From BC Traitor to Notre Dame Legend: Frank Leahy’s Legacy Endures in ‘The Holy War’

"The Holy War" refers to the football matchup between Boston College and Notre Dame. Here is the story of Frank Leahy's role in forming the historic rivalry.

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Sport has always carried a trace of the sacred.

Fans pray for victory as if outcomes are decided by divine will. Even the language of sport draws on faith: “Hail Mary,” “wing and a prayer,” “God-given talent.” A fanbase, too, often resembles a religion—defined by its own values, rituals, and traditions shaped by place, history, and culture.

For Boston College and Notre Dame, the bond between sport and faith exists on an entirely different level.

Forged by individuals with spiritual commonalities—the Irish-Catholic diaspora of Boston, Mass., educated by Jesuit priests, and the Congregation of the Holy Cross, a French missionary order spearheaded by the reverend Edward Sorin, who arrived in South Bend, Ind., during the mid-19th century—from their earliest days, the two universities have embodied the virtues of inquiry, faith, and service with a similar objective.

But on the gridiron, Notre Dame and Boston College have a bitterness for one another.

As the only two Catholic schools in the United States with FBS Division I football programs, the connection between BC and Notre Dame is unlike any other in the nation.

And the person who is, to a certain degree, responsible for establishing the timeless friction between BC and Notre Dame is a man named Frank Leahy.

The trophy of “The Holy War,” a nickname for the rivalry between Boston College and Notre Dame that first applied to football, but to all sports nowadays, was coined in Leahy’s namesake.

Leahy’s story is one that all Boston College and Notre Dame fans alike should be aware of, and it deserves attention every time a football matchup between the schools arises.

On Saturday, the 27th edition of the matchup will occur.

“Frank Leahy was the Fort Sumter of ‘The Holy War,’” Ivan Maisel, the author of American Coach: The Triumph and Tragedy of Notre Dame Legend Frank Leahy, who had an exclusive interview with Boston College Eagles On SI, said.

Here is the story of Leahy’s controversial actions which spurned decades of feud between the Eagles and the Fighting Irish, a quarrel between the hashmarks which still remains to this day—72 years after Leahy’s retirement from football.

From Commuter School to Cotton Bowl

The transformation of Boston College’s football program in 1939 is a testament to the internal fire which spread inside Leahy from the very moment he touched down in Chestnut Hill, Mass. 

Leahy was either going to attain premier status among college football’s absolute finest or die trying.

“In 1939, BC had four buildings, none of them dorms,” Maisel said. “It was a commuter school. The typical student took the bus to campus, went to class, either worked his job on campus or went to football practice, then went home and worked in his parents' store. Rinse and repeat.”

Until Leahy’s hiring, the University was not capable of fostering a dominant football program—in part, due to a lack of brand recognition and resources.

But Leahy converted BC into a squad with legitimate title aspirations in a rapid manner.

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Prior to his tenure at BC, Leahy coached Fordham’s line for six years—including an undersized guard on the 1935-36 squads by the name of Vince Lombardi. Leahy, himself, played on the offensive line at Notre Dame from 1928-30, under a coach named Knute Rockne. Still, Rockne holds the highest winning percentage of any head coach in college football history.

The student newspaper of Boston College, The Heights, was quick to take notice of Leahy’s stature in the college football world before the 1939 season had even begun.

In The Heights’ Sept. 29 edition from that year, the newspaper ran a series of articles about Leahy’s potential in the new system.

From 1937-38, the two years prior to the start of Leahy’s tenure, and shortly after the program’s revival following the Great Depression—BC did not fund a football team between the years of 1919 and 1937—the Eagles went 10-5-3.

Once Leahy took control, the paper did not expect Leahy to lose a single game.

For such an insignificant community at the time, the hype around Leahy exuded legitimacy, according to The Heights. His presence on campus was immediately tangible.

“It has been a long night and we welcome the dawn of fresh skies,” an article from the Sept. 29 edition read. “As a matter of fact leaden skies have been depressing for so long we have long since cried ourselves out and are ready for raucous laughter. There is a different spirit at the Heights. We are hopeful once again.”

Leahy immediately imposed a new offensive scheme as an ode to Rockne, implementing lateral plays and pre-snap shifts.

Leahy called his system “deception with straight power.”

Boston College hired a new President the same year, the Reverend William J. Murphy, S.J., who prioritized athletic prowess.

“I feel that with such loyal support we cannot fail but have a most successful season,” Leahy told The Heights in an exclusive interview.

Even Fordham released a brochure for sportswriters, according to The Heights, promising Boston College that it picked the right man for the job.

“‘He won’t fail at Boston,’” the brochure read. “‘It was inevitable that Fordham should lose him. Boston College’s gridiron fortunes could not have been placed in more capable hands. Born in Winner, South Dakota, he has made the name of that town prophetic of his own career.’”

In fact, he did not fail.

BC’s only two losses in 1939 were to Florida during the regular season and to Clemson in the Cotton Bowl, and they were not fully a result of poor performance.

Rather, due to racism which plagued American society at the time—this was the pre-Civil-Rights era—BC left out its star running back, Lou Montgomery, for its two defeats.

