College Football: Babes in Wonderland

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In their fierce pride, their dedication—and their explosiveness—the Irish are practically a mirror image of their coach. An Armenian Protestant who came to Catholic Notre Dame from Northwestern in 1963 and overnight restored its long-tarnished reputation for football excellence, Ara Parseghian (TIME cover, Nov. 20, 1964) is an intense, electric insomniac who works 18-hour days, delights in locker-room oratory, and hates anything dull, especially dull football. He has always had a knack for developing topnotch passers and receivers—"probably," cracks Navy Coach Bill Elias, "because his ancestors got practice catching figs that fell out of trees." At Northwestern, Ara produced Flanker Paul Flatley (now with the Minnesota Vikings) and Quarterback Tommy Myers (Pittsburgh Steelers); at Notre Dame in 1964, it was Quarterback Huarte and End Jack Snow (Los Angeles Rams). After Huarte and Snow graduated in 1965, Parseghian had to settle for grind-it-out ground attack; although the Irish lost only two games, he still shivers at the memory. "It was not," says Ara, "my cup of tea."

Hanratty and Seymour are not just a cup: they are a whole washtub—just what Ara ordered to flood new life into his Notre Dame attack, and maybe, just maybe, spark the Irish to the national championship he has been pining for ever since that last-game loss to Southern Cal knocked Notre Dame out of the No. 1 spot in the 1964 rankings. "Sure I want the title," Parseghian admits. "What else is there to shoot for, since we don't belong to any conference or go to post-season bowls?" In the meantime, though, he is playing it mighty cool with his sensational sophomores. "They have a lot of ability; that has been proven. Just give us credit for recognizing it," he says. "But how good they will be, only time will tell."

If Parseghian hadn't recognized the ability of Terry Hanratty and Jim Seymour, he would have had to be the most myopic football coach between Juárez and Sault Sainte Marie. By the time they were seniors in high school, they were two of the hottest young prospects in the U.S. Both were all-conference, all-state (Terry in Pennsylvania, Jim in Michigan) and All-America. And both got scholarship feelers from more than 40 colleges.

Jersey No. 42. At the Shrine of the Little Flower High School in Royal Oak, Mich., about five miles north of Detroit, Football Coach Al Fracassa announced last week that he was retiring No. 42, the blue and gold jersey worn by "the greatest athlete I've seen in ten years of coaching." No. 42 had been Jim Seymour, a gangling "big little boy" who was Shrine's version of Frank Merriwell. Son of a permissive, well-to-do oil-company executive, Jim had a more than ordinarily comfortable childhood: big, luxurious house, backyard swimming pool, a guitar to play folk songs on, and later the use of the family Pontiac (but not the Cadillac) to drive girl friends to the "sock hops" that Shrine staged on autumn Friday nights after the football games.

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