SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The Notre Dame Mormons will be out in force today, sitting everywhere from the Fighting Irish student section to the president's box wearing Cougar gear as BYU invades this storied football shrine.
Jim Davis, a 1973 graduate of Provo High, with bachelor's and master's degrees from BYU and a doctorate from Iowa, is a professor at Notre Dame. He is the first business strategist to ever receive tenure at Notre Dame as director of the Gigot Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.
He was also my neighbor growing up.
Today, Davis will be a guest of the Notre Dame president as he hosts Bill Marriott, a heavyweight at BYU's college of business. BYU has tried to recruit Davis to come home and he's even gone through an interview with an LDS general authority for a job at BYU — but the timing isn't right. Even the church authority told Davis he was needed at Notre Dame.
"I'll be wearing a BYU hat, a Notre Dame sweatshirt, and I'll cheer for whichever team wins today," Davis said. He rotates his two faculty tickets among his seven children.
"Hey, it should be an interesting game. Both teams are struggling, they mirror each other."
Davis just received an endowment this year for directorship in the Mendoza College of Business Management. He is now the Siegfried Director of Entrepreneurial Studies at Notre Dame, a program honored nationally last month by the NASDAQ Center of Excellence.
His parents, retired BYU housing administrator Howard Davis and his wife, Marjorie, fear their son loves Notre Dame so much, he'll convert to Catholicism.
"No fear in that," Jim said. "Someday I'll come home to BYU, but right now this is my life, my baby."
His baby is a 6-year old program that is churning out students who are hatching huge businesses. One understudy recently sold a two-year computer server business to Intel for $90 million. Davis uses the Angel Network, a group of 155 venture capitalists, to kick start winning business plans which, through his help, are turning into economy gold.
Back in Utah where multilevel l networking plans rival real estate ventures, Davis' students are attacking the economy with what he calls "real businesses."
Davis has traveled around the world for Notre Dame, establishing entrepreneurial internships and lecturing. He has stood five feet from the pope in the Vatican and been blessed. "But I wouldn't trade that at all for the (LDS) temple ceremony," Davis said.
While 85 percent of Notre Dame students are Catholic, more than 5 percent of Notre Dame's business college graduate program are Mormons who are leading their classes, according to Davis.
There is an LDS Institute of Religion at Notre Dame, taught by graduate student Patrick Mason from Salt Lake City. The winner of a $15,000 cash prize in Notre Dame's 2002 McCloskey Business Plan competition was a Mormon student from Mesa, Ariz., named Richard Crandall. Last year the winner of the Dean's Award was LDS. "One after another our guys are excelling here," Davis said. "We are making a mark here."
Crandall's business plan is now a thriving nutritional business with the federal government.
Each year, buses from the Nauvoo study program brings LDS youth to Notre Dame for an official tour.
"This is a good place with good people. The people at Notre Dame are good Christian people of faith and devotion, and I have nothing but the utmost respect and reverence for all they do.
"I've taught at state-sponsored schools before and it is nice to be involved with a university that has a set of core values and people who live them," Davis said.
Like BYU, Notre Dame has it's own honor code called Dolac. "It's taken serious and is bases on honesty, integrity and treatment of people. These are sincere people who are trying to do it right. Not everything lines up with what the LDS believe, but it's great to be working at a value-based school."
When Davis first came to Notre Dame, he wondered how he'd be treated as a Mormon. He is currently on the high council of the South Bend Indiana Stake and has served as a LDS seminary teacher. "Well, they treat me like a king. I've actually had people come up to me and tell me, 'Hey, you are more Catholic than we are.' They are not out of harmony with my beliefs."
Davis is required to go to Mass twice a year — once at the beginning of school and at graduate ceremonies in late spring. He marches in his academic robes with priests. Noon Mass is conducted in a chapel just a few feet outside his office daily.
If Davis has a football player struggling in class, he has to only make a phone call to the football office, and the Notre Dame player will not play on Saturday.
Football? Davis describes the Notre Dame game-day experience "incredible" and a sight to behold. On some Saturdays, more than 20,000 fans without tickets wander outside the stadium, just for the experience and taste of the atmosphere. "It's a culture, a family a feeling that cannot be described."
Former Notre Dame students make pilgrimages to South Bend for football weekends. They'll go to the dorms and knock on a door with a case of beer and say: "Here, take this, could you leave for an hour so I can just be here in this room."
Hotels and motels from Kokomo to Michigan City and all around the environs of South Bend are locked up. "To get a room, you call two years in advance and pay double or triple the price and you must take the room for three days, not just Friday night. You might pay $175 per night at a Motel 6. The socioeconomic impact of football at Notre Dame is huge.," Davis said.
Old men who graduated in the '40s or '50s will show up in plaid pants and coats and wander around campus, soaking it all in.
Davis' son-in-law, a Notre Dame graduate student, Joshua Francis, used to work in BYU's ticket office. He will sit in the Irish student section today wearing a BYU shirt. His daughter, Casandra Joy, is called the Irish Cougar.
"I've been here 11 years and never tired of Notre Dame football," Davis said. "This is a school that doesn't play a mambsey-pambsey schedule. If they lose, the lose to the best. If they win, they're beating the best. If you see a Notre Dame game here, you are seeing future NFL players."
On Friday afternoon, the Notre Dame band marches through campus. In the golden domed administration building, a trumpet corps gives a concert featuring the Notre Dame fight song and other campus favorites.
"I'll tell you, they don't have homecoming here. Every home game is homecoming, and thousands come here and fill up the campus just to feel the legend," Davis said.
"I was at BYU when Steve Young and Jim McMahon played, and they were the legends and it was a special time. But at BYU fans come late and leave early. Here, they soak it in way before and after. You see people running to Mass after the game, going to the grotto to light candles — win or lose —and just enjoy the experience they consider an important event of their life.
"This," Davis said, "is Notre Dame football."
E-mail: dharmon@desnews.com