The following article, "The Golden Boys" is from the November 1997 issue of Sports Illustrated. It's by Paul Zimmerman, and discusses whether the '46 or '47 Fighting Irish team was the greatest in college football history.

Sports Illustrated Online: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/
 
The Golden Boys
by Paul Zimmerman
 
After World War II, Notre Dame fielded the greatest college football team in history, but which unbeaten Irish juggernaut was it: the '46 or the '47 squad?
 
I met John O'Connor in the bar of San Francisco's Olympic Club in the summer of 1967, and when he shook my hand, he almost crushed it. Big guy, size-18 neck, 46-inch chest, still an active AAU wrestler at 40. On the bridge of his nose was a telltale helmet scar.
 
"Where'd you play football?" I asked. "Notre Dame, '46 and '47," he said.
"Greatest collection of college football talent in history," I said. "How much did you play?"
 
"Not at all-for the varsity," he said. "B team. Scrimmaged against the big boys every day." He paused. "The greatness of those teams will never be realized. You ever hear of Art Statuto?"
 
Sure I had. He was the classic example of the postwar talent amassed by Irish coach Frank Leahy. Statuto never earned a monogram at Notre Dame, but he played three years of pro football afterward.
 
"We had lots of Art Statutos," O'Connor said. "There were guys who'd been starters and then gone off to war and couldn't win a monogram when they came back. There were people who weren't even issued jerseys, but in high school their uniforms had been retired. There were guys no one ever heard of and were never heard of again. You ever hear of Chick Iannuccillo?"
 
No, never had. So he told me the story of Chick Iannuccillo. He was one of those prospects a coach glimpses once in a lifetime, if he's lucky. He was a fullback, 5' 11", 225 pounds, a monster in those days. He had speed and a real killer instinct.
 
"He used to go, 'Vavoom! Vavoom!' when he was running," O'Connor said, "and he'd bring up a forearm and flatten guys. Leahy used to have this drill for backs, to see how tough they were: All the linemen would line up, single file, and the back would run at them, one at a time. The back got tackled by every one. The veterans lined up near the end so they could get the runner when he was tired. When Iannuccillo ran it, all of a sudden guys would start dropping out of line. One guy needed a new chin strap, another one would have something wrong with his shoelaces."
 
Late in the summer of '46, two men from the Department of Veterans Affairs paid a call to Iannuccillo. "He'd been in an infantry unit in Italy, and he'd caught a flesh wound in the leg," O'Connor said. "He was getting a full disability pension from the government. They let him know that playing football at Notre Dame would seriously compromise his disability benefits." The result: Chick Iannuccillo, ex-fullback.
 
"Notre Dame had given him a job raking leaves in front of the athletic office," O'Connor said. "Every day on the way to his office Leahy would have to pass by Chick, raking leaves in his Army fatigues, getting fatter and fatter. Leahy would just shake his head, and Chick would keep raking and whistling."

Lujack, the All-America quarterback, had the signature most coveted
 by young fans of the Irish.

(Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Archives)

 
The players fought for positions, playing time, a monogram, a smile from the coach. "There have been great college teams through the years," says Leon Hart, an AlI-America end at Notre Dame and the last lineman to win the Heisman ltophy, in 1949. "But for a sheer collection of talent, nothing could match our teams of '46 and '47."
 
Which team was better? Hard to say. Both were national champs, both were unbeaten, although the '46 team was held to a scoreless tie by the Doc Blanchard-Glenn Davis Army outfit. The statistics of the '46 Irish were eye-popping: No.1 nationally in total offense and defense, first in rushing offense, fifth in rushing defense, third in pass defense, only 24 points (four touchdowns, no extra points) allowed during the nine-game season. The stats of the '47 squad were slightly less impressive, as the Irish finished second to the Michigan single-wing machine in total offense but ranked in the top 10 in seven categories, including, for the first time, passing offense. Notre Dame gave up eight touchdowns and 52 points for the season.
 
Most veterans of both teams give a slight nod to the' 47 squad. "We were better, we'd played two years together," says Bill (Moose) Fischer, the All-America guard and winner of the' 48 Outland Trophy as the nation's best lineman.
 
