1. I stocked up on groceries today at Yoke's, in large part because Debbie wanted to prepare a warming, comforting fall dinner: chicken and dumplings. We invited Christy for dinner. We had a good time enjoying Debbie's delicious meal and yakking about any number of things.
2. Before dinner, I prepared a cheese plate with cave aged cheddar, stilton, blue cheese, white goat cheese and other cheeses, mostly from the Murray's counter at Fred Meyer in CdA. The cave aged cheddar was from Costco. We also had apple slices and Breton multi-grain crackers. The cheeses are full of great flavors. They are rich. A small amount of cheese goes a long way and it's a great pleasure to dive into the variety of textures and different strengths of the cheeses.
3. Pretty much by accident, I stumbled upon the 30 for 30 documentary, Catholics vs. Convicts (2016), filmmaker Patrick Creadon's insightful treatment of two concurrent stories. First, it covers the emerging college football rivalry between Notre Dame and the University of Miami, focused mostly on their epic and historic game in 1988 in South Bend when Miami was undefeated and the top-ranked team in the USA and Notre Dame was also undefeated and ranked in the top five. The bitterness of the rivalry stemmed from the two teams' 1985 contest in Miami. Miami creamed Notre Dame, 58-7. Miami ran up the score, taunted the Notre Dame players, danced and pranced when they scored or when they made great defensive plays. From the perspective of Notre Dame, Miami's victory was unsportsmanlike and humiliating. With a new head coach, Lou Holtz, by 1988, the Notre Dame program was elite again and, in the titanic 1988 game the Fighting Irish had assembled a team talented enough to possibly avenge the 1985 humiliation. This film explores what transpired in that 1988 contest.
The movie also covers a second story. As the 1988 Miami/Notre Dame game approached, earlier in the year, the Miami program had about three players run afoul with the law. The Fighting Irish's basketball captain, Joe Fredrick (his nephew CJ played basketball for Iowa and now has transferred to Kentucky) came up with a t-shirt idea that would nickname the 1988 game Catholic vs Convicts. The t-shirts were an underground effort. Notre Dame's administration had banned the making and selling of "black market" t-shirts -- an entrepreneurial effort that a student, Pat Walsh, had had great success with in the past. The t-shirts were a sensation. The slogan Catholics vs Convicts heightened the bitterness of the rivalry. The documentary explores how the t-shirts came to be produced, their popularity, and the consequences the students who produced them suffered for violating the university's policy about renegade shirts like this one.
I enjoyed the fact that the filmmaker, Patrick Creadon, was a senior at Notre Dame in the fall of 1988 and he was friends with the t-shirt makers and some of the football players. So, not only were the interviews with the coaches and players involved in this game fascinating, so were the interviews with the students who created the Catholics vs Convicts t-shirt and the way that slogan turned the football game into a morality play on the gridiron.
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