Satisfaction Guaranteed at the Holtz No. 1 Club

The pep rally is an ancient rite at which a football coach can dispense with being diplomatic. He can say whatever he feels like saying, rather than that heaping helping of mumbo-jumbo that he regularly ladles out. He can be as forthright as he pleases because every nodding noggin in his audience agrees with every word out of his mouth.

Were mealy-mouthedness an Olympic sport, Lou Holtz could win a gold medal in either synchro or solo. The man is multilingual, speaking Coachspeak to society at-large but turning completely candid in the proper company. It all depends who’s doing the listening. And this might clarify why Holtz, the haggard little Where’s Waldo look-alike who coaches football for Notre Dame, after having spoken daily of the Florida State Seminoles with a forked tongue, finally cut loose last Friday night, in the final hours before the big, big, big game.

Thirteen thousand overcrowded the Joyce Athletic Center on campus here to seek reassurance that Notre Dame need not be second-best to anybody. They hated being Avis. They wanted Holtz to put them in the driver’s seat. They wanted to know how anyone dared deem as a 6 1/2-point underdog a second-ranked Notre Dame squad playing on its own grass. And they wanted mainly to hear this from Holtz himself.

He did not disappoint. The coach stood hands-on-hips in that Mighty Mouse, here-I-come-to-save-the-day pose that seems to have caught on in end zones, coast-to-coast. Off to the side sat his players. The noise swelled and then a hush fell and then Holtz said: “We didn’t get to be 9-0 and get to play in this game because we won the lottery! We’re here ‘cause we belong here! And tomorrow we’re gonna prove it! We’re gonna play the best game we’ve played all year!”

None of that noncommittal pap now. Not among the faithful. Not among the congregation. No one in this gathering needed to be proselytized. These weren’t would-be converts, nor were they spies who were going to blab back to everybody in Tallahassee, Fla., all of the enemy’s secrets or insults. None of these comments would create for Holtz any headlines or headaches. These were promises that a coach might not even need to keep, knowing full well that at Notre Dame a football coach is very likely to be absolved for the sin of pride.

Elsewhere on the campus this night dined a Florida State team that sat around laughing in wrong-color caps with shamrocks on them, showing a very public disrespect, poking fun at Fighting Irish mystique, filling ears with gab of not even knowing how many Horsemen there were in a Notre Dame posse, of not even knowing how to pronounce old Knute what’s-his-name’s name--one Seminole player called him Ka-knock-knee --or of not even knowing what this so-called “Irish mystique” was supposed to be. Some redheaded lady named Teek, could be.

Holtz bristled, or pretended to bristle.

“I’ve heard Florida State say . . .” he said from the pulpit, holy and rolling, laying a quote on an entire university as though dormitories could talk, “that they don’t know anything about ‘mystique.’ ”

Pause for effect.

“They’ve never been around mystique. How would they recognize it?”

Oh, did he shake down some thunder. As the walls reverberated, Holtz preened, gladly playing the part of promoter. He knew which rooms to work. At news conferences it was necessary to yak on and on, ad nauseam, about how Florida State had the best team these old wire-rimmed eyes had ever seen, about how there wasn’t a team in the glorious old US of A that these Seminoles couldn’t pulverize by 40 points, except maybe the Dallas Cowboys. Here, though, a coach could speak freely. Best team anywhere? No, now these were Tallahassee tyros who wouldn’t know mystique if it bit them and probably thought tradition was that thing where a prisoner gets transported from one country’s jail to another’s.

Holtz knows how to play the game, indoors or out.

He out-coached Bobby Bowden and his staff out-scouted Bowden’s in what was supposed to be a seminal victory for the Seminoles. He exposed the top-rated team’s vulnerable rushing game by taking away Florida State quarterback Charlie Ward’s favorite weapon, the dump pass to a backfield mate far behind the line of scrimmage. Thirty-one completions sound like a lot, but 297 yards translate into nothing but meager gains. The longest connection Ward made was a 20-yard touchdown pass diverted by a Notre Dame player’s hands.

Holtz even heeded advice, going against his instincts by trusting those of his assistants who implored him to keep the wind at Notre Dame’s back in the third quarter, not the fourth. Take a big lead and make it bigger, then sit on it, these aides suggested. Holtz gave in, and the only time it nearly blew up in his face is when a punt that fluttered five yards like a shuttlecock nearly wiped out a whole day’s work.

Like him or not, Lou Holtz proved his mettle. His is an undefeated team that must yet interrupt Boston College’s seven-game winning streak to stay that way, and already we can hear the old king of tut-tut-tut telling us that Boston College must be the greatest football team in the history of football teams that have lost to Northwestern. The patter is down pat. The act is down cold.

In the locker room after the big game, a Florida State player, Clifton Abraham, said he simply couldn’t fathom losing to Notre Dame. He said: “For every one person they have, we have three people better.”

Not one head nodded.

Wrong time, wrong room.