Football, fear of failure, and a bit of fun
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 18, 2025
- 606
These are heady times for my alma mater, which, in case you missed it, will be playing for the national championship on Monday.
Most so-called experts are saying Ohio State will win easily.
My response is, “Do you mind if we play the game, anyway?”
You’d think Notre Dame was a small private school with an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 7,000, that its glory days were nearly 100 years ago and that most of America disdains us.
And you’d be correct on all counts.
Still, I ask the question: “Do you mind if we play the game?”
I grew up the child of a mixed marriage: Dad was from South Bend, and Mom was a Columbus native. College football was an important part of Saturdays in the fall, and I soon became an ND fan, never imagining that one day I’d be accepted for admission.
As I prepared myself to leave my hometown and begin a new chapter in my life, I worried about a lot of things and had many questions: Would I be able to keep up academically? Could I make friends? Was writing for the campus newspaper or becoming part of the radio staff even a possibility? Could I find the dining hall?
Notre Dame had just begun to admit women the year before, so I understood that any success on the social front would be a minor miracle, thus I filed that likelihood under “F,” as in “Forget it.”
I envisioned any number of potential problems, everything from getting lost on my way to class to failing to figure out how to open a checking account, from missing Mass to losing my room key.
But there was one thing I never even considered: marijuana.
My wife and I graduated from the same high school — she in 1970 and I three years later — so you’d assume we’d share certain commonalities and a sense of parallel experiences. After all, it was a small Ohio town with little in the way of any real excitement.
However, as I got to know her during our courting days and nights, it soon became painfully obvious that whereas she was much more worldly — hitchhiking to concerts, working a series of responsible jobs, making friends outside of high school — I was a delicate flower, protected from reality, left to bloom in blissful isolation.
Sure, I went to a party or two, had dates for the occasional dance or movie, even drank beers with my friends in bars, but in truth my high school days were about as exciting as a merry-go-round ride.
My wife, on the other hand, was one of the cool kids, always adding new experiences, broadening her horizons, in a word, living.
I mention this as prelude to what happened my very first day at ND.
Thinking that a good way to impress my roommates would be to score a case of Ballantine Ale, I walked down Notre Dame Avenue with my trusty fake ID in my wallet to a tavern/carryout called, amusingly enough, the Library. Then I headed back to campus.
You have to understand that in all my 18 years as a sentient human being, I’d never seen, smelled or smoked pot, so I was utterly unprepared for what greeted me when I opened the dorm room door. The cloud of smoke that enveloped me spelled one word.
Expulsion.
Even before I’d sat in my first class, gone to my first football game, had my first heartbreak, I was destined to be thrown out of school.
I didn’t know what to do, so I closed the door and wandered down to St. Mary’s Lake, where, as I watched the ducks and stared at the Grotto, I leaned against a tree and popped the top off a Ballantine’s.
Two bottles later I decided to call Mom and Dad, who were in town to deliver me, staying with my father’s sister in South Bend.
Their advice was to talk with the hall rector, so I did that, and Father Dave told me not to worry about it, that he’d take care of it.
This, of course, didn’t go over well with my three roommates, who called me a “narc” and pretty much had nothing to do with me for the rest of the semester. I fell in with another group of guys who kept me from feeling so alone, but when they went outside to pass the pipe, I stayed behind, still adamantly opposed to the devil weed.
Flash forward to the first week of my sophomore year. I was rooming with the guys who’d rescued me from solitude, and over the summer, I’d decided if I got the chance, I’d join their number.
We had a three-room suite on the top floor, a coveted spread that included a ledge overlooking a courtyard we shared with a dorm across the quad. It was there that I got high for the very first time.
It wasn’t a bad experience; in fact, I enjoyed it, especially when we played records on the state-of-the-art component stereo system I’d purchased from what I’d earned cutting grass at my summer job.
Notre Dame didn’t expel us, we still went to class and all of us made the dean’s list that fall semester. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere, though far be it for me to encourage drug use.
When the Fighting Irish take the field Monday night, I want another kind of high, one that makes us feel better than all the rest.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where national championship dreams float in the smoke.