All-America

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In rain, snow, hall or sleet Leahy's men can't be beat Sink the Navy! Sink the Navy! Sink the Navy! Y-A-A-A-A-H-H-R-R-R!

With a blood-curdling yell--one that welled and resounded across Notre Dame's practice football field last week--the varsity players broke from 'their huddle and dashed forward to face the "Hamburger Squad," the Notre Dame freshmen. At Notre Dame, the freshmen never play an outside game. Their sole function is to serve as "ground meat for the varsity," a ferociously hungry group which believes in eating''up just as much yardage in midweek scrimmages as in Saturday's big game. The seven linemen--roaring another guttural "Y-A-A-A-A-H-H-R-R-R"*--charged like bulls into a row of freshman defenders, who were specially padded, rather like picadors' horses, to withstand the shock. In the same split-second instant, a long-legged halfback named John Lattner sprang from his crouch, took the deft hand-off of the ball from his quarterback, and cracked through the right side of the line with the power of a runaway steer.

Any reasonably intelligent football scout on the premises could have diagramed the play in less than a minute, and planned a defense against it a minute later. There would be only one difficulty: in the past three years, no defense yet devised has been able to stop Halfback Lattner from averaging 5 yds. every time he has carried the ball. A rawboned husky who stands 6 ft. 2 in. and weighs 195 Ibs., Lattner is admiringly assessed by Backfield Coach Bill Earley as a power runner. "Some guys, when you get a hand on them, they go down. Not John." Head Coach Frank Leahy, who is opposed on principle to singling any one of his men out for special praise, gives Johnny Lattner this citation: "He's our bread & butter ball carrier."

Triple Talents. Lattner is more than a ball carrier. In the two-platoon era of a year ago--when most players were either offensive or defensive specialists, and few ball-carrying halfbacks ever dirtied their hands with a tackle--Johnny Lattner was one of football's rare iron men, a 6c-minute player who enjoyed making a crackling tackle almost as much as he enjoyed lugging the ball. On the offensive, Halfback Lattner was and is a throwback to the days of the genuine triple-threat back; his ability to pass from a running play is a constant threat to the opposition, and his booming kicks travel so high and far that even the slowest-footed Notre Dame lineman can get downfield to smother the receiver. This year Notre Dame's opponents. ' returning Lattner's punts, have averaged less than 2 yds. a try.

For these manifold talents, Halfback Johnny Lattner, as a Notre Dame junior, got the Maxwell Trophy as the outstanding football player of 1952. and he was the only player to make everybody's All-America team. This year, when two-way players are at a premium with the end of the two-platoon system, when football is again producing iron men instead of wooden specialists, All-America Lattner is taking up where he left off.

Sinking Navy. Last week Lattner & Co. faced a fired-up Navy team which had rolled up 158 points against its opponents while yielding only 35, and which was relying heavily on its underdog chance of upsetting Notre Dame. But Notre Dame's Fighting Irish were fired up, too. Their revered Coach Frank Leahy had been rushed to the hospital with stomach spasms midway in the Georgia Tech game the week before. He would be watching them from his bedside by television. On the eve of the Navy game, Frank Leahy sent a note to his team asking that the game be played "for the seniors and for Notre Dame." But as Captain Don Penza explained later in the dressing room: "The boys got together and played it for the coach anyway." It was very likely the first time in his ten-year regime at Notre Dame that a team had ever disobeyed Frank Leahy.

Trouble seemed to come fast. On the first play from scrimmage, a Notre Dame fumble put Navy in scoring position on the 15-yd. line. With its back to the wall and playing "For Coach," Notre Dame's defenders growled their defiant "Yaaaahhrrr" and took the ball away on downs. Then it began, the famed Notre Dame treatment that has been likened to facing Joe Louis in the ring: a series of rocking left-and-right crunches followed by a knockout. The heavy and hard-charging Notre Dame line seemed to move as one man while Halfbacks Lattner and Joe Heap and Fullback Neil Worden supplied the power punches. Usually, when

Notre Dame needed vital first-down yardage, Quarterback Ralph Guglielmi called for Notre Dame's bread & butter boy, Johnny Lattner. In twelve carries, Johnny twisted and power-drove through Navy for 50 yds.

