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To his father, a responsibility attended the natural gift, and to his credit, Joe Sr. took greater pains than foul tips for his son. He stayed in one place, working at the Civic Finance Co. and with Joey, so that there would be no restraints on the boy's career. (His wife, Theresa, worked as a secretary in the same office.) "I remember when he was ten, he wanted to quit midget football. His mother said, 'If he doesn't want to play, why don't you leave him be?' So I said, 'The hell with it, go ahead and quit.' After work, when I got home, I said: 'Get your equipment; you're going to practice. One day, Joey, things are going to get tough in your life and you're going to want to quit. I don't believe in that.' "
In the retelling, this probably sounds more like a story from a military academy than it should. Even thumbing his scrapbooks in absent reverie or sitting down to supper at home, where the dinner music is a taped interview of young Joe, the elder Montana seems a most benevolent stage father, and his boy's enduring emotion, of many complex ones, appears to be gratitude. "I love my kid, whether he ever played football or not," says the father softly, "but the part of him that made him so special, I loved that too. I'd say to him: 'Joey, it's not easy for me to holler at you; it kills me.' Joe understood. He wanted the things for himself that I wanted for him." Gentler still, the son says: "Sometimes I just want to tell him, 'You accomplished for me what you wanted; it's time for yourself.' "
By the time young Joe was a Ringgold High Ram, he had asked backyard waivers on his first receiver, and drafted a neighbor who liked to pretend he was Jim Seymour; Montana was Terry Hanratty. Those were Notre Dame's stars at the time. The setting of most of Joe's dreams began to be South Lend.
The start of the Irish legend, Cool Joe the Comeback Kid, is also the start of the misunderstanding. He has been taken to be cold, indifferent, standoffish. "I am affected by things, but I don't show it." He is unflappable. I'm emotional, but nobody knows it." Off the field, he is undemonstrative. "At Notre Dame I was awed by the place in general and lonely at being away from home for the first time. Plus, all of a sudden, there were eleven other quarterbacks. I was feeling all the things people say I don't feel."
In the second semester he married his home-town sweetheart, Kim Moses, and brought her from Monongahela to Notre Dame. She worked in the sports-information office. After the games he would keep Kim company as she typed the team's statistics. Joe was grateful to have an ally from home in residence, but the marriage ended in divorce after three years. He says simply: "We were too young."
In 1975, Joe's sophomore year, Rick Slager was the favored quarterback of Coach Dan Devine, though the leading receiver at the time, Ken MacAfee, still wonders why. According to MacAfee, "The pattern began to be that Rick Slager would start the game and then Montana would have to come in and save it." Joe sat out the entire season in 1976 with a separated shoulder, extending his eligibility one year and increasing his frustration.