Tales from the Notre Dame Fighting Irish Locker Room

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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Richard “Digger” Phelps compiled a 393-197 record in twenty years at the helm of Notre Dame’s basketball program, becoming the winningest coach in Fighting Irish history. Fourteen of his teams advanced to the NCAA Tournament, including the 1977-78 team, which reached the Final Four. Phelps’s Irish squads beat a record seven teams that were ranked number one in the nation, including the 71-70 victory over UCLA on January 19, 1974, that ended the Bruins’ record eighty-eight-game winning streak. Since his retirement from coaching he has worked in President George H.W. Bush’s White House administration (1992–93) and provided commentary on college basketball for CBS and ESPN, before retiring in April 2014.
Tim Bourret worked in the Notre Dame sports information office from 1975–78 and traveled with Digger Phelps and the Fighting Irish to the 1978 Final Four. He has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Notre Dame and has served as the sports information director at Clemson University for the last twenty-three years. In 1997 Bourret joined forces with Phelps and Sports Illustrated’s John Walters in writing Basketball for Dummies.