If you've ever seen the T-shirts piled in my dresser
If you've ever seen the T-shirts piled in my dresser, this one's for you.
From the Post this fall, a story about a senior at Gonzaga who attends football games. He's a fan, not a player. Which is exactly the point.
For diehard Gonzaga students, Saturday can be anything but relaxing. By choice. Saturday is football day for the Eagles. For the players on the team, this is what the team has been building up for all week. The adrenaline is pumping. Even when they are standing still, they are moving. Clapping hands, high-fiving teammates along the sidelines. You can feel the energy as the team anxiously waits to take the field.
Off the field, but less than a first down away from the team, the energy is just as amped. They aren't wearing uniforms, but they've risen early and dressed for the game.
McAuliffe slept in an extra hour, rising at 7:45 a.m., to meet some classmates for breakfast before heading downtown for the game. His purple Gonzaga shirts – more than a dozen – have their own special space in the closet. "I just reached in a grabbed the one on top," McAuliffe said.
My worn tees may only be for bed now. But they're still in the dresser.
The story gave me a nice kick of alum pride and so did the video below. I want to time-travel back to 1996 and show it to 17-year-old Patrick in his HTML class. It would blow his mind that Web videos were going to be more than The Spirit of Christmas. And that they didn't need days of downloading. And that anyone could shoot, edit, add special effects and post them to the Internet. Anyone at all, even kids on Eye Street.
Gonzaga lost the game mentioned, but the video displayed how the school has moved forward in all kinds of ways. After Fr. Novotny, the school president since my freshman year, died unexpectedly this fall, the football team wore memorial armbands. Though there may be no armbands for video editors, Novotny's leadership stretched across all kinds of academics, athletics and activities. Made the video possible.
One thing prompting me to post today was realizing this week that a few NPR colleagues also grew up in the area. The second prompt was friend Steve e-mailing about being in the school store recently. He'd married into an Eye Street family and was buying Christmas presents for a relation. He asked I'd gone to NU to keep wearing the Gonzaga purple. (The school store is something.) I couldn't totally disagree. A third was e-mailing with old classmates about catching a movie over New Year's. A fourth was seeing my alum uncle at the tree-cutting.
The fifth and final prompt came in catching up with mail this afternoon. In the stack was the most recent mailing from Gonzaga. Printed before Novotny's death, the mailing included a letter from him. It opened:
No matter how far I may wander from Eye Street, Gonzaga is never far from my thoughts. This is not just the consequence of devotion to responsibility, either noble or compulsive, that any of us face when away from work, especially in this age of instant and constant communication. It is, though, the result of something perhaps even more familiar.
We've probably all experienced the almost reflexive flash of recognition whenever we catch sight of something purple…
December 27th, 2010 at 1:19 AM
You went to Gonzaga? I went to Ireton…small world! You guys always beat us in sports – probably because our colors are shared by the most terrible team in Washington!
December 27th, 2010 at 9:46 PM
Ha! Does the Skins' win yesterday help at all? We were always so confused to cross the river into NoVa, a foreign land. We were sometimes just happy to make it there and back without getting lost.
January 30th, 2011 at 8:06 AM
[...] Had a nice lunch with my parents yesterday and picked up some mail. Among the pieces was the latest issue of the Gonzaga alum magazine, The Good News. The pages were filled with memories of former school president Fr. Novotny, whose unexpected death I've mentioned here. [...]