All through the scoreless first quarter, Navy reeled under the lefts and rights. Then Notre Dame delivered the knockout : a four-touchdown assault in nine minutes. During the second half, Lattner and his first-team teammates sat it out on the sidelines and let the second, third and fourth teams finish the job. Final score: 38-7.

Top Team. It was a good example of the kind of play that has made Notre Dame the No. i team in sportswriters' polls all season long, and made them national champions four times in Coach Leahy's ten years.

Playing the toughest schedule in the U.S.. Notre Dame toppled or tied five major college conference champions last year, and this year has managed to be "up" each Saturday for a backbreaking intersectional schedule that included Oklahoma. Purdue. Pittsburgh. Georgia Tech and Navy. This week it is Pennsylvania. Still to come: North Carolina. Iowa, Southern California and Southern Methodist.

How does Notre Dame do it? Many Notre Dame critics--and they are legion, particularly among rival coaches--point out that Notre Dame's bird-dogging alumni fervently flush out football players by the covey. Even nonalumni, e.g., New York's subway variety, feel such a kinship for the Fighting Irish that they adopt Notre Dame and flood it with batches of scouting reports on swivel-hipped high-school backs, blockbusting linemen. Notre Dame acknowledges the bird-dogging tactics of its alumni talent scouts, but points out briskly that, unlike some institutions which pull players out of trees and suit them up, Notre Dame has demanding scholastic standards: though the passing grade is 70, Notre Dame athletes, to be eligible to play, must maintain at least a 77 average.

Notre Dame's winning ways are only partly attributable to talent. More important, by far. is an intangible spirit that seems--like the guttural yaaaahhrrr--to make super-players out of ordinary mortals like Johnny Lattner. In a school where the first religion is Roman Catholicism, athletics is No. 2 for the 5.401 undergraduates who live under the strictest collegiate discipline west of West Point and Annapolis. Notre Dame football players get much of their spiritual lift from the pre-game dressing-room chats by Coach Leahy. "Usually." says a lineman, "he tells us that we are a team with a lot to lose and little to gain because we win so often. He also tells us what Notre Dame stands for all over the world. He says Catholic youngsters all over the world are watching us. Now that the games are carried by short wave, it's even more so."-

"Kind of Choked Up." Johnny Lattner was imbued with the Notre Dame spirit the moment he set foot on the campus as a green freshman three years ago: "I came down that driveway and I saw that golden dome with the statue of our Blessed Mother all lighted up, and it was one of the biggest thrills of my life. I got kind of choked up, and I was awful glad I came here." The Notre Dame indoctrination, particularly of football players, is as relentless as the Marine Corps boot training. Johnny recalls: "The first night, they showed the movie Knute Rockne--All American, with Pat O'Brien and Ronald Reagan [portraying Notre Dame's first football All-America, George Gipp]." Lattner, who was one day to become

Notre Dame's 62nd All-America. left the theater "kind of choked up" all over again. "I mean I got a big bang out of it. I was ready to kill anybody who said a word against Notre Dame. I still am."

Twenty-one-year-old Johnny Lattner has lived most of his life in a German-Irish neighborhood on Chicago's far west side. Johnny, who is of German-Irish descent himself, was a gangling, sensitive boy until he was ten or so: "I was sort of a sissy, I guess. But my pa wouldn't break up a fight if he saw me in it. He wanted me to learn." Johnny learned, and football taught him. When Johnny was in the sixth grade, his father gave him a helmet, and. like other millions of American youngsters, Johnny soon found himself playing football and filling out. A good deal of personal determination entered into it. His mother remembers that Johnny went on a cod-liver-oil binge, once drank 17 pints of it in a single week. "Do you know who his idol was in those days?" asks Mrs. Lattner. "It was Superman." Johnny recalls: "By the time I was in the eighth grade, nobody picked on me any more."

