Stadium
What are we preserving?
Notre Dame Stadium is a structure whose power to inspire comes from many different qualities, reaches many different kinds of people, and conveys many different messages.
“This is not merely a football field,” says Notre Dame’s Official Campus Guide. “It is an experience, a uniquely Notre Dame synthesis of sport, tradition, pride, loyalty, and belief.It is haunted by a thousand ghosts of glorious seasons past: the Four Horsemen riding into immortality on the words of Grantland Rice; the multi-talented George Gipp and “Jumpin’ Joe” Savoldi; Joe Montana, a field general in a green jersey; Raghib “The Rocket” Ismail flying toward the end zone; and, of course, Knute Rockne, pioneer of the forward pass, master of the locker room speech, brilliant motivator, relentless innovator, and though gone from the gridiron since 1930, still the most victorious coach (winning an amazing .881 of his games) in college football history.”
To a steelworker in the classic film Rudy, this stadium (experienced personally without the static of his living room TV) was an instrument of joy. Rudy Ruettiger’s dad said simply: “This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen.”
To one of the 20th century’s greatest Catholic writers, this stadium, situated far from his native England but comfortingly close to a golden statue of Our Lady, was a symbol of enduring faith. G.K. Chesterton, visiting Notre Dame in 1930, saw a deeper meaning in American football as played in “The Arena”:
I have seen, where a strange country
Opened its secret plains about me,
One great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one
Seen afar, in strange fulfillment,
Through the sunlit Indian summer
That Apocalyptic portent that has clothed her with the Sun.
She too looks on the Arena
Sees the gladiators grapple,
She whose names are Seven Sorrows and the Cause of All Our Joy …
Notre Dame Stadium is a building that helps to fulfill this University’s mission. It engages the culture … with a culture of its own. It doesn’t just deserve respectful preservation … it embodies it. It is a building where people and ideas and traditions come together. It will be best suited to speak boldly about tomorrow’s hopes if we preserve its ability to speak proudly about yesterday’s—and today’s—dreams coming true.
