Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Charlie Weis Enters the Andy French Cup!

So, apparently, Charlie Weis wrote a book. I'm staggered by this development, because he doesn't seem like a guy who has a lot of free time. Between the late nights of game preparation he's famous for and his whirlwind tour of the entire known universe in the off-season. Between his ten minutes of sleep (standing, with his eyes open, as legend has it) a night and having one of the most high-pressure jobs in the sports world, Weis somehow managed to find time to sit down and scribble his memoirs.

There's a free read of the opening chapter over at The Rock Report, and it warms my cockles to know that Charlie Weis has made an entry in The Andy French Cup! Weis recounts his drunken angry phone call to Father Ted Hesburgh, of all people:

To this day I am not sure why I dialed the phone. I guess you could blame it on a lot of things, immaturity probably being the biggest. It was a Sunday afternoon in 1975, the day after Notre Dame’s football team had lost a game and looked pretty bad doing so. For some reason, I believed that being a student of the university entitled me to issue a complaint about the team’s performance. I thought it would be a good idea to take my complaint all the way to the top—to the office of Father Theodore Hesburgh, the school’s president at the time.

To be honest, I was fully expecting to get an answering service. I was stunned when Father Hesburgh himself picked up at the other end. It had never dawned on me that he would be done with his Sunday masses and actually sitting in his office at that very moment, ready to answer his phone.

Father Hesburgh was caught off guard as well. He wasn’t in the habit of fielding a lot of complaint calls from students. He made me come straight down to his office to tell him exactly what was on my mind.


Rock on, Charlie Weis. An angry drunken (I'm assuming it was drunken... anyone who was a freshman at Notre Dame realizes that there's still a toxic amount of alcohol in your system the Sunday afternoon after a football game) call to the President of the University? You rule my world, Charlie. You rule my world.

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