At Oak Park's Fenwick (Catholic) High School, which last year sent about 17% of its graduating class to Notre Dame, Johnny began to round out in other ways. Fenwick Trainer Dan O'Brien recalls Johnny as a "sort of dual personality around here. He seemed like a backward type when he was in the dressing room, not saying much or paying much attention to what was going on. But when he was on the football field, he suddenly became aggressive--not offensively so, but intelligently so."

By being intelligently aggressive on the football field. Johnny won All-State honors as an end in 1948, his junior year. The next year Captain-elect Lattner was shifted to halfback, where he became a bread & butter boy for Fenwick Coach Tony Lawless. Known as "Big John" to his teammates. Lattner averaged 18 yds. a carry. He made All-State again, the first player in Illinois records to do it two years in a row at different positions. He also led Fenwick to the finals of the Chicago championship. Fenwick lost, but Johnny will never forget the crowd that turned out for the game. "There were 67,000 people there that day," says Johnny with a mixture of pride and awe.

A Gold Nugget. After the football seasons at Fenwick, Johnny found time to 1) captain the basketball team and lead it in scoring for four straight years, 2) win two track letters as a dash man (10.3 for 100 yds., 22.3 for 220). Such athletic prowess did not pass unnoticed by the college football scouts.

In the postwar gold rush for playing talent, Lattner was one of the most sought-after nuggets in Illinois history. Turning down countless other offers, he visited the campuses of six schools--Michigan, Illinois, Purdue, Kentucky, Kansas and Indiana (which made a strong social impression on Johnny by supplying him with a white summer tux and a stunning brunette date for a dance). The offers for his football services included the standard ones of room, board and tuition, with sometimes an additional alumni deal which Lattner will not discuss. He accepted Notre Dame's relatively modest offer: free tuition (a $620 item), room & board ($830), for which he does nominal chores. His current job: "night check" on the third floor of his dormitory at curfew. As Lattner and other Notre Dame footballers put it: "I'm in on a ride."

The ride, though free, was sometimes bumpy. To begin with, the youngster who choked up over the Knute Rockne movie was just another member of the Hamburger Squad at a university where All-State halfbacks are almost as plentiful as clerical collars. The impersonal hustle & bustle of college life on the Notre Dame campus-left unassuming Johnny Lattner, like countless freshmen before him, a little bewildered. On the football field, though, he felt at home.

The Beloved Legend. One day, served up as hamburger for the varsity meat choppers, Lattner laid a particularly tooth-rattling tackle on a varsity star. Coach Leahy took time out to compliment Lattner personally: "Keep up the good work, son. There's no telling how far you can go at Notre Dame if you do. You can go as far as you like with hard work." This morale booster was all, or almost all, that 17-year-old Johnny needed. Today, after three grinding years on the Notre Dame varsity, playing under one of the toughest taskmasters in the business, Lattner's loyalty to Leahy is limitless: "He's the best. We wouldn't be anything without him. He works so hard at it, it's only fair that you work hard at it."

Lattner's dedication to Notre Dame, to Leahy, to football and to that indefinable spirit of the Fighting Irish is part & parcel of his first indoctrination the night he saw the Knute Rockne movie. One of the beloved legends at Notre Dame has it that Rockne, at half time in a game the Fighting Irish were losing to Army, gave the boys an effective little talk.

He brought up the name of fabled George Gipp, the great halfback who died of pneumonia a few days after the all-winning 1920 season. Rockne told how Gipp, on his deathbed, asked Notre Dame to remember him. "Let's win this for the Gipper," said Rockne, and the Fighting Irish went out and tore Army apart in the second half.

Halfback Lattner knows the tug of such an appeal. In the spring of Johnny's freshman year he paid many visits to his father, who was dying of cancer. With Lattner on one of the last visits was Notre Dame's varsity quarterback, Johnny Mazur.

Said Quarterback Johnny Mazur to father Lattner: "Your son will score for Notre Dame in his first varsity game, I promise you."

