By CHRISTOPHER MANION
During a home football game at Notre Dame Stadium in the late 1960s, an unscheduled event was featured at halftime. In those days, games didn’t take 4 1/2 hours, most of that filled with endless TV advertising breaks. Halftime was 30 minutes long, and it went pretty fast, given the required trips downstairs from the seats to the quick-run stands and other facilities at Gate 14.
Games starting at 1:30 generally ended before 3:30, and the rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around campus, listening to the band playing on the porch of Sorin Hall, and in later years, lingering at the tailgate parties, a tradition pioneered by my sister Marilyn in the 1950s.
On weekends — especially football weekends — Notre Dame welcomed coeds from St. Mary’s College (across old Route U.S. 31) and more distant campuses as well. They included visitors from women’s colleges like Barat, Mundelein, and Rosary from the Chicago area, the “Woodsies” from St. Mary’s of the Woods in Terre Haute, and occasional visitors from as far away as Dumbarton, Rosemont, and Georgetown Visitation (then a junior college for women adjacent to the campus of Georgetown University).
There’d be a “Victory Dance” later in the evening, but the always-looming curfew — men in your hall by 12:30, signed in with the cop at the door! — bringing festivities to a halt as the girls found their way back to their crowded rooms in local hotels and boarding houses.
But on this gorgeous Saturday afternoon, we were offered an added attraction. At halftime, spectators were treated to an unannounced, one-time-only “game within a game.”
Ladies and gentlemen, surprise! Presenting the Barat Bombers and the Mundelein Monsters!
What???
Sure, we all knew the terrific gals from Mundelein and Barat — but what was this?
The halftime program was a football game. A real football game between teams from two women’s colleges who had apparently been planning it for weeks.
And it was serious. It might have been touch, it might have been tackle, but these women were serious. One of those Monsters from Mundelein could have given Joe Montana a run for his money.
The crowd went crazy — what was crazier than two women’s teams playing football at Notre Dame Stadium at halftime? But they pulled it off, and I don’t remember who won — but who cares? It was a class act.
Call Out The Cowards
And You’re Canceled
Those days are over. And nowadays, we’ve got to be careful with superlatives. The hilarious “Battle of the Babes” on Knute Rockne’s home turf 55 years ago no longer gets first place in the Crazy Awards.
No, today that award goes to Lia Thomas, a grown man who, after two unspectacular years on U-Penn’s men’s swimming team, changed his “gender identity” and barged into the world of women’s sports, all to the gushing praise of the usual suspects.
Today Thomas shows up at major events, pretending to be a female, and blows away records set by real women. Pretty soon, he’ll break the multiple records set by world champion Katy Ledecky (a graduate of Little Flower Grade School in Bethesda, Md.), and competitive collegiate swimming will go the way of professional wrestling.
And who’s going to stop him? The NCAA, the International Olympic Committee, and the College Swimming Coaches Association of America are all striving for the Gold Medal in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” finals — hence the verdict: “Lia’s really a woman, but it’s so obvious that he isn’t, we’re all pleading the Fifth!”
Thus speak the “leaders.”
They’re all afraid of being canceled. After all, their marching orders are clear, as laid down by The New York Times last June, which exulted in “the way she [sic — and sick] carried herself in the water — head down, with grace and ease.”
The Times has been notoriously pervert-prone for decades, and coaches and athletes who are focused full-time on their sport are no match for the Campus Thought Police operating from the Times rulebook 24/7.
So it’s no surprise that most critics within the sport are silent. Many women on U-Penn’s swim team are not, although they must speak anonymously for the same reason: these days, fear rules.
When confronted by the real world, parents and athletes, many of them supporters of “diversity” in the abstract, are outraged at the tranny tyranny. But there’s little they can do about it, longtime referee Cynthia Millen tells The Washington Times. The kids are helpless. “The onus should be on the ‘adults in the room,’ referring to the swimming authorities,” she said.
Millen “hung up her whistle” after thirty years of officiating at USA Swimming events. “I told my fellow officials that I can no longer participate in a sport which allows biological men to compete against women. Everything fair about swimming is being destroyed,” she said.
Will the Fighting Irish
Fight Back?
Last week, the NCAA adopted a sport-by-sport approach for transgender athletes, bringing the organization in line with the U.S. and International Olympic Committees.
This is the same NCAA that let the University of North Carolina off the hook for ten years after that school’s most outrageous cheating scandal in history (for eighteen years, thousands of athletes were given A’s and B’s in African-American Studies courses that didn’t even exist).
This time around, the NCAA’s cowardice ruled once more. “Transgender participation for each sport will be determined by the policy for the sport’s national governing body,” blah blah blah.
Recall that in 2015 the NCAA threatened to pull college basketball’s Final Four from Indianapolis because of a pro-family law advocated by Gov. Mike Pence. So while they’re geldings when it comes to real scandals, they’re vicious tough guys when promoting perversion.
Rest assured, before long, those “national bodies” will fall into line. And when they do, this writer, baptized in Sacred Heart Church on Notre Dame’s campus 75 years ago, will have one question: What will Our Lady’s university do?
Recent events chronicled here over the years do not portend a pleasant outcome.
In its perpetual devotion to what Ralph McInerny called “the vulgar lust for prestige,” the University of Notre Dame will soon have to decide whether to bend its knee to the transgender ideology
In 1964, this writer was among the founding members of the Notre Dame crew. The men’s crew was a “club sport” that had to find its own funding, but it wasn’t long after women were admitted that they not only formed a rowing team, but were also made a well-funded varsity sport.
What will the “Fighting Irish” do when trannies try out for the women’s rowing team?
The crew’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2015 at the women’s beautiful boathouse on the Saint Joe River. The members of the ’64 team — men’s rowing was still a “club sport” — sat in the back row.
Will the real women be sitting back there with us at our sixtieth anniversary while the trannies preen at the podium?
If that comes to pass, students and alumni will be instructed to sit there quietly and pretend that it’s all real.
Not me. I hope that some sane soul recruits the Mundelein Monsters to show up and teach those trannies a thing or two about real women. On stage. In person.
Crazy.
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