BARRINGTON, Ill. — It was an event that was largely overlooked by the national media in the flood of National Football League news and continuing agita over all things B.C.S.
But while one Bowl Championship Series school, Notre Dame, displayed its wares emphatically in breaking a 3-game men's basketball losing streak with an 82-69 victory over DePaul, another -- the host team -- honored one of the most beloved figures in college sports history.
A few days short of his 90th birthday, Raymond Joseph Meyer (Notre Dame '38) sat among hundreds of his closest friends at what is now called the Allstate Arena and despite his beloved Blue Demons, whom he coached for 40 years, falling to the visiting Fighting Irish, he was smiling constantly.
Ray Meyer was one of the most rugged of cornerstones in college basketball for two generations. Players from George Mikan to Howie Carl to Mark Aguirre kept the Demons on the hoops map for the vast majority of those years.
In his seniority, much as had been the case with the much beloved patriarch of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Arthur J. Rooney, Ray Meyer had become a larger-than-life cultural icon not just for DePaul, but for the city of Chicago.
"He IS Chicago," Mayor Richard M. Daley had said last Friday. "He is as much Chicago as deep-dish pizza, the Buckingham Fountain or the Board of Trade."
Your faithful correspondent was a student at Villanova University in February, 1970, and as assistant sports editor of the campus paper, was covering the sparsely-attended Villanova at DePaul game one bitterly cold Saturday afternoon.
It was a different era to say the least. Chicago had four daily newspapers -- the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Today. None of them saw fit to send a writer to Alumni Hall in the city's Lincoln Park neighborhood, just 3 miles north of the area where all four papers published.
As the post-game locker room interviewing broke up, there was Ray Meyer. On the phone, dictating the box score to a desk assistant at one of the papers. "Porter, 10 field goals, 6-for-7 from the line, 26 points..." Right...P-O-R-T-E-R. He's their All-American..."
That was quintessential Ray Meyer. Never a thought of public complaint, always accessible.
One of my colorful relatives, the late Dr. John N. Fogel, a Notre Dame classmate of Meyer's, used to tell the story about banging underneath the boards of the old, musty, dirt-tracked Notre Dame field house with Meyer, who lettered all four years at Notre Dame.
"Nobody was more competitive than Ray Meyer," he used to say. "He was a constant battler and his teams reflected that."
Meyer's classic Germanic face lit up, that trademark gap-toothed smile the exclamation point when the name John Nicholas Fogel surfaced.
"Ah yes, the good Doctor, how is he?" Ray would ask years later, told he was talking to Fogel's nephew as he prepared for his color commentator role at a DePaul-Notre Dame game in 1992. His nearly octogenarian eyes told a tale of reverence. "Wonderful man, John Fogel."
Indeed, the feeling was mutual. The big guy had toiled as a reserve center and guard on Notre Dame's mostly-forgettable football teams of the 1930s, but remembered Meyer from his days at Mount Carmel High School while Meyer guided a talented St. Patrick hoops team in some brutal Chicago Catholic League battles.
"Ray represents all that is good," said Fogel, a surgeon in San Diego who hosted Ray and his son Joey, a 1971 graduate who played for his dad and later replaced Ray as Blue Demons coach, when DePaul played in San Diego's Cabrillo Classic in 1981. "We keep in touch as often as we can, but he's awfully busy at DePaul."
Meyer compiled a spectacular 67% winning percentage, one of the best of his era. And his son did the same, before the university made a fateful decision after much-admired Athletic Director Ed Manetta returned home to his alma mater, St. John's University in New York.
Bill Bradshaw, an upwardly-mobile young marketing whiz from LaSalle University in Philadelphia, replaced Manetta and with stunning quickness, an instability permeated the DePaul athletic department.
The joy of years and years of camaraderie became daily tension. The junior Meyer's record collapsed to a disastrous 3-23, and Bradshaw, who had been looking for an excuse to put his own guy on the coaching hot seat, unceremoniously fired Joey, basically severing an over half-century relationship between the Meyer family and their beloved university.
The hiring of Pat Kennedy brought further tension between the new coach and Meyer family and Ray, who had looked forward to his daily trip to his unpretentious Alumni Hall office, was unconsolable.
But Bradshaw's mercurial stint on the North Side was being scrutinized closely and in the latter phases of Kennedy's undistinguished career, the alumni and media outcry for change at DePaul brought a major change as Women's Athletic Director Joan Lenti Ponsetto replaced Bradshaw.
It didn't come in time to sustain Joey Meyer's DePaul career -- he is now coaching in an N.B.A. developmental league in North Carolina. But a load had been lifted.
"We thought it'd be good to rebuild the bridges to the Meyer family," said Ponsetto, who is married to former Blue Demon basketball standout Joe Ponsetto.
The look on Ray Meyer's face this past Sunday said the rest. Tears welled in his eyes a couple of times. His beloved wife of over 40 years, Marge, had passed on in the early 1990s, but there was no mistaking the genuine peace that permeated the man many just call "Coach."
"This is a wonderful, wonderful moment," he said finally, as the university dedicated the Allstate Arena court to Ray and Marge Meyer. "My only regret is that Marge couldn't be around to see this."
Those tears you might have seen, had you been watching the WGN-TV broadcast, were coming from Notre Dame's players.
Ray Meyer had that kind of impact on everybody whose path he crossed.
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