Johnny's first varsity game came the next fall against Indiana. All during the first half, in those two-platoon days. Johnny played on the defense. In the third quarter, Notre Dame moved the ball down to Indiana's 2-yd. line. Coach Leahy looked along the bench. "Lattner," he called, "go in at halfback. Play offense." Quarterback Mazur was waiting. In the huddle he put his arm around Lattner. "Johnny," he said, "this one is one for your dad." On the next play. Johnny bulled into the end zone for his touchdown, carrying two Indiana tacklers with him.

Life on Campus. A big factor in Notre Dame's success story is the Spartan existence that all Notre Dame students lead. At Notre Dame, all students are required to check back into the dormitory no later than midnight, and for most, 10:15 is the curfew. Lights are turned out at 11 p.m., and students who are out on "midnights" must sign the watchman's register as they return. Violators are in danger of immediate dismissal. Each Notre Dame student carries an identification card stating his name and age, which makes it easy for South Bend bartenders. Only students 21 or over may enter beer taverns, and only those 23 and over may enter cafes where hard liquor is sold. No student can have a car on campus.

The football team attends Mass in a body the morning before every game at home or away. Often the non-Catholics (4% of Notre Dame's students) will attend. These include such players as Dick Washington (Baptist), Wayne Edmonds (Baptist) and Menil ("Minnie") Mavraides (Greek Orthodox). Washington and Edmonds, both sophomores, are the first Negroes ever to make the team at Notre Dame, although Negroes have been on the squad before.

Extreme politeness is expected of a Notre Dame man addressing his elders and even a celebrity like Lattner addresses strangers as "mister." Johnny does not smoke and says he drinks only "a couple of beers" when he goes home on weekends after a game. His training philosophy is simple: "If you smoke or drink, you don't put out. If you don't put out, you don't stay on the team."

Johnny is just as intently serious about his education. He aims to become a certified public accountant, and this year, despite the demands of football, he has been maintaining an 81 average in such subjects as accounting, auditing, business ethics, and Government taxation. He is also in Notre Dame's Air Force R.O.T.C., preparing for a turn of active duty soon after graduation.

"Fun on Saturday." It is only on the football field that serious, mild-mannered John Lattner becomes the growling All-America who barrels through enemy lines, knocks down the passes and tackles for the love of it. Coach Leahy rates him Notre Dame's best all round ballplayer since Quarterback Johnny Lujack ('47)--"The thing both boys like to do most is tackle, a sure sign of a real football player." Lattner thoroughly approves of the single-platoon system, because "if you make a good tackle, it peps you up. You get a good feeling, and you're ready to go to town. If you make a mistake on offense, like fumbling, you get a chance to make up for it by tackling." His attitude toward the whole cycle of practice and play: "You work hard all week and have fun on Saturday."

From now until the season winds up with the Southern Methodist game, Dec. 5, Johnny Lattner's duty and Johnny Lattner's fun should coincide. The pressing matter, as he and his yaaaahhrrring teammates see it, is to lug that football, kick that punt, throw that pass and tackle the enemy, to prove to a watching world that Leahy's men can't be beat.

-"Yaaaahhrrr" is a legacy from Notre Dame Tackle Ziggy Czarobski, an All-America lineman in 1947, who made it his personal battle cry. Subsequent Notre Dame squads delightedly picked it up. - All Notre Dame's football games are also televised and cabled to theater outlets in many major cities, e.g., New York, Boston, Chicago. Cheering fans make such an uproar from the darkened theater seats whenever Notre Dame scores that it is often impossible to hear the announcer until after the point after touchdown. -The university is just completing a $10 million building program which includes a $2,400,000 liberal-arts building and art gallery, and a $3,600,000 science building, named for Notre Dame's Father Julius Arthur Nieuwland, chemist-pioneer in the making of synthetic rubber. The building program has been paid for by the gifts of alumni and Notre Dame's many nonalumni friends, not by football receipts.

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