Tales from the Notre Dame Fighting Irish Locker Room: A Collection of the Greatest Fighting Irish Stories Ever Told

by Digger Phelps, Tim Bourret

Former ESPN basketball commentator Digger Phelps is regarded as one of the most charismatic and opinionated analysts in the profession. And he was the same personality during his twenty years as the head coach at the University of Notre Dame. In this book, first published in 2004, Phelps teams up with Tim Bourret and recalls the most successful period in Notre Dame basketball history. In his twenty seasons, seventeen of Phelps’s teams advanced to postseason play, including fourteen NCAA Tournament teams. In the book, Phelps recalls his initial expression of interest in Notre Dame through a 1965 letter he wrote to football coach Ara Parseghian. It recounts the scenes of his seven wins over number one-ranked teams, including the landmark game in 1974 when the Irish ended UCLA’s eighty-eight-game winning streak. Two chapters concentrate on the coach’s former Notre Dame players, concluding with the selection of his All-Digger teams. He also recalls the twenty Hall of Fame coaches he competed against, including Bobby Knight, Al McGuire, Ray Meyer, and John Wooden. Tales from the Notre Dame Fighting Irish Locker Room also contains a chapter entitled “Domers,” which documents Phelps’s relationships with Notre Dame coaches, administrators, and student-athletes, including Father Theodore Hesburgh, the man who made Notre Dame what it is today.

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296 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 2015

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advance reading copy of this book, for free, through Goodreads First Reads program in exchange for my honest review.

From a sports standpoint, as many others do, I have always thought of the University of Notre Dame as being a “football school”. For that reason, I was both surprised and intrigued to see an entire book devoted to Fighting Irish basketball. Although the book was not exactly what I expected it to be, it was still an entertaining and informative read.

With a title like Tales from the Notre Dame Fighting Irish Locker Room: A Collection of the Greatest Fighting Irish Stories Ever Told, I expected it to be a Chicken Soup for the Soul style collection of short stories spanning the more than one hundred years of basketball that has been played in South Bend. However, this book has a much more specific focus.

What the reader gets instead is a non-traditional autobiography of author Digger Phelps. Phelps coached at Notre Dame for 20 years (1971-1991) and he is still the winningest coach in school history. In 1978, he coached the Fighting Irish into the Final Four for the first, and (thus far) only time.

Digger Phelps’ story is told, not as a typical, chronological, year-by-year, season-by-season autobiography, but instead he (and co-author Tim Bourret) present his life, and career, through short stories broken down into categories such as: victories over opponents who were ranked #1, his best players of the 1970s, his best players of the 1980s, his assistant coaches, and opponents he faced who are now in the Hall of Fame. Within these chapters we hear tales of Phelps’ success including: Notre Dame ending UCLA’s record 88-game winning streak, their seven victories over No. 1 teams, his 20 year broadcasting career at ESPN after his retirement, and his induction into the Notre Dame Ring of Honor in 2014.

More important than any of his team’s accomplishments on the court, off the court Phelps maintained at 100% graduation rate of his student-athletes, and he battled and beat cancer twice. The tales in Tales from the Notre Dame Fighting Irish Locker Room at times are hilarious, at times tragic, however nearly every one of them is inspiring. Fans of Notre Dame, or college basketball in general, will like this book. The only group I would NOT recommend this book to are fans of the UCLA Bruins. The domination Phelps and his Irish teams had over the otherwise unstoppable UCLA teams of the 1970s may cause a Bruins fan to have an apoplectic reaction.