'100 Things' hits on Irish essentials

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Die-hard fans of the University of Notre Dame football program might consider 100 Things Notre Dame Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die a valuable source of information.

Casual fans, and those who are not Notre Dame admirers, might consider it more of a solution for sleepless nights than a book that they cannot put down.

Give author John Heisler, who has worked in the university's athletics department since the late 1970s, some credit. He set out to capture all of the things that make Notre Dame football special, and this book is a thorough anthology of those phenomenon. National championship seasons are remembered in detail, as are several of the biggest individual games the Fighting Irish participated in during their glory days.

That's where the book begins to get a bit tedious. The chapters about different championship seasons that populate the middle of the book all begin to run together after a while. They are, however, easier to get through that the ones about specific games such as the 1966 Michigan State game or the 1988 Miami game. These sections are almost too detailed for their own good, as they include summaries of virtually every important drive and play over the course of games that are decades old.

As the book progresses, Heisler shies away from recapping games and seasons and focuses more on people and quirks of the program like Bookstore Basketball and the Irish Guard. The book becomes much more readable, thought it never really flows the way a normal book would because of its structure of 100 different chapters about 100 different things.

By themselves, many of those chapters are interesting, and some are quite enjoyable. As a very casual follower of Notre Dame football, I knew very basic details about Knute Rockne, Ara Parseghian and how the Irish won one for the Gipper. Heisler's first few things you should know do an excellent job of keying on the really important stuff about Notre Dame's biggest people and the stories behind them.

It is information that Notre Dame die-hards probably know by heart already, but they might get more out of the season and game recollections that follow than people like me. The last half of the book is more pertinent to everybody, as Heisler has dug up a few things that even the most dyed-in-the-wool Irish follower doesn't know.

As long as readers aren't expecting to be engrossed for hours at a time and are tolerant of the often awkward interspersion of things they should do with things they should know, 100 Things Notre Dame Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die is worth a read. It offers a chance for followers of the program to recall its glory days ... and for the uninformed to get an introduction to the remarkable amount of success Notre Dame once enjoyed.

Books with the same premise have been written about many other sports teams, including the football programs at Ohio State, Oklahoma and Texas and Major League Baseball's Detroit Tigers and Los Angeles Dodgers.

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