This book was a huge letdown. I knew the book was published by ESPN Books, so I thought it might actually be a mostly objective, unbiased account. That was naivety on my part. I should have done more research before reading it—I should have known going in that it was written by an Indiana guy who writes for a South Bend newspaper. Had I known, I would have never begun reading it.
I found author Jeff Carroll to be very fair when it came to describing former Miami coach Jimmy Johnson (but for every positive or neutral thing he had to say about Johnson, he had three negative things to say about his successor, Dennis Erickson). I thought his writing was rather impartial in a lot (but not all) of the discussion about Notre Dame football. That was it, though. Everything else was a mixture of cultural bias, bowing at the altar of the Golden Dome, and poor knowledge of the game of football. There was also plenty of misinformation produced by either lazy research or piss poor fact-checking.
The full title was Perfect Rivals: Notre Dame, Miami, and the Battle for the Soul of College Football. That title would lead a prospective reader to believe he/she was about to read about the classic battles between the two teams in 1988, 1989, and 1990 as well as the significance those games had on the state of college football. Nope. The 1990 game was treated as a near afterthought. Not much time was given to the 1989 game (Miami won the national championship that season). Carroll spent a good deal of time on the 1988 game, but it wasn’t the book’s centerpiece. I don’t understand that decision. That game should be the centerpiece of any non-school specific book about college football in the 1980s. Perfect Rivals was about the two teams who played in that game, yet it was, in my opinion, given a lower billing than what was warranted. A more accurate subtitle would have been How Lou Holtz took risks and brought Notre Dame back to the pinnacle of college football just in time to sign an exclusive television contract with NBC.
One of the more darkly ironic moments comes when Carroll rants about Bill McCartney’s Colorado Buffaloes, specifically accusations of rape and the coach’s non response to them. Carroll could have written the same things about his own beloved school.
But Carroll seems to buy into the Notre Dame myth. This passage, quoted in the book from Inside Sports magazine sums up the myth:
College football needs Notre Dame, and the Irish have resurfaced just in time. In an era when the concepts of athletic excellence and academic integrity fit together like White Snake and Bing Crosby, there is no better time for major college football’s most famous symbol of athletic integrity to be on top of the football polls…Who knows? Perhaps Notre Dame’s football resurgence will bring the academic ideal back into style. Perhaps integrity will be the game’s next popular fad, like four-receiver sets or steroids.My biggest issue with the book was the constant peppering of ignorant culturally based statements. Predictably, I disagreed with nearly 100% of what Carroll had to say about the Hurricanes’ performances on and off the field leading up to the 1987 Fiesta Bowl. But that stuff turned out to be mild. About the Islamic Clara Muhammad School in Newark, New Jersey, which Raghib Ismail attended as a child, Carroll wrote, “It is a relic of the time period that a black man would choose to navigate the world as a Muslim rather than as an African American ancestor of slaves in America.” That statement demonstrates a severe lack of knowledge. A few paragraphs later, Carroll described the Ismails’ move from Newark to Wilkes-Barre: “There was one condition: that the boys attend a Protestant church, not a mosque…On another positive note…”
Carroll’s poor use of transitions give the reader a sense that he just doesn’t care about the players as people. “Rice’s career had ended without a second national championship. Without the Heisman. Without a place at the highest level of the sport. In this darkest of moments, however, true Irish believers could take solace in the famous line from the school’s fight song. ‘Old Notre Dame will win overall,’ it went, and it was about to be proven true in a way that would rattle the college football world to its very core and change Notre Dame’s reputation forever.” Who cares that Tony Rice wasn’t drafted? Who cares what his future held? Notre Dame was about to sign a huge TV deal, and the Irish faithful were elated. Give me a break.
The presentation of untruths was the book’s biggest blemish. A 1987 Pitt loss to Temple was described as “the ultimate indignity” because Temple had “gone winless in eleven games” the previous season. In real life, the 1986 Temple Owls were a 6-5 team. Those 6 wins were forfeited in 1988 after it was revealed that a Temple player had played that season after taking money from an agent. The truth paints an entirely different picture over Pitt’s loss to Temple and whatever baggage the players would carry from that loss into their game with Notre Dame. Carroll also wrote about Michael Irvin, “Johnson’s volatile former ‘Cane, whom the Cowboys had nearly given up on by the time Johnson arrived.” No. When Jimmy Johnson arrived in Dallas, Irvin had just completed a rookie season during which he led the NFC in yards per reception after being selected 11th overall in the draft. The Cowboys were elated with him then. They considered moving on from him after his second season, Johnson’s first in Dallas, because they were unsure he’d be able to recover from an injury. The one that bothered me the most was a statement about how the BCS led to a split national championship in 1997 even though it was supposed to prevent that sort of thing. The BCS did not exist prior to 1998, so I don’t know how Carroll holds it responsible for Michigan and Nebraska sharing the championship.
Bad information and poor fact-checking make me doubt everything I read in a work. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what the author failed to understand or what he/she misrepresented to an exaggerated degree. This is a history book, but I cannot trust the history it gave me. Overall, I feel that Perfect Rivals was a waste of my time.
D
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