"Our sequence of plays was slightly smoother in '47," fullback fohn Panelli says, "probably because we'd gone away from Leahy's two-unit system of '46. But that system kept you fresher."
 
Leahy's biggest problem was sorting out all the talent that came back from the war, so in '46 he played his first unit, on both offense and defense, in the first and third quarters, the second group in the second and fourth. "It was a tremendous advantage to play on that second unit," says George Ratterman, who split quarterback duty with AlI-American Johnny Lujack in '46. "The first unit would beat the hell out of them. We'd come in against guys who were worn out. Look it up. We scored twice as much as the firsts did."
 
Sure enough, the Irish had six touchdowns in the first quarter, 14 in the second, six in the third and 14 in the fourth. If Ratterman had come back in '47, Leahy might have used the two-unit system again, but Ratterman was a gifted four-sport athlete and had had his fill of playing behind Lujack. At age 20 he signed a contract with the Buffalo Bills of the All-America Football Conference, a deal worth $11,000, including a $2,200 bonus if he finished among the league's top five in passing. He collected the bonus in a breeze, making second team all-league. In South Bend he would have been second team Notre Dame.
 
"Just look at the guys from those teams who never did much at Notre Dame but played pro football," Ratterman says. "I'd say the pros are pretty good judges of talent, wouldn't you? There's no question in my mind that Notre Dame would have beaten any team in professional football except the Cleveland Browns."
 
Forty-three Notre Dame players from either '46 or '47 (or both) played in the NFL or the rival AAFC. Yes, there were two leagues, but the total number of teams was only 18, or 60% of today's total. And squads were about 30% smaller .
 
The Notre Dame count is not easy to establish. What do you do about Bob Hanlon, for instance? In 1943 he was a monogram- winning fullback and linebacker on Leahy's first national championship team. He came back from the war in '46 and was moved to guard. "A tough nut," says Jack Connor, a reserve guard who is the brother of Notre Dame All-America tackle George Connor and the author of Leahy's Lads, the definitive book on that era in Irish football. "In early fall practice Bob broke George's hand in a scrimmage and suffered a deep thigh bruise. He could barely walk. Leahy told him to run it off. He said the hell with it and transferred to Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa."
 
Where he made Little AII-America. Then the squad of the 1948 NFL Western Division champion Chicago Cardinals. Then the Pittsburgh Steelers. If you count Hanlon, it's 44 Domers from '46 and '47 in the pros, but we won't count him.
 
How about Luke Higgins? He'd been a monogram-winning tackle on Leahy's 1942 team, ranked No.6 nationally. "A shot put champion, one of the strongest guys in the school," Jack Connor says. The NFL's Cleveland Rams drafted Higgins in '45 while he was serving in the infantry in Italy, but when he returned home with a Puple Heart, he chose to stay at Notre Dame. Before going off to war, however, he had made an unforgivable mistake: One day he had told Leahy he was tired. In '46 Higgins found himself on the B team. On the afternoon that Notre Dame beat Purdue, he had a career day in the B team's rout of Great Lakes Naval Training Station, which had walloped the Irish varsity the year before. In '47 Higgins was wearing the uniform of the Baltimore Colts. Yes, we'll count him.
 
In his book Jack Connor wrote about being selected to run in the infamous Murderers' Row drill, at which Iannuccillo had excelled, on his first day of practice in' 46. Connor faced 14 guards. "Eleven had lettered on previous teams," he wrote, "and six of them had each earned two monograms." Three-John Mastrangelo, Bill Fischer and Marty Wendell -would go on to make AlI-America.
 
"I was one of the few players who hadn't been in the service," says Leon Hart, who arrived at Notre Dame as a 17-year-old freshman in '46 and would become one of the school's greatest stars ever. "I was one of 21 ends, 11 of them monogram winners."

Assistant coaches such as Joe McArdle (helmetless) were easily as
tough as the Irish starters. 

