ST. LOUIS — It’s 6:38 p.m. in the Crystal Room on the third floor of the Missouri Athletic Club, and Brian Kelly hasn’t moved in a half-hour. To his left there is a line. It was 20 people long as soon as it started, and it is not noticeably shorter now.
It is the line to get pictures taken with the football coach of Notre Dame.
To the people in this room, it is a very important line.
Strategically positioned in front of a Notre Dame Club of St. Louis banner, Kelly leans into every handshake, makes direct eye contact, tells all it is a pleasure to meet them. They enter his orbit because they believe. Or, rather, they are a rattled but earnest flock that wants to believe, desperately, now and forever, amen.
It is Brian Kelly’s job, for now, on this night and several others this month, to give everyone a reason.
He is very good at this.
Dave Sauget Sr., owner of the Gateway Grizzlies, a local Frontier League baseball team, reaches the front of the line. Kelly makes small talk about Sauget, Ill., noting its population of 249. He remembers this from a sign along the road on the way into St. Louis. He had no idea he was meeting Dave Sauget tonight.
Sauget hands Kelly a pen. The Gateway Grizzlies schedule unfolds from inside the pen.
“Only in the Frontier League, right?” Kelly cracks, smiling like a lottery winner.
The group disperses. Kelly moves on to the next set of beaming acolytes. Sauget, standing a few feet away now, smiles and shakes his head.
“He was right on the ball,” Sauget says. “Ha! That’s cool.”
Jet-setter
The Notre Dame private jet is a narrow little dart, blue and gold stripes on the side. Inside, there are seven beige seats. Each has its own five-inch monitor, although they only broadcast the location of the plane and not, regrettably, satellite television or anything else of interest.
On a sunny Tuesday, the plane lands at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport, a small municipal airport that abuts a golf course. Inside the terminal, Brian Kelly waits, holding a cup of coffee, wearing a sport coat, a pink shirt and wraparound sunglasses on a sun-roasted face.
He had taken a quick trip home for his youngest son’s birthday, but the links did the real damage.
“I got nine holes of golf in,” Kelly says. “And I’m singed.”
The event in St. Louis is one of many in a busy May, his itinerary stretching from Cleveland to Fresno. St. Louis won Club of the Year honors in 2008, by extension winning an appearance from the Notre Dame football coach.
It’s a telling distinction. That policy — win Club of the Year, win the coach — was established by Charlie Weis. Now, Kelly fulfills the responsibility. The churn creates an underlying uneasiness for the fans. Kelly is the latest vessel for their enduring faith, which has gone unrewarded basically since 1988.
His only way to validate it, before a single regular-season game, is to instill confidence that he’s the right guy for the job. Not just the anyone-but-the-last-guy guy.
“It’s not just about change,” Kelly says from his usual seat on the Notre Dame jet, third back on the right side of the plane. “I think it has to be met with an energy and excitement. You still have to get people to buy in. Even after having some lean years. They gotta believe in me.”
So he engages those people. He clutches their palms, absorbs the stories about family patriarchs who graduated from Notre Dame before the World War II. He meets their expectant eyes with the assurance they long for: We are part of this, you and I.
“This is really about, I think, making sure people know the head football coach at Notre Dame — you can reach out and touch that person,” Kelly says. “It doesn’t sit up on a tower and is separate from what Notre Dame represents. It’s not this position that is guarded.”
Maybe he means to strike the note, maybe he doesn’t, but on this the contrast with his predecessor is impossible to ignore. Charlie Weis was not lovable, and the Guglielmino Athletics Complex was as welcoming as a Supermax penitentiary under his watch.
“No one loved Notre Dame more than Charlie Weis,” Kelly says of his predecessor, an alumnus. “He loved Notre Dame. He knew more about Notre Dame than I do.
“But I also know that a head football coach, regardless of whether it’s at Notre Dame or Central Michigan or Grand Valley is also an ambassador and a very influential person when it comes to shaping sentiments about how people feel about their program.”
This is the easy part. Kelly does not prepare remarks en route to St. Louis. He only studies small dossiers provided by his indefatigable assistant, Beth Rex, on donors he will meet.
Other than that, he is just the son of a Boston politician diving into his element, hawking the good word. He will give a keynote address at 8 p.m. It’s already written, without a single flourish of a pen.
