Lou Holtz has no interest in cheering for any other country’s soccer team. And if you were thinking about inviting him to your Cinco de Mayo fiesta next year…well…you can go ahead and forget that too.
At RNC this week, the legendary coach --who is endorsing Donald Trump-- referred to immigration as an “invasion,” as part of an address to the Republican National Coalition for Life:
“I don’t want to become you,” he said (via Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff). “I don’t want to speak your language, I don’t want to celebrate your holidays, I sure as hell don’t want to cheer for your soccer team!”
The crowd, who had gathered to honor fellow conservative Phyllis Schlafly, must also hate football, er, soccer. Everybody cheered at that line, Woodruff reports.
Holtz’s thesis was that immigrants need to come to the United States to learn to speak English and “become us,” not the other way around.
Learning English, and adapting into a provably successful culture and economic system in order to “become us” is not really the “Holtz thesis.” In fact, it’s the thesis of all thinking people. After all, if you came from a native homeland so incredibly unpleasant that you were compelled to leave it, why would you travel thousands of miles, risking life and limb, just to recreate the same hell-scape here?
Still, Holtz’s mere statement, of something once considered common sense, was more than enough to earn him the derision of the leftist sports media. Writing in NBC’s College Football Talk, Zach Barnett (who for some reason ripped Holtz’s immigration quote without providing a single quote, or link to what Holtz said) performed the deed:
“Holtz, who was raised Roman Catholic, rose to the spotlight by coaching a Roman Catholic university with a French name — University of Notre Dame du Lac translates to “Our Lady of the Lake” — whose football team is nicknamed the Fighting Irish.
There may not be a program in college football who owes more of its success to the support of immigrants than Notre Dame. And Holtz — a successful but not great coach at William & Mary, N.C. State, Arkansas, Minnesota and South Carolina (not to mention one 3-10 season with the New York Jets) — owes his platform, more than a decade removed from his coaching career and knocking on the door of his 80th birthday, to the 11 years he spent and national championship he won at Notre Dame.”
So now things with foreign names make them foreign? Someone please inform the populations of Coeur d’Alene, Bayou la Batre, and San Francisco to start packing their things. Actually, Coeur d’Alene and Bayou la Batre can stay. San Francisco…it’s been real.
But, Barnett’s take is high comedy. The “immigrants” who founded Notre Dame in 1842 were priests from Ireland and France. Not exactly the type of people you’re likely to run into, tunneling their way under a fence. No one knows for sure how Notre Dame’s sports teams became known as the “Fighting Irish.” The first usage of the term described Irish immigrant soldiers who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The first time a Notre Dame sports team was referenced with the term “Fighting Irish,” was from a halftime speech in 1909, when a player rallied the football team to come back and beat Michigan.
Not exactly a “Si, se puede” moment.
So, the idea that Holtz owes his career success to throngs of saucy Irish boat people, is pretty dumb. Which makes it a readable story over at NBC, apparently.