(Hy Peskin/LIFE)

 
One of Leahy's favorite routines was to have his assistants take on the linemen in drills. "It was brutal but very effective," says Fischer. "Player blocks coach. Techniques can be corrected immediately. Much better than hitting a sled. It kept the assistants in shape, too. Now Moose Krause, the tackle coach, was the kind of guy who didn't want to embarrass you in front of Leahy, so when I went against him, he kind of retreated, inch by inch, and Leahy said, 'Oh, Bill Fischer, that's the way we want you to block.' He always used that formal form of address, first and last names. When Leahy left, Moose said, 'One more trip,' and he slammed me with an elbow to the throat and walked me back to the green fence and said, 'Don't you ever forget who's boss here.' "
 
Fischer was one of six members of the '46 and '47 squads who would make All-NFL. Nine players on the '47 Irish team were AII- America at some point in their careers; two of them, Lujack and Hart, won the Heisman; two more, Fischer and George Connor, earned the Outland nophy. Seven would be chosen for the College Football Hall of Fame. Who were the superstars? Hart, of course, a 6' 4", 252-pound end who made All-Pro with the Detroit Lions on offense and defense, just as Connor did for the Chicago Bears. And Lujack, the Bears' All-Pro quarterback who was equalIy gifted at defensive back. In his first NFL game, in 1948, Lujack picked off three passes, tying a Bears single-game record that still stands. He finished his rookie season with eight interceptions, equaling a club record that would stand until 1963.
 
"When I was at Notre Dame, everyone went both ways," Lujack says. "I loved defense. My first game as a Bear, we were playing the Packers, and the guy I was covering kept yelling at me, 'You AlI-American s.o.b., you're gonna have a long day today!' I was shocked. No one had ever said anything to me on the field before. So I picked off three, and next time we played them, they didn't throw to him."
 
George Connor, a member of the NFL Hall of Fame, was the finest interior lineman in Notre Dame history, a demon blocker with enough speed to make All-Pro as a linebacker. His brother tells the story about the week before the Purdue game in 1947, when George was worrying about an ankle he'd sprained in a scrimmage and Leahy had him test it against half a line-guard, tackle, center-all by himself as the backfield ran plays at him.
 
"They ran off-tackle plays, traps, up-the-middle plays, quick openers," Jack Connor wrote in his book. "They did this for a half hour, and the offensive team never gained more than a yard or two. At the end of the drill, George was convinced that his ankle was fine. ...Years later Frank Leahy told his nephew, 'Jack, in all my years of playing and coaching football, it was the greatest exhibition of defensive tackle play I have ever seen.' "
 
The other big stars were Marty Wendell, a short, blocky guard and linebacker with a devastating initial pop, and Jim Martin, an end with an interior lineman's body. (In '49, his senior year, Martin switched to tackle and made All-America at the new position. He followed that with a 14-year NFL career as a linebacker.) And, of course, there was Leahy.
 
Almost everyone on the team could do a passable Leahy imitation-his habit of calling each player by his full name, his formal, almost prissy way of speaking. His practices were no joke, though: mean, grueling affairs, heavy on full scrimmages, born out of Leahy's years as a 185- pound tackle under Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, from 1928 to '30, and reflecting Leahy's boyhood in Winner, South Dakota, as the son of a freight handler who taught his four boys boxing and wrestling almost as soon as they could walk.
 
"What I remember is that we fought every day - fought to win a job and then to hold it," says Martin, who went to Notre Dame after serving as a Marine in the Pacific, where he was decorated for swimming ashore and doing reconnaissance work before the invasion of Tinian. "I was a mature 22-year-old freshman. I remember when I was visiting Notre Dame before I enrolled. George Tobin, a guard, was showing me around and said, 'How about a movie?' I said, 'How about a bar?' You had guys like me, and then you had the older service vets, and practice was tough on them. They'd had enough of war, of guys beating the hell out of each other, but that's what practice was every day, a war."
 
Notre Dame corralled many of the best high school recruits, of course. But World War II scrambled the process, as many blue-chip recruits joined the service. And Leahy, a Navy officer in the Pacific with the assignment of organizing and supervising athletic and recreational activities for submarine crews returning from the Far East, did some serious recruiting among servicemen.

All-time Irish great, team captain George Connor
takes to the air.

(Hy Peskin/LIFE)

 
"I was stationed at Pearl Harbor," says George Connor, who had been AlI-America at Holy Cross in '43, "and one day a command car pulled up and a guy said, 'Ensign Connor, Commander Leahy would like to see you at the Royal Hawaiian.' He talked me into coming to Notre Dame. He said we'd win the national championship, and I'd make All-America. It all came true."
 
