Winter’s Daydream with Irish Eyes

ITEM ONE: Sarah's Wintersong still has me at first note

I love and care for my father very much. I don't always show it, but it's true, and sometimes it takes little exchanges between us to remind me of it. Last week at my uncle's B&B in North Wildwood, I had a really good visit with him. One of the things that accentuated this was him giving me a copy of Sarah McLachlan's Wintersong album from two years ago. He knew it was something that initially I would love and loathe at the same time, but I think deep down he also knew that I would eventually drop the latter feeling about it.

I'm not a big fan of Christmas music per se. My dad loves it. My brother used to listen to it the day after Halloween until Christmas Day. As for me, for a myriad of reasons too personal to even blog about, I could only seemingly tolerate it from about 10:30pm on Christmas Eve until about 11am on Christmas Day. I think it had as much to do with my inner struggle with God, who and/or whatever he/she/it is, and the year-round vengefulness I felt was being directed at me and my family members that I didn't feel super excited to celebrate the birth of his only son. But that's my cross to bear.

I have more of a modern taste in holiday music, but to a point. I can deal with it in limited numbers before it feels like somebody forcing me to eat vegetables. But in listening to the disc on my way back up the Garden State Parkway last night, I listened to, with apologies to Bruce Springsteen, arguably my favorite musician of all-time and her album of holiday music. And once more, I became enraptured by her abilities as a singer and a songwriter.

I enjoyed her different take on the John Lennon "Happy Christmas, War is Over", could hear Diana Krall in the Peanuts standard "Christmas Time is Here", and dream about the days when my family was together in Montvale as her version of Joni Mitchell's "River" played on my MP3 player. But the song that I kept replaying and replaying, and being shocked that I didn't pick up on it two years ago when it was released, was the album's namesake, "Wintersong".

I can picture her writing this song, in some snow-covered cottage outside of Vancouver, and all the while wishing, at the risk of sounding 'stalkerish', that it was me she was writing about. I mean that second verse where she writes, "It's late and morning's in no hurry, but sleep won't set me free," is pure genius. It makes me realize that one of the things most people I know take for granted is something I have rarely known, which is the love of someone else at a time where loneliness has a special way of digging at your soul. Maybe that explains why this time of year is one that I have rarely fully embraced. As Bruce Willis once said on Moonlighting, "a good job doesn't love you back."

So I have been playing this song over and over again at night. It's soothing and harrowing at the same time. At 40, with my own mortality continuing to be more self-evident, I wonder how many more Christmases I'll have, and why it is that I continue to be Christian Slater when it comes to relationships – my own worst enemy. After all, as Sarah sings in Wintersong, I don't yet have an answer for "…when silence gets too hard to handle, and the night gets too long…" I keep saying that things will change when I get my life stabilized. Trouble is, that day may never come.

ITEM TWO: Why Notre Dame will never again be Notre Dame

In the midst of the "will Charlie Weis be fired by Notre Dame" rumors this past week, it's important for ND alumni and subway alumni like me alike to remember something. This isn't your father's Notre Dame, much less your grandfather's Notre Dame, and I'm afraid it never will be again. It doesn't matter if you could raise Knute Rockne from the dead. You can search for foolish answers, but there just some things about college football in the year 2008 that I believe will prevent the Irish from ever having their fans' eyes smiling again.

Back before the advent of today's college football, Notre Dame had several advantages going for it. One thing was that the major pipeline for them to gain a recruiting advantage was through the major Catholic schools across the country. Another was that there were only 2 or 3 games on television per week, and because of their previous popularity and success, Notre Dame was always one of those teams on TV each and every week. Because they weren't locked into a regional conference, they traveled to opposite ends of the country to play against the powerhouse schools. This meant increased exposure for kids wanting to play in the NFL.

Then in the 1980's, ESPN built itself up by showing college football games by the bunch. The more teams that played on television, the more realistic it was for those schools to recruit kids to stay at home to play football. It also became easier for the warm weather states like Florida and California to build powerhouse programs by attracting kids to that climate, rather than bitterly cold winters in outposts like South Bend. As the influence of television grew, the dev elopement of stronger conferences with bowl tie-ins made it harder for Notre Dame to stay competitive. As one of the last independent teams, they get to keep all their TV money from NBC and any bowl money they receive instead of splitting it evenly with other conference members. Yet, when they go 3-9 like they did in 2007, the Irish also receive 100% of $0.00 from no bowl appearances.

