Notre Dame plays UCLA in basketball at Pauley Pavilion this morning, and by morning we're talking 10 a.m., followed by a car wash and pancake brunch.
"I didn't know it was back on the schedule, to tell you the truth," Austin Carr, the former Irish star/villain who scorched UCLA for 46 points in 1971, said of the game.
Roger Valdiserri was driving to a round of golf in Scottsdale, Ariz., this week when he answered his cellphone.
Now retired, he once prodigiously presided over athletic public relations at Notre Dame and was the man who suggested that Joe Theismann switch the pronunciation of his name from "Theesman" so that it rhymed with "Heisman."
Valdiserri helped forge the early UCLA-Notre Dame basketball relationship, sat in on the broadcast negotiations and, in the heyday, held a circus seat next to Irish Coach Richard "Digger" Phelps.
Asked about this UCLA-Notre Dame game, Valdiserri wanted to know:
"Is it going to be televised?"
UCLA vs. Notre Dame . . . yes, it's going to be televised.
The difference between the series then and now is the difference between love and a handshake.
Explaining to people what UCLA-Notre Dame was isn't easy. Maybe you had to have come of age between 1970 and 1980.
"There was a mystery about it back then," former UCLA great Marques Johnson said Friday. "There weren't all these summer camps and AAU teams. Adrian Dantley, I had only read about him. We were similar in size, so your mind would conjure up an image of what kind of player he is."
Johnson was a young teenager in 1971 when Carr scored 46 in Notre Dame's upset of UCLA on Jan. 23 of that year in South Bend, Ind.
Johnson was a die-hard UCLA fan, the incarnation of Sidney Wicks, but after that game he went to a local church in Baldwin Hills and destroyed an older kid in a challenge game.
"I became Austin Carr," Johnson said. "It was an 'I am God' basketball mentality. I remember bouncing one shot in off the ground."
Three years later Johnson, as a 17-year-old freshman, was on the Bruins' bench in South Bend when Notre Dame ended UCLA's 88-game winning streak.
The series used to be a circle-your-calendar event, framed in the stand-alone exclusivity of a world uncluttered by cable glut.
UCLA and Notre Dame played 42 times between 1966 and 1995. For years they played twice a season, home and away.
The schools met first in 1952, in East Lansing, at the Michigan State Classic, and once again in Los Angeles, in 1960.