The '46 season was Leahy's first one back, after two years in the service. The Irish had been nationally ranked in '44 and '45, but two lopsided losses to Army, and another to Great Lakes in '45, had marred those seasons. The word got out early that a mighty collection of talent was gathering at Notre Dame in 1946. Phil Colella, the second-leading Irish ballcarrier in '45 and a Navy vet who had been on two ships sunk by Japanese torpedoes, came out to preseason practice, took one look at the backs Leahy had stockpiled and transferred to St. Bonaventure.
 
"Our paper strength still has to transform into playing strength; we could lose three or four games," said Leahy, whose legendary pessimism was part con, part paranoia. Notre Dame's first opponent was Illinois, which had opened its season with a 33-7 win over Pitt, a game that Leahy had scouted. "It's an awful assignment," he said, "the toughest any Notre Dame team has ever tackled in its first game. Their line is the biggest I've ever seen in college. Their backfield is two-and three-deep, and with Buddy Young. it has tremendous speed."
 
Notre Dame won 26-6. Young, who would become one of pro football's most scintillating runners, gained 40 yards. Until the last 30 seconds of the game, Illinois had been in Irish territory only once.
 
Pitt, coming off a 33-7 win over West Virginia, was the next to fall to Notre Dame. The Panthers threw up a 5-4-2 defense, forcing the Irish to pass. Lujack and Ratterman obliged with 211 yards in the air, and Notre Dame added 257 on the ground in the 33-0 rout. Pitt made three first downs, 42 total yards. Leahy was furious at what he saw in the films, or at least that's what he told the South Bend Tribune's beat writer, Jim Costin. It was a technique Vmce Lombardi would later use at Green Bay: Rip 'em when they're riding high, leave 'em alone when they're down. Leahy blasted player after player by name until Costin finally asked him, "Didn't anyone play well?"
 
"Bob McBride," Leahy said. McBride was a third-string guard.
 
The following Saturday the Irish beat Purdue 49-6. In practice the next week Leahy was annoyed with his punt return I unit. He hollered to Bill Earley, the B team : coach, "Send me a punt returner!" and along came Coy McGee. He ran one back all the way against the varsity. Then he did it again. "My goodness," Leahy said.
 
"Who is that lad?"
 
Are you old enough to remember Fox's Movietone newsreels of 1946 and '47? Seems like every week there was another thrilling punt return by McGee and the familiar narration: "There he goes again, folks. Another one for little Coy McGee." He was a jackrabbit runner from Longview, Texas, whose weight fluctuated between 146 and 158 pounds. "His legs would go every which way," says Terry Brennan, the Irish starting halfback in' 46. "In the open field he was almost impossible to tackle." McGee made the 36-man traveling squad for the next game, at lowa -a team of which Leahy was "scared to death." Someone showed him a pool card. The Irish were favored by 19. "It's a typographical error," Leahy said.
 
McGee turned in a few nifty runs in the 41-6 slaughter, but he didn't even make the traveling squad for the next game, a 28-0 victory over Navy. It was simply too crowded. "Guys killed themselves to make the traveling squad," Fischer says. "One day years later I asked Bill Earley, 'Why did we always have that two-hour scrimmage on Thursday in full pads, with only the first team exempt?' He said, 'The coaching staff would spend hours and hours trying to select the traveling squad. The idea of the Thursday scrimmage was to see who got hurt. That would help us select the squad.' "
 
Unbeaten Army was coming up, at Yankee Stadium. On the Saturday morning of the game a motorist drove around the stadium with a sign offering a $3.30 end zone ticket for $200. He sold it. "My girlfriend in Cleveland called and said she needed two tickets, probably for her and some other guy," Martin says. "So I sold her two for 50 bucks apiece. I made her pay. I never saw her again. Can't be lucky all the time."
 
It was buttoned-up football, close to the vest - too close, some Notre Dame players would say years later. The Irish had been a two-unit team all season, but now Leahy went with his firsts. "Let's face it. He just chickened out," Martin says. "They had a great first unit, but we could have worn them down with our squad. Leahy could have put Ratterman in and opened things up."
 
