UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

This was back in January of 1993.

My old roommate was one of the offensive linemen, and early one morning on a weekend, the phone rang and I answered it.

The person on the line sounded a lot like Lou, and said that he wanted to talk to my roommate.

When I asked who it was, he impatiently said "This is Coach Holtz, and I need to talk to him now."

I told him "he's sleeping now. Can I take a message?"

He then said "wake his ass up now!"



Anyways, my roommate had woken up just then, and I handed him the phone, laughing and saying "there's some yahoo on the line who thinks that he's Lou Holtz!"

Right away, I knew I had committed an error, since I could hear Lou yelling, and could see him with that "Oh crap" expression on his face as Lou was chewing him out. He apologized to Lou on my behalf.

Then that expression melted away and was replaced by a smile, since Lou had called to tell him that he was bringing him to the Hula Bowl.



The second direct encounter went much better.

Fast forward several years later, when I was a grad student at South Carolina...

I was grabbing lunch at one of the local eateries, and the place was packed. Lou was in that place, taking a rare occasion to enjoy a lunch outside of the usual place (he all but lived in his office and the athletic facilities), and had a table to himself, and saw that I was looking for a place to sit.

He offered me a seat at the table, and I gladly accepted.

He saw my Notre Dame class ring, and we started having a good conversation.

Later on in that conversation, I apologized to him for the above incident, and I told him the truth, that I honestly thought it was Kevin Pendergast crank calling us, given that Kevin could do very accurate imitations of Lou Holtz and Tony "Coach Yellow" Yelovich.

Lou accepted my apology, and laughed about it, telling me that it was water under the bridge, and that I must have had real balls to muster up the courage to ask for forgiveness. He even chuckled and said that he was caffeine deprived that morning (never went anywhere without his Diet Coke), and felt crankier than usual.

He even asked about my old roommate, and was happy to hear that he was continuing as the head coach of a pretty powerful school that sent a lot of kids to Division 1A schools.

I have to admit, that I was surprised he would remember all of the above, given the sheer massive amount of events in his hectic schedules and the thousands of players he had coached throughout the years. Still, that shows how sharp of a genius mind the man had.


Nevertheless, those interactions with Coach Holtz is what hammered home the message to me, that when you screw up like I did, you'd better man up about it, and not beat around the bush. You'll feel much better afterwards. I know I certainly felt much better after that second encounter.


For all of his superhuman abilities as a coach, he was even more superhuman as a human being.