Furthermore, the academic expectations have changed at the university. The standards for admission have been tightened, meaning that if Tim Brown, Jerome Bettis, Tony Rice, Rickey Watters, and Raghib Ismail all tried to play at Notre Dame now, they all would have been denied admission to the school. Those are arguably the five best players in the last 25 years of the ND football. So the problem, in my view, begins there. From what I understand, all five of those players wound up being excellent students at the university. But if 'borderline' student-athletes like them would be denied a chance to attend Notre Dame in 2008, how in the world do boosters and fans alike expect the school to compete at the same level? Either you want to be a Division I version of an Ivy league school, and therefore be content with an occasional 10-2 season mixed in with several 7-5 seasons, or you are willing to bend the rules for a few football players to help win 10+ games every year and reap the million dollar payouts of BCS bowl games. There is no shame in being Stanford or Northwestern, but if the academics are as super-important as the athletic accomplishments, or as seems to be the case more important, then accept that as who you are. But neither Urban Meyer, Jim Tressel, Nick Saban, Pete Carroll, nor even Lou Holtz, would be able to win with the same regularity as Ara Parseghian did back in the day when Notre Dame, even from the standpoint of public perception, was a football-first university.

Now, that's not to say that Charlie Weis doesn't have some blame in the current situation, because he does. Still, and I know that this falls under the category of, 'if my aunt had nuts she'd be Colin Montgomery', if they make one of two last-minute field goals against Syracuse and get one more score in regulation with a 17-0 halftime lead against Pittsburgh, the Irish are 8-4 instead of 6-6 and people would be talking about how Weis improved the team by 5 wins this year. Such is football.

I still maintain, and always will, that the best course of action for Notre Dame is to do what they've done in every other sport: join the Big East. The conference would benefit from the fact that ND is still such a big brand name that they could adjust the revenue sharing percentages for TV and bowl appearances because they could make that money back by having ND on their schedule. As a Big east member, ND could play 8 conference games and still play 4 out of conference games, allowing them to keep the traditional contests with Navy, Michigan, USC, and either Stanford or Michigan State as out of conference games.

ITEM THREE: Random Thoughts

If Sean Avery had said the other day, "I find it humorous to see other guys in the NHL shooting the five-hole off the ice of some of my ex-girl friends," do you think he would have been suspended? I think the guy is a world-class jerk and is probably close to trying to make his summer internship at Vogue into a full-time gig, but I wouldn't have suspended him for what he said. That being said, I've heard Elisha Cuthbert's name more this week than in her entire career, so there's that… my favorite up-and-coming band, Shaimus, is playing at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach on Thursday night December 11^th. Word is that they are close to finishing their first studio album, so do my good friend Evan a favor and go see them on Thursday night – tell them Crief sent ya… this weekend is an important one in college football, with conference championship games in the Big 12 (Oklahoma-Missouri) and SEC (Alabama-Florida) likely deciding the two teams playing the BCS Title game next month. But my favorite of the day, and the one I dial in every year with anticipation, is the Army-navy game in Philadelphia. Once upon a time, many many years ago, this was THE game across the country, with national championship and Heisman Trophy hopes, riding on it. Today it is reduced to a game that is simply the appetizer for a college football fan's championship Saturday feast. But for me and many others, it serves as a reminder of all that is good about intercollegiate sports. I've been lucky enough to see this game live twice, and if you think of yourself as a sports fan on any level, you haven't seen a live sporting event until you've seen an Army-Navy game in person. I think the reason I enjoy it so much is because at the end of the game, the players, especially the seniors, go from being enemies on the field of football combat to brothers-in-arms on the actual field of combat serving our country. And for that, among many reasons, they have my respect… Nine years for Orenthal, huh? Funny to hear people talk about why he did what he did. It's simple: he got away with double-murder, what would make him think a simple robbery-in-the-name-of-reclaiming-his-possessions would lead bring him down? And by the way, a guy I know in his 20's asked me what the big deal about it was, and I had to explain to him what a big deal he was 25+ years ago. In many ways, when I see the footage of him in the snow at Shea Stadium breaking the 2,000 yard barrier in 1973 is haunting to look at, knowing how good he had it and knowing it would all be gone a quarter century later…