Lujack had been iffy until game time with a sprained ankle. Although the Irish outgained Army by 35 yards, his passing was way off. He made the defensive play of the game, though, bringing down Blanchard in the third quarter with an ankle-high tackle in the open field. Notre Dame mounted the most serious threat of the game, getting a first down on the Army 12 in the second quarter. But Billy Gompers was stopped on fourth-and-one at the three. "I told Lujack, 'Hell, you should have given me the ball,' " John Panelli says. "That was the end zone where my parents were sitting. I'd have scored."
 
The amazing thing about the newspaper accounts of the scoreless tie was that no one suggested that Notre Dame should have kicked a field goal. "Uh-uh, not Leahy's style," Lujack says. "It would have been an admission of defeat." Field goals were still in their infancy at South Bend. The Irish kicked none in '46, two in '47. In 1945 they were still drop-kicking their extra points, and Stan Krivak missed 13 of them.
 
"Look, the game ended zero-zero, and people are still talking about it," Lujack says. "If it had ended 7-0, would they still talk about it?"
 
The rest of the season was anticlimactic. The only unknown each week was which Notre Dame player would break loose. Emil Sitko romped for 107 yards on 15 carries in a 27-0 victory over Northwestern. Gompers (10 carries for 103 yards) and former South Bend high school star Ernie Zalejski (seven for 101) ran wild in the 41-0 annihilation of Tulane in New Orleans. After that game still other players went wild, notably All-America right tackle Zygmont Peter (Ziggy) Czarobski.

Ziggy (second from the left)- with Lujack (second from the right)
and mates--was the Irish toastmaster.

(Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Archives)

 
"A few of us had celebrated at the Old Absinthe House," Fischer says, "and we finally got to the train and took over the club car. Ziggy was leading the party. Ziggy led all the parties." To this day, when the old players get together, the night is called a Ziggy. Everybody has a Ziggy story. At the Notre Dame sports publicity office they still have the questionnaire he filled out as an incoming student. Church preference? "Red brick." Hobbies? "Plant collecting, bee hunting, surf-riding [Ziggy came from the South Side of Chicago], dancing."
 
One time Leahy found Ziggy taking a shower before practice. "Zygmont Czarobski, what in the world are you doing?" he asked.
 
"Coach, it just gets too crowded afterward," Ziggy said.
 
When Ziggy, who tended to put on weight, got married, Terry Brennan wired the father of the bride: "You are not losing a daughter, you are gaining a ton." As Ziggy led the revelry in the club car after the 1946 Tulane game, in walked Leahy. "Ziggy hollered, 'Hey, Coach, I want you to meet a friend of mine,' " Fischer says, "and he turned to the girl on his lap and said, 'What the hell's your name again?' Leahy turned and started walking out the door, and some of the guys booed him.
 
"Oh, boy, now this was a dilemma. He couldn't ignore it. He couldn't beat up the whole first team in practice that week, not with Southern Cal coming up and a shot at the national title. And that's when he got a gastrointestinal attack and checked into the hospital. Thank god he put Moose Krause in charge. We had a great week of practice."
 
The Irish rushed for 517 yards in a 26-0 victory over the Trojans, and McGee, who'd always been a favorite of Krause's, broke two dazzling runs and wound up with 146 yards on six carries. Southern Cal had one consolation. It scored the only touchdown against Notre Dame's first unit all season.
 
The Irish were national champions. They had terrorized the college football world - well, all of it except second-ranked Army, whose unbeaten streak now stretched through three seasons. But Notre Dame would have one more shot at the Cadets, in South Bend the following year. That game would be the last in a 34-year Notre Dame-Army series, whose cancellation by West Point would become a sore point with the Irish.
 
Only three Notre Dame starters would graduate in the spring of 1947, and Leahy sounded a rare note of optimism when he told the Chicago Sun- TImes in March, "We should be in very good shape next season." By September he was back in form:
 
Army will come out here undefeated on November 8," he said. 'as for us, who knows? No telling how many games we'll have lost."
 
The preseason forecasters, unfazed by the pessimism, were saying that this Irish squad might be the greatest collegiate team ever assembled. "Intercollegiate football will be divided into two groups in 1947, Notre Dame and The Rest," Tom Siler wrote in Pic Magazine. "The best games will be the intrasquad scrimmages at South Bend."
 
