Category Archives: History

Those thrilling days of yesteryear

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Just to demonstrate how really old I am, the introduction to the television show The Lone Ranger was “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.” Seems appropriate as we anticipate Saturday’s matchup against Notre Dame.

The yesteryear was 1993 and the thrilling day in this case was November 20. The place was South Bend, Indiana.

Actually, we’ll go back a little further to start. November 7, 1992. The Eagles were to play Notre Dame in South Bend (after the first-ever BC-ND game in Foxborough in 1975, BC played three successive games at Notre Dame). The Eagles came into the game ranked #9, with only a 24-24 tie with West Virginia blemishing their 7-0-1 record. Notre Dame was 6-1-1, but ranked #8.

The rivalry was called the “Holy War,” as it included the only two Catholic universities to field Division 1 teams. To give you a hint of the outcome in 1992, that Monday’s Heights carried the headline “Holy War ends with Eagles’ crucifixion.” (Are we getting close to sacrilege there?)

The Irish dominated BC. Only a BC touchdown in the last two minutes prevented a shutout in the 54-7 Notre Dame victory. BC coach Tom Coughlin and many an Eagles fan did not appreciate it when ND coach Lou Holtz, with his team holding a huge lead in the second half, called for a fake punt, which was successful in securing another first down for the Irish.

The Eagles split their final two regular season games to finish 8-2-1, ranked #16, but lost to Tennessee in the Hall of Fame Bowl game.

Back to 1993, the week before the BC game, undefeated and #2 Notre Dame had defeated #1 Florida State and taken the top national ranking. The Eagles that season had slipped a bit, coming into South Bend 8-2, ranked #17.

Just to set the scene. #1 Notre Dame, having just wrecked the Eagles the year before, playing their last game of 1993 at home against an “okay” top 20 Boston College team. What could stop their march to the national championship?

Page one of the November 21, 1993, Boston Globe

Sweet revenge, indeed. It didn’t come easily, either. After running out to a 38-17 lead with 11:13 remaining in the game, BC watched the Irish mount a furious comeback. Notre Dame scored 22 points in the next 10 minutes and led the Eagles 39-38 with 1:01 to go. 

Starting BC’s final drive on the BC 25, quarterback Glenn Foley missed his first two passes. He then hit tight end Pete Mitchell for 12 yards. Two plays later, he passed to Mitchell again for 24 yards. A nine-yard screen to WR Ivan Boyd set up a 41-yard field goal attempt with five seconds left.

David Gordon, BC’s kicker, had been a soccer player at the University of Vermont before transferring to BC and walking on to the team roster as a non-scholarship player. His longest field goal up to that point had been 39 yards. Earlier in the season, he had missed a 40-yard field goal that would have given BC a win over Northwestern. Earlier in this game, he had missed a 40-yard field goal, aiming at the same goalposts.

The Boston Globe account: “The snap was high but Foley was able to grab it out of the air and somehow got it down perfectly. Gordon said he struck it a little bit high, with a little bit too much toe. At first, he said, ‘I thought it was blocked. I like to kick it a little better than that. You could tell by the rotation of the ball that it wasn’t perfect. But I guess it was good enough.'”

Yes, it was. Thousands of BC fans who had attended the game rushed out onto the field, while players milled about, hands on their heads, seeming unable to process what had happened.

Here is the lead up to the last play of the game and the aftermath.

And if you really want to appreciate the game, here is a condensed version of the entire game, but just action, no huddles, etc. (41:15).

The Eagles had put up the most points on Notre Dame since USC had scored 42, 14 years earlier. They outgained the Irish 477-427 in total offense. Foley was 30 of 48 for 315 yards, four touchdowns, and no interceptions. Mitchell caught 13 passes for 132 yards and two touchdowns.

#4 Notre Dame went on to defeat Texas A&M in the 1994 Cotton Bowl. #11 BC lost again in the last game of the regular season to #5 West Virginia, but, ranked #17, beat Virginia in the Blockbuster Bowl to finish 9-3.

A look back at Lynch School

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A screen capture from the video shows Campion Hall under construction.

Back in 2002, I worked at BC’s Lynch School of Education as director of communications and alumni relations. The School celebrated its 50th anniversary that year. Part of the celebration was a gathering at which a video about the School’s half-century was shown.

I had been among the people who had worked on the video, and it had been probably at least 15 years since I had last viewed it. Until this year, when a young BC alumna doing research on the early years of women at BC, tracked me down. She had found mention of the video on a page on the BC website published in 2006, but the link there was not functional.

I remembered the guy in Media Technical Services who had put the elements of the video together and, looking on the BC website, learned Dave Corkum was now in charge of that office. A few email exchanges and he was able to send me a link to the video, which I was able to download and then put on YouTube.

The video is 22:24. It includes vintage film from the early years of the Lynch School; interviews with an alumna from the inaugural Class of 1956, other alumni, faculty, and students, as well as Carolyn and Peter Lynch; and information about programs current in 2002. It’s also a bit of a history of the University overall, of course.

