From "Out of
Bounds"  Shy, sensitive Pete Vaughan, who snapped goalposts with his head and looks like he could eat cactus for breakfast. LEGEND: In the 1909 Michigan game, Pete Vaughan scored from five yards out, exploding through the line with such force that he broke the goalpost with his head. FACT: Vaughn wasn't sure if it was his head or his shoulder that snapped the goalpost. "I didn't feel a thing," he insisted. (There are smart people today who think this is why helmets were invented - to protect goalposts.) Here is a footnote to the legend of Pete Vaughan breaking the goal post with his head on his game winning touchdown plunge. Years later a writer asked Pete to set the record straight: Pete told me the story many years later when I was doing a magazine story about him as a veteran coach at Wabash College. At the time he was reported as having exploded through the line with such force that he broke the goal post with his head. That's the way Father Matthew Walsh always told it when he was vice-president of Notre Dame. Pete rejected the implication of hardheadedness. He was sure that he hit the post with his shoulder for the reason that he didn't feel the impact. By some quirk of his nervous system he was almost imniune to pain in the area of his shoulder. "If I'd struck home with my head," he said, "I'd have known it. It had to be my shoulder." But that was incident to what happened between him and Hamilton. Just after calling the last plunge, the quarterback turned and snarled, "Come on, you yellow- backed so-and-so!" Pete's next thought after scoring was to annihilate the libeler. He had chased the laughing quarterback half way upfield before he realized that Hamilton had capitalized on his hair-trigger temper. No one knows exactly how Notre Dame's Fighting Irish got their name. Admittedly, four Irish brothers did aid Founding Father Sorin in establishing the University. The French-born Sorin, however, was never very fond of Celts. "Not inclined to obedience," was his comment on the Irish. Here the "Out of Bounds" boys discuss the earliest newspaper mention of the "Fighting Irish" nickname. When a 1904 Milwaukee Sentinel noted the school's line-up of "Fighting Irishmen," nobody noticed. Early newspapers commonly referred to the football team as the Notre Dames or Notre Damers, the Gold and Blue, Warriors, Domers, Benders and South Benders, Hoosiers, and Catholics. Playing without a home stadium for over forty years, Notre Dame was nicknamed the Nomads and Ramblers. (One sportswriter called them the Road Scholars.) Rockne's teams, especially fast and flashy for their era, were tabbed the Rockets and Blue Comets.
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