What was it like to work for Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz?
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SOUTH BEND ― It seemed like a dream.
Standing on the old Notre Dame football practice fields that late summer day in 1994, Bob Chmiel couldn’t believe his luck. One day not long before, he was stuck at a desk in the University of Michigan football offices pondering what direction to take his coaching career.
Having worked six seasons for legendary coach Bo Schembechler, then four more after Bo retired, Chimel felt it was time to make a move. Time for a change of scenery and new coaching challenges. Maybe get back closer to his mother, who lived alone in Chicago.
Chmiel’s coaching path led him to Notre Dame, a 75-minute drive from his Chicago home. There, he worked for another coaching legend in Lou Holtz. That first day on Cartier Field, the new boss called the new guy over for a word. Chmiel stared intently at the slight man in glasses who spoke with a lisp and smoked a pipe.
Chmiel couldn’t help but wonder if it was real. Was he there? On that campus? Was Lou Holtz really addressing him? None of it seemed true at the time. All of it was.
“Over his shoulder, the sky was so blue that you couldn’t believe,” Chmiel said, recalling the day 32 years later from his home in Granger, Indiana. “There was the Golden Dome and there was the Blessed Mother. I looked over Coach’s shoulder like, am I really here? Is this a dream?”
Weeks earlier, in countless conversations with Schembechler, Chmiel learned that Holtz had called his coaching rival often through the years. Whenever an open spot on his staff needed to be filled, Holtz often thought about hiring Chmiel. He was an ace recruiter. He was a hard worker. He knew the game. He was a disciple of Schembechler, which means he was, like Holtz, a disciple of another coaching legend, Ohio State’s Woody Hayes.
The question from Holtz, and the answer from Schembechler, long remained the same. No, Lou, if Bo was coaching at Michigan, Chmiel would coach at Michigan. Until one day, years after Schembechler was no longer head coach, it was time for Chmiel to leave Michigan behind.
Be by your phone at 7 o’clock on Friday, Schembechler said to Chmiel.
In those days, that meant sitting in your kitchen or your den or your home office and waiting for something that had a rotary dial and a receiver to ring. This was pre-cellular phones, so it wasn’t like Chmiel could have a fully charged phone with him in the car or be out and about near good reception. He had to be at home staring at the phone, wishing for it to ring.
At 7 o’clock Friday, Chmiel was in his Ann Arbor home. And at 7 o’clock, in his Ann Arbor home, the phone rang.
It was Holtz.
“Coach calls and says, ‘I want to bring you to the University of Notre Dame, and I want you to be here on Tuesday,” Chmiel remembered. “I said, ‘Coach, I’ll be there on Tuesday.’”
That was that. Tuesday came and Chmiel was being shown here and there and everywhere around the Notre Dame campus. He had yet to see his new boss. Not in the morning, not at lunch, not as afternoon turned to evening. He was touring Loftus Center, which then served as the team’s weight training/indoor facility. Chmiel stood for a minute next to two gray, non-descript heavy doors.
Like that, the doors opened and out stepped Holtz, appearing from seemingly nowhere like one of his magic tricks. Holtz took Chmiel through the doors and into the team meeting room, where he was introduced to the Irish as the new tight ends coach/recruiting coordinator.
“I can’t even say how I felt,” Chmiel said. “I was like, what am I even doing here? How did this happen to me?”
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Pete Cordelli knows how it happened to him. How he went from a high school quarterback in Northeast Pennsylvania with NFL aspirations to being recruited by Holtz to play at North Carolina State to laying in a hospital bed after suffering two cracked vertebrae in his neck after being tackled in the team’s final scrimmage before his senior season.
Cordelli didn’t want to admit it then, but that tackle ended his football career. Laying there with doctors debating whether to fit him with a halo to help heal the injury, Cordelli knew it was time to go in a different football direction. Holtz held the road map.
Holtz also had been hurt while a football player in college at Kent State. Unable to continue, he became a student assistant. That was the start of his coaching career. What someone once did for Holtz, Holtz would do for Cordelli.
“He said, ‘When you get out of the hospital, go back to class and when you’re done with class, you come over here and you’ll be a student coach,’” Cordelli recalled. “If it wasn’t for him, I never get into coaching.”
Chmiel worked for Holtz at Notre Dame for three years. Cordelli followed Holtz from North Carolina State to Arkansas to Minnesota and then to Notre Dame. He worked for him for a combined 10 years. Both assistant coaches have different stories as to how they came to serve on Holtz’s staffs, but both have similar stories of what it was like to work for the man.