The School of Ed (a Heights feature for incoming freshmen of my era [1964] asked “Who’s Ed?”) was notable for being BC’s first “professional school,” but its principal impact came from introducing women to the Chestnut Hill Campus. San Diego Eagles interested in BC history and especially alumnae may find this of interest.

I cleared putting this online with the BC Office of Communications. Their only request was that it be mentioned that the School of Education, which became the Lynch School in 2000, is now the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.

Old rugged rivalry

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BC plays Holy Cross in football Saturday. While BC played Holy Cross more times than any other team in its history, the last game between them was 1986, 32 years ago. At our gamewatch this past Saturday, I realized there are a lot of BC alumni who know very little about the rivalry that used to be.

Some of you are aware that, in June, I joined my classmates at BC in celebration of the 50th anniversary of our graduation. I had also developed a blog about our years at BC and some of what was happening around us at the time, in Boston and in the outside world. One of the blog posts on ProudRefrain.org was about the BC-Holy Cross rivalry during our time at BC. Below is an adapted version of that post.

1966 Sub Turri

If it was Thanksgiving weekend when we were students at BC, it was also BC-Holy Cross football . . . except once. While the first three BC-HC games took place on the traditional Turkey Saturday, the 1967 game was the following Saturday, December 2. (That season started late. First game wasn’t until September 23. Not sure if it was just calendar or something else.)

BC-HC football was also the season finale. There were only eight or nine bowl games back then — the iconic Rose, Sugar, Cotton, and Orange bowls, along with the newer and lesser Tangerine, Liberty, Bluebonnet, Sun, and Gator (and occasional Pasadena) bowls. Only 18 teams made it to bowl games then, far fewer than the 80 teams that will play in bowls this season. Most of the teams playing in bowls in the Sixties were southern schools with the Pac-8 and Big 10 meeting in the Rose Bowl. (After the 1943 Orange Bowl, the Eagles didn’t play in a bowl until the 1982 Tangerine Bowl.)

Always the final game and against Holy Cross, the age-old rival from nearby Worcester, the Friday night before the game featured a rally, the most expansive of the year. In our first couple of years, at least, the rally consisted of a parade of vehicles “adapted” to be floats carrying large signs (some of which carried somewhat blasphemous language, as at right). The parade would leave the area in front of McHugh Forum, proceed east down Beacon Street to Cleveland Circle, and return via Commonwealth Avenue to Upper Campus. (Permits? We don’t need no stinkin’ permits!)

The promo in The Heights for the 1964 rally promised “fiery speeches” and a bonfire in which the floats “will go up in flames and smoke.” I was home, in Western Mass, that Friday and didn’t attend the rally, so I cannot confirm the existence of a bonfire.

That November 24, 1964 issue of The Heights (published on a Tuesday) also carried an edition of The Infidel, a purported edition of a Holy Cross student newspaper. The lead article announced that Holy Cross had once again sought to forfeit the game against BC because of “fright.”

In 1964, the Eagles avenged a shutout defeat (9-0) the previous year by winning another low-scoring game 10-8 to finish the season 6-3 (best season record while we were there).

Team, fans, everybody leave the field at Alumni Stadium following 1964 win over Holy Cross. Caption in The Heights: “On to the Victory Dance!”

As sophomores, we saw classmate Brendan McCarthy, playing in his first varsity season, win the O’Melia award as top player in the BC-Holy Cross game. McCarthy’s 139 yards on 20 carries and 1 touchdown (on a very muddy Fitton Field) led the Eagles to a 35-0 rout of the Crusaders.

Preceding the 1966 game, Heights sportswriter and classmate Bob Ryan (retired Boston Globe sportswriter and four-time national sportswriter of the year) penned a column for the November 18 issue entitled “Cross Game Ain’t What It Used To Be.” In it he opined that, at least that year, the BC-HC rivalry was better on the hardwood, i.e., between the Eagles’ and Crusaders’ basketball teams. Holy Cross, however, decided to make it a rivalry that year, securing their only victory over BC while we were students, 32-26, in a “wide-open finale.”

Heights sportswriter and classmate Reid Oslin, in his article on the 1967 BC-Holy Cross game, called Fitton Field “The World’s Coldest Place.” Oh, I remember that one! The Eagles won 13-7 and quarterback and classmate Joe DiVito took home the O’Melia Award. [In an interesting allusion to the present, BC’s two wins to wrap up the 1967 season were over Holy Cross and UMass, the two teams with which they open this season.]

We played Holy Cross in football four times while we were students. In basketball, BC and Holy Cross met eight times on the court, twice each year. The greater frequency, and probably the ability to see players up close, made the basketball rivalry seem more intense. You could really see “villainry” in the opponent, cf. Keith Hochstein. By the way, BC’s record against the Cross in our years — 7-1.

The last BC-Holy Cross football game was played November 22, 1986. BC won 56-26 in its eighth-straight victory in the series. The Eagles had won 17 of the last 19 games in the series. The Crusaders had won two games in 1977 and 1978 by a total of six points.