When the Eastern sportswriters visited South Bend in the preseason, the first thing Leahy complained about was a lack of size and speed in his backfield. "Instead of halfbacks, we have nine small fullbacks, " he said. How about Brennan, a gifted, versatile back who would often line up as a flanker and had led the Irish in scoring and receiving in '46?
 
"Heart alone "Leahy said. "He hasn't the speed or physique of a great halfback."
 
Then what about Sitko? Now there was a guy who could fly. "For 50 yards," Leahy replied. 'After that his legs tighten up, and tacklers get him from behind."
 
Coy McGee? "He ran well in one game."
 
And so on, right down to Leahy's announcement that Zalejski would be lost because of a knee injury. 'A terrible blow," the coach said. Terrible. Only 15 backs left.
 
The start of the season revealed a new wrinkle in the offense. The Irish were opening things up. They were throwing the ball: 204 yards in a 40-6 win over Pitt, 184 in a 22-7 victory over Purdue, two teams that had loaded up to stop Notre Dame's fearsome array of runners. The Boilermakers' seven-man line held the Irish backs to 89 yards. That simply had to be addressed. The defense was not a problem. It never was.
 
What Leahy didn't see was that his team was wearing down. The two months of spring practice ("Goofy," says Brennan. "You started with snow on the ground, and you ended in June") and the brutal fall practices with their two hour scrimmages, had sapped the players' strength. "After the Purdue game their was almost a mutiny," says Brennan, who would succeed Leahy in 1954 and would coach the Irish for five years. "Our captain, George Connor, went to Leahy on behalf of the team and said, "Look you've got to start backing off on the practices." Then Warren Brown, the sports editor of the Chicago Herald American, told him the same thing.
 
"It had gotten to the point that all you wanted to do in practice was survive." says Brennan. "It didn't prove anything. This was a vetern team. Leahy knew who his best football players were, he know who was going to play hard for him. He didn't have to kill them off on the practice field."
 
"The games were Cub Scout meetings compared with the practices," says Panelli, the fullback. "Boy, I'll tell you, we lost a lot of good people in those scrimmages."
 
"The amazing thing was that Leahy listened to Warren Brown." Brennan says. "This guy was not a friend, so he listened. Leahy wound up cutting back on the practices, and it saved our season."
 
The team responded with three straight shutouts: 31-0 over Nebraska, 21-0 against Iowa and 27-0 over Navy. The only sour note was the news that came over the wire and was announced on the public address system during the Iowa game. At Baker Field in New York, Columbia had upset Army 21-20. Notre Dame players, who had wanted to be the ones to halt West Point's four-year streak, kicked the ground in disgust.
 
The Notre Dame - Army game still produced a record crowd in South Bend. There was a bitter undertone on the Irish side, a resentment of the Cadets for abandoning the series. It was a nasty, windy day. Army's kickoff was a shank out-of-bounds. The next one was a line drive that Brennan had to take a step backward to catch. "The kick got there ahead of the coverage," Brennan says. "I took few steps up the middle and froze the first four guys. I saw a crack, made my break, and I was gone. Ninety-seven yards, touchdonwn.
 
The rout was on. The cold and wind limited the Irish to 28 yards passing, but Leahy unleashed a merciless set of backs: Brennan, the darting Sitko and the bruising, slashing 190-pounder, Mike Swistowicz. The new wrinkle was Martin on end-arounds, picking up 47 yards on five carries. "I've never seen such a bunch of speedy, hard-driving backs," Army coach Earl Blaik said his team's 27-7 defeat. So much for Leahy's preseason moaning about having nine small backs.
 
The following week Northwestern gave the Irish their closest battle of the year, scoring a late touchdown before losing 26-19. "I never felt that we were in trouble," Lujack says, "We never trailed in the game." Or in any game during 1946 and '47.
 
Next Tulane come to South Bend with its great fullback, Eddie Price, and fell 59-6. The Irish scored 32 points in the first quarter.
 