Montgomery was not allowed to play against certain opponents—a request made by Florida and Clemson that year, which Leahy and BC’s administrators agreed to—because of the color of his skin.

“[Florida and Clemson] were both southern schools in which Boston College agreed not to play Lou, who was a Black kid from Brockton, [Mass.],” Maisel said. “They lost to Florida, 7-0, and to Clemson, 6-3, and Leahy was a young coach who wasn’t going to make a peep about that. … It wasn’t a pretty chapter.”

The next year, Leahy’s second in Chestnut Hill, the Eagles went undefeated and beat Tennessee in the 1940 Sugar Bowl. The Volunteers were coached by Colonel Robert Neyland—later General Neyland—whom Tennessee's current home stadium is named after.

According to Maisel, Neyland said his 1940 team was the best he ever coached. But BC bested the Volunteers, 19-13, and scored the winning touchdown via Neyland’s signature play.

“Leahy kept watching his scout team score against his first-team defense on that play, and three days before the game, he put it in the playbook,” Maisel said. “He called it ‘The Tennessee special.’ Charlie O’Rourke scored the winning touchdown.”

Once again, Montgomery did not travel with the team in 1940, nor did he travel for the Eagles’ matchup with Tulane that year, either.

Nevertheless, with or without Montgomery, success rang like church bells on a Sunday morning across the Heights.

“BC was a little old school that needed money, so [Leahy] kept his mouth shut,” Maisel said. “Leahy expressed regret at how he handled it, but Montgromery told Boston Magazine, before he died, that if he had to do it over again, he wouldn’t have gone to BC.”

At the time, Leahy was unbothered by the bigotry which virtually left Montgomery off the roster. 

His eyes were set on what he considered to be the end all, be all of his own personhood.

Burning BC at the Cross

Nothing ever stood in Leahy’s way from achieving his lifelong goal—becoming the head coach at Notre Dame, his alma mater. Even if it meant turning on the program which brought him to relevancy and would have probably kept him for decades longer if that had remained a possibility.

To Leahy, it did not, because his commitment to Notre Dame paralleled nothing else in life, according to Maisel.

“His single-minded devotion to the university is what propelled him to such great success,” Maisel said. “[It] also propelled him to such poor health and eventually being forced to retire at age 45 because the stress was eating him alive. Nothing was more important to him than Notre Dame winning a football game.”

Five weeks after leading the Eagles to an 11-0 record in 1940, Leahy agreed to terms on a five-year contract extension, vowing to continue his supreme reign, still in its infant stages, at BC.

“In the days before Leahy signed the contract, the AD at Boston College, [John P. Curley], announced that Frank Leahy would be the head coach until his hair turned white,” Maisel said. “He signed the contract extension on February 4 of 1941. And 11 days later, his hair turned white.”

On the very same day that Curley extended Leahy, Elmer Layden, Notre Dame’s head coach from 1934-40, resigned.

So Leahy did what he was destined to do.

“Leahy claimed that when he negotiated the contract, BC agreed that if the Notre Dame job came open, he could leave, no questions asked,” Maisel said. “And no one at BC, from the athletic director to any of the priests, could recall ever having that conversation.”

But Leahy’s mind was made up. 

His career at Boston College fell into limbo for a short period of days after he publicly declared that he was going to take the Notre Dame gig. Leahy called up Curley and the rest of the priesthood to tell them straight up.

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“[He] basically [said], ‘What are you going to do about it?’” Maisel said. “BC just said ‘Fine, go.’ But Father [Maurice V.] Dullea was incensed, not so much with Leahy, but with the priest at Notre Dame. He wrote an incendiary letter to the President of Notre Dame, who basically pooh poohed the letter.”

The South Bend Tribune called it “the biggest lie of his life,” but Leahy’s prophecy to follow in the footsteps of Rockne, who he won two National Championships with as a player, morphed into a sudden reality—unbeknownst to Boston College.

Infuriated, Father Maurice Dellea, S.J., a Jesuit at BC who was well connected with the football program, wrote a letter to the head of the Church of the Holy Cross, which Notre Dame presides under, condemning the University for never asking permission to speak to Leahy.

“He had a point,” Maisel said. “Because Notre Dame never asked until long after they were way down the road with him. … He thought they had not dealt honorably with BC, and that’s the genesis of the hard feelings between the two fanbases, the two Universities.”

Diverging Routes in the Post-Leahy Era

Leahy packed his bags and fled to South Bend hurriedly, like he was sitting on a jar of tacks.

He had not stepped foot on campus since he graduated, and he did not intend to step foot on campus until his name became synonymous with Notre Dame itself.

When his foot eventually touched Earth in South Bend, at 3:15 p.m. on Feb. 15, 1941, his vision was realized.

“That’s how significant it was to him,” Maisel said. “He came from, I mean, he was a total bootstrap story. He came from nothing, and he always remembered the feeling he had the day he arrived on the Notre Dame campus.”

From that day on, according to Maisel, Leahy built Notre Dame—not just as a football program, but as a university—into the higher institution that exists in South Bend today.

