The Coach's Wife: A Memoir
The wife of Notre Dame's head basketball coach, Digger Phelps, describes school President Theodore Hesburgh's insistence that athletes do well in academics and presents a disturbing portrait of Notre Dame athletics following Hesburgh's retirement
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Here is an unprecedented look from the inside at big-time college sports, a memoir that bears equal comparison to Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain and John Feinstein's A Season on the Brink. Taking us to the center of the high-pressure world of college basketball, Terry Phelps, wife of longtime Notre Dame head basketball coach Digger Phelps, shares the richly rewarding story of their life at Notre Dame and offers a surprising look at the Notre Dame sports mystique.In twenty years as Notre Dame's basketball coach, Digger Phelps won nearly 400 games. But his proudest statistic was his team's unparalleled 100 percent graduation rate. It could only have happened at Notre Dame, where President Theodore Hesburgh insisted that athletes be students too. During those two decades, not content to be just a "lovelywife" in sportscaster's parlance, Terry discovered a different Notre Dame mystique. For her it existed not on the football field or the basketball court, but in the classrooms, the campus ministry office, and all the other places where the spotlight rarely shines. Earning three degrees at Notre Dame, Terry became the first female "triple Domer" and a tenured professor in the law school. Notre Dame made her, she writes, "a person who could talk about the soul without being embarrassed."Believing fervently in Notre Dame's ideals and happily raising their three children in the midst of the larger Notre Dame family, Terry and Digger were unprepared for the changes that occurred when Father Hesburgh retired. Under a new administration the ugliness of college sports elsewhere began to infect Notre Dame basketball, as the athletic department insisted on a schedule that left the players less and less time to be students and began to undercut Digger's position as one of the most respected and successful coaches in America. A formerly supportive campus atmosphere now became increasingly hostile.What happened next, as Terry and Digger battled to preserve their vision of Notre Dame sports at its best, is a story of absorbing human interest, narrated by Terry Phelps with astonishing grace and emotional honesty.
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