We booked this trip months ago around a single line on the schedule: Rice at Notre Dame, September 12. What had not dawned on me until we were rolling our bags through Denver International Airport was that we would be flying on the 25th anniversary of September 11th.
A remembrance ceremony was underway as we made our way toward the gate. Then, on the train out to the concourse, we found ourselves standing next to a couple of police officers. That gave me a chance to explain to our eight-year-old what the day was, why those officers were there, and how to thank someone for their service. Of all the things I hoped they would get out of this weekend, that one was not on the list, and it may end up being the most important.
Friday: Millennium Park Is Enormous
Katie’s parents, Chris and Lori, drove down to meet us, and we took the kids to Millennium Park – we were not remotely prepared for how big it is! My mental image was “the park with the Bean in it.” In reality it’s 24.5 acres of ice rink, botanic garden, bandshell, pedestrian bridge, interactive fountains, and playgrounds that our kids would happily have stayed in until the following Tuesday. It draws something like 25 million visitors a year, which puts it in the same conversation as Central Park and the National Mall. We covered maybe a tenth of it and had to be physically extracted!
Saturday: A Tale Of Two Cities
Saturday we split the party. Katie, Lori, and our two-year-old stayed in the city for an aquarium-and-public-transit day: the Shedd, several bus rides, and afternoon tea on the Riverwalk – by all accounts, a marvelous time was had by all.
Meanwhile Chris, our seven-year-old, and I pointed the car east toward South Bend. The Notre Dame campus is not neutral ground for Chris. He is an alum who grew up in South Bend, and his father taught there, so the walk from the lot to the stadium took us through decades of his life.
We started the morning with steak sandwiches from the Knights of Columbus on South Quad, which is one of the great institutions in American sport. Council 1477 has been grilling ball-tip sirloin on football Saturdays since 1968 and has raised more than $1.5 million for South Bend charities doing it. They move up to 3,000 sandwiches on a big day. I don’t recommend it as part of your daily breakfast, but it felt just right for pre-game meal.
From there we caught the Victory March. The team attends Mass in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, comes out through the God, Country, Notre Dame door, and walks to the stadium behind the band, with the bagpipes and the Glee Club in tow and fans lined up the whole way. Stripped of the pageantry, it is a hundred large young men walking about half a mile. With the pageantry, it will raise the hair on your arms!
We skipped the coach’s remarks at the library, though, because there was somewhere else I wanted our seven-year-old to see first.
The Grotto
The first time Chris walked me around Notre Dame’s campus, we were burying his mother. That day I lit a candle at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes for my father on what would have been his 70th birthday, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed. Eleven years later I wanted my kid to see it too.
It is a small stone alcove below the basilica, banks of candles, a few rows of benches, and it is quiet in a way that almost nothing else on a football Saturday is quiet – even with hundreds of people streaming in and out. We knelt for a minute and prayed for the people we love – then we went to go watch the football game.
Rice At Notre Dame: The Game Itself
Maybe we should have directed our prayers at the Rice football team. The final score was Notre Dame 52 – Rice 0.
It was worse than the number. Our first possession ended in a fumble scoop & score four seconds into the game, and it never got better. Final tally for the Owls: 128 total yards, seven first downs, 34 carries for 64 yards, five fumbles with four lost, and zero points. The Irish averaged 7.4 yards a play and led 42-0 at the half. It was embarrassing!
I college football at Rice and I have watched us get beaten by better-resourced programs my whole adult life, so none of this was new information. Why does Rice play Texas? Same reason we play Notre Dame. You find out what you are by going to the hardest place you can find and seeing what holds up. On this particular Saturday, not much held up. But it will take more than a lackluster performance against the #3 ranked team in the nation for me to stop cheering on the Owls – we play Western Michigan next week and I will be watching that one too.
The Banners
Something that surprised me was how much of the afternoon I would spend looking up. Notre Dame Stadium hangs banners commemorating significant games going back more than a century, and a striking number of them are against Navy. The two schools played every single year from 1927 through 2019, which made it the longest uninterrupted intersectional rivalry in the sport(!), and the reason it has never been allowed to lapse has nothing to do with competitive balance. Notre Dame nearly went under during World War II, and the Navy’s V-12 training program kept the university solvent. They have been playing ever since out of something closer to debt than rivalry.
Which brought me around to Dad II, Naval Academy class of ’68 – the same year the Knights started grilling those steaks, as it happens. Paul would have loved every part of that afternoon: the tradition, the football, the banners, the service academies getting their due in a stadium that did not have to give it to them. Semper Fi, Dad II; you were with us too!
At the game, everywhere I looked, there were Joe Montana jerseys. Number 3, on people who were not alive when he won a national championship there in 1977!
Chris and Lori used to come to these games in the seventies, while Montana was playing. In that stadium, in those seats, watching the greatest quarterback ever to play the game back when he was a college kid running the second-half comebacks that made his name – priceless!
I have argued the Montana case at length and will not relitigate it here. But there is a real difference between making that argument from the archives and sitting next to someone who was in the building. Lori, for her part, chose the aquarium on Saturday, which I take to mean she has banked enough Notre Dame football for one lifetime!
Sunday: Running The Riverwalk
Sunday morning I got out for a run along the Riverwalk, and it was full: runners, walkers, strollers, dog people, a few folks just sitting with coffee watching the water go by at 7am. The Riverwalk runs about 1.25 miles along the main branch of a river that, within living memory, was mostly regarded as an industrial drainage problem. Now it’s a linear park with restaurants and boat launches and kayakers, and the city built it deliberately.
That is the thing I keep admiring about certain cities: they look at a natural asset and decide it belongs to everybody. Boulder did this with its creek and its open space, which is a large part of why we live here. Chicago did it with its lakefront first and its river second. It is not a small choice and it is not a cheap one, and every city that has made it is better for it.
Chicago Is A Serious Sports Town
Back in the city, it hit me how much of my childhood sports imagination was set in Chicago. Michael Jordan. Walter Payton. Mike Singletary. Bo Jackson, who finished his career with the White Sox and who remains, in my original Tecmo Super Bowl cartridge, completely unstoppable.
The Kia EV6, Briefly
We rented a Kia EV6 for the South Bend run, which made it the first non-Tesla EV I have driven any real distance. The 800V architecture is the headline and it earns it: 10% to 80% in about 18 minutes at a fast charger, which is quick enough that the charging stop stops being a planning constraint and becomes a bathroom break. Solid car, good ride, plenty of room for three.
The software, though, is a generation behind. Route planning, charger integration, the general question of whether the car knows what you’re trying to do before you tell it – Tesla still has a real moat there, and it is not made of batteries. That gap is closing slower than I would have guessed five years ago.
We’ll Be Back
Three days, two states, one shutout!
My first trip to Chicago was for work and my second was to see Katie’s sister and catch a Cubs game at Wrigley. This was the first one with kids, and we barely scratched the surface. We did not set foot in the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, or about forty other things, which is an excellent argument for a return trip.
Many thanks to Katie’s parents for driving down to meet us and for taking on the chaos of two kids – and thanks all the more so for sharing your history with places that you know far better than we do!