s successful team before his forced resignation last March; Rick Majerus, whose name suddenly was removed from consideration as MacLeod’s replacement; and high-profile Fighting Irish athletes who have received major punishments for transgressions they considered minor.
“I really believe from what has been said to be and what I know,” Wadsworth said, “that the restructuring and the things that are being done are being done out of a sense of great concern for the reputation of the university. And for the perception caused by some of the more notorious events of the last few years that somehow things could be amiss.
“Now I said `perception,’ and I use that word advisedly, because the actual reality is contained in the recorded successes of our individual teams [and] our individual student-athletes.”
A report by the department of athletics on the performance of the five-year plan initiated soon after Wadsworth’s arrival in 1995 includes a list of accomplishments. According to the report, which is included on the university’s Web site, Notre Dame joined Stanford as the only universities ranked in the top 20 academic institutions by U.S. News & World Report to average top-20 finishes in the Sears Directors’ Cup standings, a measure of an athletic department’s accomplishments in all sports.
Notre Dame has won the last four Conference Commissioner’s trophies for excellence among men’s teams in Big East competition and the last three for its women’s programs. A total of 35 teams, the most in school history over a four-year period, took part in NCAA championship play from 1995-96 through 1998-99. In the same span, a school-record 35 athletes reached academic All-America status. For the four academic years, athletes have achieved a grade-point average above 3.0, less than one-tenth of a point beneath the average of the student body.
“The only thing that is left is not real problems, but the perception that some of these very difficult stories created,” Wadsworth said. “And I don’t mean to minimize the importance of that by saying that. But I think what it does is highlight that sometimes, perceptions are as important as reality. And that’s what these decisions reflect.
“The record is clear to what the reality is. The perception seems to signal that there is a need to do something in a demonstrative way so the public will see that Notre Dame is very serious about changing whatever it is that has been a problem. Sometimes organizations will do this. It will be change for the sake of change as a symbol of the seriousness of the issue.”
The list of potential candidates meeting the criteria Notre Dame appears to seek–an outsider with management experience in athletic administration and an extensive understanding of the national landscape–is not long.
Wadsworth’s successor, operating under a more direct line of communication with Rev. Edward Malloy, the university president, soon may have to complete an evaluation of a football program attempting to rebound from its first losing season since Holtz’s first year. Wadsworth and Beauchamp, who promoted Bob Davie to head coach in 1996 and last summer approved a contract extension through 2003, no longer will be able to offer support in response to a frustrated following.
Already, short-list quality names are falling out of consideration. Gene DeFilippo, the athletic director at Boston College whose response to a gambling scandal he inherited attracted national attention, strongly maintained Thursday that his only interest is to remain there.
Kevin White of Arizona State has not responded to questions about openings at Notre Dame, Michigan and Kentucky. But a person familiar with his thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said late Friday White already had provided private assurances within the Arizona State administration that he will not leave.
According to the source, White did not want to appear so presumptuous as to decline publicly a conversation with a university that has not initiated contact. But if an inquiry is made, the source said, White will make a statement similar to DeFilippo’s, polite but unequivocal.
Wadsworth said that a report suggesting he decided to resign after hearing a description of the restructured position was not true.
“I have never declined an opportunity to be helpful in any way,” he said.
Wadsworth sat quietly on a dais at the basketball luncheon Friday, listening to renewed talk of competition and hope, and the possibilities that exist in the future.
For one moment, Doherty interrupted the talk of ambition. He turned to his left, looked at the man whose Notre Dame future no longer extends quite that far, and said thanks.
“Without you, Mike,” Doherty said, “I wouldn’t be here.”