It was tough. It was trying. There were many difficult days, even when they were winning. Those were days that neither would trade for anything. Having worked for Schembechler, and knowing his history with Hayes, Chmiel knew what to expect from Holtz.
It was much the same. Demanding, but fulfilling. Every single day.
“Going into a staff meeting with Coach Holtz, there was nothing new under the sun after Bo,” Chmiel said. “They were so alike.”
When Holtz entered the staff room, everything about that room changed. His personality and presence commanded your attention. You sat up straighter in your chair. You were even more detailed in watching the film. He made sure that if Holtz needed to hear you say something, you said it. You knew what you needed to know. You didn’t want to not know, not for Holtz.
“You felt the energy,” Cordelli said. “Some coaches walked into the meeting room, you go, eh, I don’t know. He made sure there was a bounce in his step. When he spoke, there was a purpose, a meaning.”
Holtz’s criticism could cut deeply, but he was often just as quick to praise a player. He might dress down the starting right guard on one run play, only to build him back up the next. The longer he spoke, the more excited he got. Speaking with that lisp, carrying all that energy, Holtz would start to talk faster. Then, faster. Soon, spit would be flying everywhere.
Once he got going, it seemed like he would never stop. He was Red Bull on 100. Then, like that, silence. Holtz would just shut it all down, turn and walk out of the room, but not before one final comment.
“Sometimes,” Cordelli said, “it was just, ‘Dammit, nobody understands how hard it is to be the head coach at Notre Dame.’”
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Chmiel and Cordelli have spent every day since Holtz died on March 4 at age 89 reflecting on their time with him. Not just during the big games on Saturday afternoons or the big moments where it seemed like they might never lose, but the quieter times that didn’t involve 59,075 fans in the Notre Dame Stadium stands.
Moments in the Joyce Center first-floor offices still mean as much ― and sometimes more ― as what happened across what was once Juniper Road in the stadium. Every season for the last few on the day of the first home game, Chmiel would meet with the Holtz’s Heroes group at a hotel near Eddy Street Commons. Holtz would make it a point to be there. The former head coach and his former assistant always found time to share a private moment with a chat, a hug and, invariably, a thank you from Chmiel to Holtz for having made possible his three seasons in South Bend.
“I really can’t put into words the thoughts that I had when I learned he was gone,” Chmiel said. “It hurts.”
Cordelli, who planned to drive from his home in Nashville, Tennessee for the visitation and funeral Mass at the Basilica, dreaded the trip. Everywhere he would go once back on campus, another memory of his time working for Holtz awaited. Another moment he wished he could share with his boss.
Like when Holtz would hold the season’s first team Mass at the Grotto. Or the Mass on the day of a home game held at a dorm on the edge of campus. Then, the walk to the stadium. Or that first season with him in 1986 when Holtz had players and coaches stay at a monastery on campus the night before home games.
Sleep back then was a rumor in that old building where every creak, every closing of a door, was heard in stereo everywhere and by everyone.
“He’d always say, ‘How did it go?’” Cordelli said. “I’d say not worth a damn, Coach. Nobody got any sleep. He was always like, eh, if it’s good enough for the priests … I’d say, Coach, we don’t have many priests putting helmets and shoulder pads on.”
Cordelli put his helmet and shoulder pads on for Holtz. He put his headset on and devised game plans for Holtz. He followed Holtz around the country because coaching for him meant more than anyone ever knew.
“He impacted so many lives on and off the field,” Cordelli said. “There has been a lot of reflection, a lot of memories. That will never end because of what he meant to me.”
From that first day on the practice field to the last day when he wore Holtz’s headset for the head coach’s final home game against Rutgers, it all still seemed like a dream for Chmiel. Every long night, every grueling staff meeting, every demand made of him by the head coach was more a blessing than a burden.
Former Notre Dame offensive line coach Joe Moore, one of those old-school, chain-smoking, gruff and rough around every edge types who spoke with a graveling voice and had a stare that could make a burly offensive lineman melt, had finally seen and heard enough. One day during a staff meeting, Moore turned to Chmiel and unloaded.
“He said, ‘Chmiel, when is this honeymoon going to be over for you? I’m sick of it!’” Chmiel said.
Moore was right, but it didn’t change Chmiel’s outlook on where he was working, what he was doing and, most importantly, who he was working for.
“That sums up my time at Notre Dame with Coach Holtz,” Chmiel said. “I loved him dearly.”
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at tnoie@sbtinfo.com
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Notre Dame football was special under head coach Lou Holtz
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