“I already got St. Louis knocked out,” Kelly says on the way in, grinning in anticipation.
Preaching to the faithful
The jet lands at the private airfield in Sauget — hence the aforementioned signpost — and a black Ford Expedition brings Kelly and his party downtown. At a red light, with the base of the Arch to the right, Kelly asks the driver for a fact about the Arch that no one else knows.
All he gets is that it’s 650 feet tall.
First stop is the Renaissance Grand Hotel and a private 30-minute meeting with a Notre Dame donor. Eventually Kelly makes his way over to the Missouri Athletic Club, arriving fashionably late for the 6 p.m. “VIP” reception.
Kelly is on the elevator up when a reception attendee, wearing a name tag that reads “Notre Dame Class of ’95,” steps on. For the next few moments, the gentleman sheepishly glances over his shoulder. Kelly rescues him.
“Who you guys here to see?”
“You.”
“All right!” Kelly growls, reaching out for a handshake with the vigor of long-estranged fraternity brothers reuniting.
He is at full-throttle, his wit as sharp as a whip-crack. Before Kelly enters the reception, he is asked if he wants to be introduced, like a head of state. Kelly takes a beat.
“Somebody die?” he deadpans, by way of response. “Is there a wedding?”
Soon Kelly is working the room in just one corner of it, primarily because the room comes to him.
He meets the Hasara family, taking a group picture and then warning 11-year-old Ben Hasara, “I don’t want to see this on Facebook tonight.”
There is a no-autograph mandate, but he first signs one for Ben Hasara, then scribbles his signature on the cast of Notre Dame freshman-to-be Sienna Combs. Combs heaves her injured leg onto a chair for this and Kelly teases her about demanding the limb work harder than it has in weeks.
Jack Dwyer, the Notre Dame Club of St. Louis president, shepherds the guests through the photo line and frets they will linger too long or ask Kelly for too much. But it’s only when the dinner chimes sound that Kelly leaves his station, grabs a drink and heads downstairs.
“He seems like he’s genuinely excited to get out and tell the story and see people,” Dwyer says. “It’s a little bit like the Pope. You get a long way by your position, but the rest of it you make by what you do with it.”
Crowd favorite
“It’s great to be here in Big Ten country!” Kelly barks over a tinny sound system, starting his remarks with the punch line he had concocted hours ago, the zinger a direct hit. “What, you guys don’t believe everything you read?”
After a standing ovation, there are now about 400 people at rapt attention in the room, camera phones and small video cameras at the ready. Kelly knows what he needs to tell them, which is exactly what they want to hear.
He talks about getting that “ND spirit back.” He says he doesn’t mind being reminded of the past but he lives in the present. He says there are no five-year plans.
He said he would have signed anything Notre Dame put in front of him, cocktail napkins included. He further disarms the crowd when a spotlight suddenly clicks on like a nuclear-powered interrogation lamp, Kelly stepping away from the podium and barking, “I’ll do the dance later!”
For now, Notre Dame needs someone to treat alumni events like stump speeches, to slap corny commandments and creeds on locker room walls and tap into the emotion of teenagers. But Kelly remains keenly aware that, later, it needs that to turn into victories on Saturdays.
Kelly ends the speech with the usual crescendo, the full-throated screed about returning Notre Dame to the elite of college football. After the applause, he heads for the door.
He passes former Irish football player Alvin Miller on the way out, shaking hands. At the bottom of the stairs, Kelly recalls Miller’s words of encouragement with a bemused smile.
“He kept saying to me, ‘Good luck so far,’ ” Kelly says, and from the incongruity comes truth, that everyone at Notre Dame will believe in Brian Kelly so long as he offers no proof they should not.
Upon arriving back at the airfield in Sauget, Kelly asks if it’s a good night to fly.
He climbs aboard the jet, settles into his customary seat and pulls out noise-cancelling headphones he doesn’t use.
He instead talks playoff hockey and the Boston Bruins, about elementary schools, about some of the biggest success stories his staff has had in reshaping players’ minds.
The jet lands on a clear, dark night in South Bend. Kelly walks to his car, two more events on his schedule for the next day: a lunch and a dinner in town. He will spread that good word some more. Everyone will inhale it, feel something abiding and intoxicating swell inside them, and then wait to see what happens in September.
