William Valentine Shakespeare: The Merchant of Menace

On Wednesday night, while doing some online research for the Jason Miller novella, I discovered a bit of fascinating ephemera that borders the sports and literary worlds: William Valentine Shakespeare (1912-74) was a a famed halfback for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team from 1933-35.

Because of his shared name with the other William Shakespeare, the sporting press dubbed Bill The Bard of Staten Island, The Bard of South Bend, and The Merchant of Menace. Shakespeare was a key player on November 2, 1935, when Notre Dame faced the undefeated 1935 Ohio State Buckeyes in front of a crowd of 81,000 at Ohio Stadium:

The 1935 Notre Dame-Ohio State match was regarded as one of the greatest comebacks in history of the sport. Red Barber, who broadcast the game on radio, later called it “the greatest college football game I ever called.” In The New York Times, Allison Danzig opened his report on the game by writing, “One of the greatest last-ditch rallies in football history toppled the dreaded Scarlet Scourge of Ohio State from its lofty pinnacle today as 81,000 dumbfounded spectators saw Notre Dame score three touchdowns in less than fifteen minutes to gain an almost miraculous 18–13 victory in jammed Buckeye Stadium.” Radio announcer Tom Manning added, “I always said Shakespeare had a pair of rosary beads and a bottle of holy water in his back pocket.”

The media picked up stories of the Catholic faithful praying for Notre Dame as they listened to the game on the radio. One nun told a reporter of overhearing a colleague in her convent “gamefully bargaining” and eventually “threatening” the Poor Souls and saints for another Notre Dame touchdown. The Chicago Tribune later noted the irony that it was a truly ecumenical group that combined for the famed “Hail Mary” pass: “Manziotti a Catholic, handed to Shakespeare, a Protestant on a fake reverse. Shakespeare passed to End Wayne Millner, a Jewish boy.” In 1969, as part of the centennial of the first college football game, the Associated Press conducted a poll to select the “game of the century”, and the 1935 Notre Dame-Ohio State game was chosen as the best game in the first 100 years of college football.

But that’s not the most interesting aspect of Bill Shakespeare’s career as an American football player for the Fighting Irish. No. It gets better:

The week after the Ohio State game, Notre Dame faced Northwestern featuring All-American end Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Before the game, the Associated Press carried a story profiling the two players: “Shakespeare and Longfellow will meet tomorrow —- not to trade verses, but to play all the football they know.” Longfellow later recalled, “Shakespeare and I played against each other for three years. Each year, because of our names, we got a terrific buildup. It was a natural, I suppose. All through my college days I never heard the end of it. The writers went wilder each year.” Longfellow got the better of Shakespeare in 1935, as he caught a touchdown pass to help Northwestern win the game, 14-7. Shakespeare attempted to lead the Irish to another come-from-behind victory, as he ran 48 yard to the Northwestern ten-yard line late in the game, but the Northwestern defense held. On the last play of the game, Shakespeare threw a “long, desperate pass”, but it was intercepted as time ran out.

This is research material that is definitely going in the novella; fact is truly stranger than fiction.

 

Purgatory Diaries: The Novel

“… plenty of booze but I can’t catch a buzz, cartons and cartons of cigarettes and not a match in sight.”

Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller

Jason Miller’s original play, That Championship Season, following the reunion of four high school basketball players and their coach long after the applause — and their youth — has faded, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1973, as well as the Tony Award for best play. After that overnight success, Jason Miller, as a writer, was finished, as essayed in the 2007 play I wrote with Tom Flannery, Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller.

There is now a new Broadway revival of Championship starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patrick (Miller’s son), Chris Noth, Brian Cox, and Jim Gaffigan, which is sure to renew interest in Miller’s astonishing work as a playwright. For this, and a few other reasons, I have decided to sit down and a novel-novella based on my original play, with the title truncated to The Purgatory Diary of Jason Miller.

One of those “few other reasons” is that, to be honest, I’m still smarting over a newspaper review of a Bob Hughes production of the play in Pennsylvania, wherein the critic writes that Go Irish was “written with the help of L.A. playwright Roger (sic) Jacobs … (the play) shares Flannery’s perspective without asking us to toss out preconceptions.”

Horseshit. As I essayed for Hollywood Elsewhere in 2007 in an article titled Miller’s Ghost, the play originated with me after a chance encounter with Miller on the set of Exorcist III. I sought out Flannery, a Scranton playwright (Miller’s home town) to add some local flavor to the brew. Now, there’s a hell of a lot more than that to the story but I’ll save that for another time, except to say that the novel will help me reclaim my original vision of the story, free of Flannery’s input (and when I resurrect the original text of Miller’s Ghost in the next day or so, it will be apparent that the spirit of Jason Miller did not much care for Tom’s efforts, as I chronicled in the story).

So, for the next couple of months, when my attention isn’t distracted by Popmatters essays and paying journalism gigs when I can find them, I will be immersed in online footage of Pathe News reports of 1930s Notre Dame football games, explorations of Dante’s Purgatorio, the plays of Jason Miller, Jesuit mysticism, New York’s Cedar Bar in the early 1970s, production notes from The Exorcist, Brian Moore’s novel Catholics, and a fascinating essay by Gregory Rich titled The Skeptic’s View: Life After Death in Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop.

Because the book is lit-fic with limited commercial appeal where the New York literary trend setters are concerned, I will be going the self-publishing route with this title, both print and electronic download versions, which will also get it to the market in a much more timely fashion; the other novel that I have on the back boiler for the time being is still intended as a mainstream marketplace manuscript.