Over the course of 11 years with the program, he amassed an 87-11-9 record, which is the second-highest winning percentage of any head coach in the history of college football—second to Rockne.

Leahy only stopped coaching the team because of World War II, from 1944-45, but he returned for the 1946 season after he was discharged.

Even amid scholarship cuts in 1950, as the university sought to buttress Notre Dame’s academic mission and put athletics on the backburner, Maisel said, Leahy’s Fighting Irish football factory chugged along.

His worst record at Notre Dame occurred that year, when the team went 4-4-1, but he rebounded with two consecutive seven-win seasons, and ended his tenure with a 9-0-1 record in 1953.

“I would argue, and did argue, that Frank Leahy is who made Notre Dame Notre Dame,” Maisel said. “If he had not come along, it would just be remembered as the place where Rockne coached. But because Leahy came there and won to the same degree as Rockne, then all of a sudden the winning became identified with Notre Dame rather than with just Rockne.”

The darker sides to winning are not always present—the unseen experience of an individual with the weight of the world on his back. 

For Leahy, that came in the form of serious health complications, mentally and physically, from the stress of needing to win—not for himself, but for the uiversity and its following.

Leahy nearly lost his life in the middle of Notre Dame’s matchup against Georgia Tech in 1953, when he suffered a pancreatic attack and collapsed in the locker room.

“By that time, he was just beat up,” Maisel said. “He just couldn’t take it anymore. I mean, Urban Meyer coached himself into illness at Florida and took some time off, and then coached himself into illness at Ohio State. It’s not completely unheard of in the modern day, but he was Leahy.”

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Being Leahy was not just about leading the football program. Leahy’s influence stemmed beyond the realm of sport. 

His recreation of Notre Dame football served as a beacon to communities across America which experienced backlash during the anti-Catholicism movement of the mid-20th century.

To them, Leahy was a mythical figure—like God himself.

“They looked to Notre Dame as a way to show the rest of America that they were normal, that they were people, too,” Maisel said, referring to the growing anti-Catholic sentiment at the time. “Notre Dame was this beacon of revenge. Or just a way to show the rest of the country that ‘We know how to do this, too.’”

Boston College was fortunate to have Leahy run its football program during the saner years of his life, before that pressure amounted. 

But there is no argument about which school benefited the most from Leahy’s influence.

As opposed to Notre Dame, a perennial National Championship contender in the 21st century—well after Leahy’s time—the number of times BC has grazed national recognition in the post-Leahy era can be counted on, at the very most, a pair of hands.

“There’s a bit of a big brother, little brother thing going on there,” Maisel said. “Because it’s been a long time since BC has been competitive at the same level as Notre Dame. But you never know. Saturday could be the day.”

Enter “The Holy War.”

The Holy War

The first time BC and Notre Dame met was in 1975, 23 years after Leahy’s retirement from coaching.

According to Maisel, there is probably a better reason than just chance as to why the schools did not schedule a matchup until that point—especially given Leahy’s connection to both.

“I think that's an indication of the hard feelings between the two schools,” Maisel said. “So I don't know whether it was Notre Dame ignoring BC, or the hard feelings that existed between the two. … But there is a version of those events that will satisfy whatever side of the argument you're on.”

When the inaugural game finally came about, however, it was fitting that Leahy’s name was used for the trophy awarded to the winner.

“It’s a great rivalry,” BC head coach Bill O’Brien said. “The history of college football is awesome, and Notre Dame is a big part of the history of college football. So is Boston College. It’s the only two Catholic schools that play [FBS] Division 1 football.”

While the Fighting Irish hold a 17-9 lead over the Eagles in the all-time series, and have won nine of the last 10 matchups, the first 33 years of “The Holy War” were relatively evenly matched—between 1975 and 2008, BC went 9-8, including 7-1 from 1999 to 2008.

“I mean, you think about the past, [there are] great games in this rivalry,” O’Brien said. “You know, the game back in [1993] where [Notre Dame was] No. 1 [in the country]. You know, we just inducted Brian St. Pierre into the Hall of Fame. He beat them three times [as a player]. So there’s been some great BC victories.”

O’Brien does not view Leahy as a traitor in full, but he understands the sentiment behind that feeling. His players are well aware of the history, he claimed.

“I mean, I wouldn’t go that far, but yeah, no, I understand,” O’Brien said. “This game was named after him, right? It’s ‘The Holy War.’ It’s ‘The Vatican Bowl.’ It’s the ‘Frank Leahy Cup.’ … I believe our guys really know what it’s about to be a part of this rivalry.”

In a little over 24 hours, O’Brien is going to be coaching on the opposite sideline from the one Leahy formed his reputation on, and there is quite a big difference between the two—as opposed to BC, with every new Notre Dame coaching hire, Leahy’s legacy is directly in the backdrop.

Nevertheless, without Leahy, it is quite possible that neither BC nor Notre Dame would be what they are today—both as a football program and a University.

Despite the obvious connection between the two, that eternal resentment between BC and Notre Dame when the whistles start blowing is entirely a product of the man himself.

“Well, it’s the Holy War,” BC running back Jordan McDonald said. “If you don’t know about it, you don’t need to be at BC.”