Before Notre Dame's season finale, against Rose Bowl-bound USC in Los Angeles, the city was hit by a rainstorm. "I think the Trojans have a good chance of upsetting Notre Dame," said UCLA coach Bert LaBrucherie, whose Bruins had lost to USC 6-0. "They've beaten favored Notre Dame teams in the past."
 
"Everything points to a Southern Cal victory tomorrow," Leahy said. "I'll be the happiest Irishman in Los Angeles if we can win by a single point."

Emil "Six-Yard-Sitko rambles for another gain.

(UPI-Corbis-Bettmann)
 

 
How about 31? Sitko, whose legs supposedly tighten up after 50 yards, broke the game open with a 76-yard touchdown run on the opening play of the second half, and the Irish went on to win 38-7."I was watching a telecast of the game," says Mike Hudson, who was then a Palo Alto High student and would go on to be a UPI desk editor, "They had this very pro-USC announcer doing the game, and on Sitko's run there was only one guy left between him and the goal line - Gordon Gray, the safety. The annoucer kept saying, "Can Gordon Gray make the stop? Can Gray make the stop?' It was hilarious. Notre Dame had an absolute mob of blockers downfield, and Connor just left the pack, knocked off Gary and returned to the group, and when Sitko crossed the goal line, everyone was still looking for people to block." "One thing Leahy always liked," Connor says, "was linemen who could run."
 
The Irish beat out undefeated Michigan in the polls for the national title. There was newspaper talk about matching the teams in some kind of charity game, but it was just talk. "It would have been interesting," Brennan says,"Two distinct systems, our T formation versus their single wing, one unit against Michgan's offensive and defensive platoons. I often wondered how we'd have done under that system. Maybe we'd have been even better."
 
There was speculation about how Notre Dame would have done against a pro team. "It's too bad football can't have a world series, with the winner of the two major professional teams meeting for the right to tackle Notre Dame for the championship." The Newspaper Enterprise Association's lead sportswriter, Harry Grayson, wrote. "Notre Dame, in this observer's opinion, would beat the best of the pro teams."
 
The next summer 14 Irish players made the trip to Chicago for the College All-Star Game against the NFL champion Cardinals. The collegians were coached by Leahy. Art Statuto, the fifth-team Notre Dame center, with 10 minutes of playing time in '47, made the squad. So did five Irish backs and four tackles. What the hell, the Notre Dame reserves were better than other people's first teams. Someone asked Ziggy Czarobski what was the toughest team he had faced."The Notre Dame second unit," he said, for once being serious. The All-Stars lost to the Cardinals 28-0.
 
Many of the '47 Irish players drifted off to pro football. Lujack, the Heisman winner, signed what was then a hefty contract as the Bears N0.1 draft choice: four years at $17,000, $18,000, $20,000 and $20,000, plus a $5,000 bonus and an indorsement deal with Wilson Sporting Goods. "I found out later," he says, "that [Bears owner and coach] George Halas had paid only $2,000 of that bonus. The rest was an advance on my Wilson royalties. Halas had tricked me. Fifteen years ago, I was approached to contribute to the Halas Hall Foundation. I said, 'I already contributed $3,000.'"
 
After Hart finished his eight year career with the Lions, he became active in the NFL Alumni association. He has maintained a strong interest in football at all levels. "Notre Dame would have beaten any pro team." he says. "The talent at that time was all in college."
 
"What is football now? It's push-pull on the line and an aerial show. An athletic contest consists of three things: effort, stamina and ability. The subsitution rules have cancelled the element of stamina. Effort? Well, everyone knows he's playing for big bucks, and he's only one play away from oblivion, so that erodes the element of effort. All that's left is ability, and what you see, along with it are gloves and towels and low-cut shoes, everybody trying to look good.
 
"Blocking techniques have almost vanished," Hart continues. "I produced a film for the Notre Dame National Monogram Club, The Golden Age of Notre Dame Football, and it's wonderful to see the way the game was played. The precise timing of the blocking, the way the holes opened up. It isn't just running to daylight, running for some seam, behind a whole lot of pushing and shoving. It was beautiful football. The kind of football Frank Leahy taught."
 
Leahy died in 1973, at the age of 64. In 11 seasons at Notre Dame he produced six unbeaten teams and four national champions. His '46 and '47 teams were the best, though, and who can argue that they were the best of all time?