Throwback Thursday: Notre Dame Fighting Irish vs. Navy Midshipmen

Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty ImagesRemember how I told you that the Notre Dame vs. Pitt rivalry was a family rivalry for me? Well, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish vs. Navy Midshipmen rivalry kind of is, too. My dad is a graduate of Notre Dame, class of 1965, and he was in the Navy ROTC program while he was a student at Notre Dame. He aspired to fly fighter planes for the Navy, and so for the summer between his Junior and Senior years at Notre Dame, he flew planes down in Pensacola. But, similar to Maverick in the movie Top Gun, he buzzed the tower a few too many times, and so they reassigned him into a nuclear submarine. In reality, he was always destined to be in a submarine. Admiral Rickover had his sights on my dad, from high school all the way through Notre Dame, but the Navy needed some reason to bump him out of a plane and into a sub.

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