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Even so, he must have worked up some antagonism somehow. In basketball, Jim was merely great: he made the Shrine varsity as a freshman, led the team in his senior year in foul shooting, assists and rebounds. In track, he was almost invincible: after the third meet of his sophomore year, he was never beaten in the high or low hurdles. A string of seven plaques hangs today on the wall of Shrine's gymnasium, listing the holders of school track and field records—and the name "J. Seymour" is on five. In football, he was pure gold. An ex-Michigan State quarterback, Coach Fracassa hadn't paid much attention to Jim when he turned out for the team as a freshman: he was just another uncoordinated, 165-lb. six-footer. Fracassa took another look after Jim worked out with a football all the next summer and reported back for practice at 6 ft. 3 in. and 175 Ibs.
Shrine was a small school playing in a tough conference, the Detroit Metropolitan Catholic League, and the usual headline the day after a game read: DIVINE CHILD CLOBBERS SHRINE. By the time Seymour was a junior playing both end and halfback and doing the punting, all that had changed. Shrine won six games, lost only one, and earned the right to play in the Soup Bowl against Notre Dame High School for the Catholic championship. As a senior, Jim caught 31 passes for 560 yds., picked up another 163 yds. in 31 carries as a halfback, and averaged 44.2 yds. per punt. The college offers poured in—from Michigan, Michigan State,
Toledo, Arizona, San Jose State. All they got back was polite no-thank-you notes. Jim Seymour had visited South Bend and talked to Ara Parseghian; he was going to Notre Dame. It was inevitable, he explained to his sister Mary Jane: "All the nuns at Shrine were praying I would go there."
Gym with Chairs. Terry Hanratty's route to South Bend from Butler, Pa., was more circuitous; he thought about going to Penn State—until he persuaded himself that he could not meet the entrance requirements and did not apply. Terry's parents had recently separated, and his grades were not all they might have been. (Notre Dame is tutoring him; his grade average is now up to 2.3—a C+—and he is even studying Russian.) But there was never any question about Hanratty's athletic ability. His older brother Pete, now 22 and a graduate student at Georgetown University, was a high school track star, and the Hanratty home was really a gym with chairs and a TV set. "Our living room was a boxing ring," remembers Sister Peggy, 21. "Our backyard was a baseball diamond. I was always stumbling over makeshift bases."
Yet Mrs. Edward Hanratty abhorred violence—including football. She refused to sign Terry's Midget League application when he was ten (he got a neighbor to sign it instead, quarterbacked his team to the championship), and she had never even seen him play until she tuned in to the nationwide telecast of the Notre Dame-Purdue game. Then she almost expired from fear that he would "fall on his face in front of all those people."