The legendary football coach died yesterday.
From The New York Times (gift article):
Lou Holtz, who coached six major colleges to bowl games and revived a floundering Notre Dame football program, taking the Irish to an unbeaten national championship season in 1988, has died in Orlando, Fla. He was 89.
His death was announced on Wednesday by Notre Dame, which shared a statement from Holtz’s family. It did not say when he died or provide a cause. He was reported to have entered hospice care in January.
When Holtz, slender and bespectacled, arrived at Notre Dame in 1986, taking on college football’s most pressure-packed post, he hardly projected the image of a tough coach who might inspire his players to win one for a latter-day Gipper.
“I’m not very smart and I’m not very impressive,” he remarked. “I’m 5-10, weigh 152 pounds, speak with a lisp, appear afflicted with a combination of scurvy and beriberi, and I ranked 234th in a high school class of 278.”
But Holtz had a keen football mind and a disciplinarian’s resolve, insisting that his players strive for perfection. He was also an astute motivator with a quick wit.
Holtz’s teams compiled a 249-132-7 record in his 33 years as a collegiate head coach. In his 11 seasons at Notre Dame, his teams went 100-30-2, placing him second in career victories at South Bend to Knute Rockne’s 105. He took the Irish to nine consecutive major bowl games, winning five of them.
Known for turning around losing programs, Holtz was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2008.
The successor to Gerry Faust, whose Notre Dame teams had an uninspiring 30-26-1 record over five seasons, Holtz put his players through grueling practices and told them that he expected a victory every time they took the field.
And there’s this:
When he was 28 years old with three young children, little family savings and his prospects of becoming a collegiate head football coach in doubt, Holtz set down life goals, professional and personal. He came up with 108 items.
While Notre Dame was preparing for its 1989 Fiesta Bowl game with West Virginia, he said he had accomplished 84 of those goals, among them sitting next to Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” meeting the pope and dining at the White House.
Holtz, a practicing Roman Catholic, met Pope John Paul II while touring the Vatican. Even before his award from President Trump, he was invited to the White House by President Ronald Reagan (who in the role of Notre Dame’s George Gipp in the 1940 film “Knute Rockne All American” implored Rockne from his deathbed to “just win one for the Gipper”). He also accepted invitations from Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas during part of Holtz’s coaching tenure there.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon hiim...
