Mark O. Hubbard is the author of Undisputed: Notre Dame, National Champions 1966 and the co-author of Forgotten Four: Notre Dame’s Greatest Backfield and the 1953 Undefeated Season. The University of Notre Dame Press is thrilled to publish his newest book, Ara: The Life and Legacy of a Notre Dame Legend (August 2024). He recently answered some of our questions about his research and writing processes.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
Joe Doyle, who was the Sports Editor of the South Bend Tribune at the time and a good friend, told me that he wanted me to write the book on the Notre Dame 1966 National Championship Football Team. At first, I wasn’t convinced I was up to the task because I hadn’t written a whole book other than a business text before. But he convinced me that I was capable of doing it. In order to get the process started, he drove me out to meet Coach Ara Parseghian, who was his good friend. I’d never met Ara before in person. After that, I became a frequent visitor to the Parseghian home in Granger. Katie and Ara always welcomed me with open arms. We all became very good friends and during my visits I’d often joke with Coach and ask when we were going to start his biography. He would always defer and say I didn’t want to do that. He was a very humble guy. He didn’t want the limelight on himself, especially after so many years.
On my last visit, which was in May of 2017, I brought one of my former students, Amber Selking, with me. She had asked to meet Coach and learn about his techniques because she was a student of sports psychology and had just received a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. While the conversation was winding up, I asked Coach, “Well, when are we going to start on the biography?” He just rolled his eyes, and it was the same answer he’d given me scores of times. He just kind of shook his head. Then Amber chirped up.
She said, “Coach, if there were to be a biography about you, what should the title be?”
With a chuckle he said, “Well, how about ‘Ara’? A-R-A. It reads the same forward and backwards.”
About two years after he passed, Katie, whom I had gotten to know pretty well, invited me to start on Ara’s biography, and we began working on it together. So that’s how it all started. But it really was the result of an evolutionary process.
Certainly, these are unprecedented times in the United States, Europe, and around the world. What can readers find in your book that will resonate with them during this era?
I think that readers will find that my book is historically authentic. In the book I write on various subjects related to how Ara was thinking or how he would approach strategy or tactics. Football was only a part of what we talked about. Current events. Family. History. Subjects came out of real conversations. There was an authentic friendship. I’m not trying to make him more important or less interesting than he was. He was a very informed person and a very, very fine individual, not just a great football coach. He stopped coaching at age 52, and he lived until he was 94, so he had a lot of years to do other things. He lived a productive life after football as well. His story is worth telling.
There were many personal tragedies in his life that he had to deal with. So, it’s not all just blocks and tackles or wins and losses. He was a complete person with a complete life. I approached the biography attempting to focus on his personality and character. I wanted to reinforce the humanity in him that I knew and respected. So, I think that readers will pick up on that sense of authenticity.
How did you research this book?
Ara’s wife, Katie, started as an acquaintance and became a friend, and now she’s practically family. In fact, my wife Bridget and I have celebrated her last three birthdays together. So, she really is a loved one now, as far as we’re concerned, and I think she feels the same about us.
Katie has been, and still is, a wonderful partner in this project. It was kind of funny because when we sat down her first question to me was, “How much do I have to pay you to write this book?” I told her that that’s not how this works. I explained that I wanted us to work together and that eventually we’d find a publisher, and she wouldn’t have to pay me anything. From our very first conversation she trusted me. This was really important, because then she provided me with access to all of Ara’s private papers, of which there were a lot. He had saved letters that were sent to him, things that he wrote, newspaper articles that he thought were important to him and to his family. So, I had great material to work with. I didn’t have to dig very far to get the real truth.
Katie and I also conducted over 30 hours of interviews over the course of many sessions that I have on audio tape. During the sessions I could ask her questions and get answers from a primary source. Additionally, she was able to open up doors with other people who were Ara’s friends and contemporaries, so I had a lot of really good primary sources. The other part of it is that he and I were good friends. For years I had been making mental notes of his philosophies and his approach to various things, including football.
One really good resource was the book Notre Dame’s Era of Ara by Tom Pagna and Bob Best which was written immediately following Ara’s retirement. Ara and his wife, Katie, worked with those authors on that book, so I was able to rely on what was in it as being as close to the historic truth as I was going to find about some of the events that may have been lost in the fog of history.
What did you learn while writing this book?
The first thing I learned was that writing a book is really hard. I view myself more of a storyteller than a writer, and I wanted the reader to be able to pick up the information in the book without being put to sleep by it. But with that came difficulties with punctuation, etc., so the copywriter was very helpful with those sorts of things and helped me to appear a lot more literate than I was. But the story is all there, and the quotes are all real, and they are all authenticated. So, that was one thing that I learned. Writing a book is hard.
I also learned that finding a publisher isn’t easy. I have a friend who’s an author who reminded me that only 5% of the books that get printed sell more than a thousand copies. This means that there’s a lot of people writing books that never get put their work into the hands of readers. And only a few authors really make any money doing it. My difficulty and my challenge was once Katie trusted me to do it, I had to go the whole way and finish the manuscript because it was too important for me to do, even without a publisher. Luckily for me, Notre Dame Press came along and saved the day. And now we’re partners, and I think this is going to be a great project working together.
In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
I think that it’s not that different. I mentioned in the acknowledgments that Ara would have been pleased that I started with a game plan. So, I didn’t even start writing until I decided how to approach it. Thankfully, the approach that Katie and I were comfortable with was to focus on personality and character, not on wins and losses. When you do the entirety of somebody’s life, you need to put all the puzzle pieces together so you can understand what it was like growing up as a child through being in your nineties and having to deal with life challenges. There’s a long history that comes with wanting to understand a person. I think you can only do that through having a plan and then sticking with the plan which, for me, was Ara’s personality and character.
Along the way you get benchmark dates that help you see important turns in the road. I was able to see where his career went from being a high school player, to going into the Navy, to going into college, and then into professional football, and then getting injured before becoming an assistant coach. Really, as a matter of happenstance, you look at these inflection points and realize where there were forks in the road. But along the way I kept reminding myself that I’m speaking about the same individual and that his approach to these events are part of his personality and character.
Who is the biggest influence on you?
Coach was a huge influence because as I got to know him, I began to understand what a good person he was. He was a very straightforward and very decent guy who was high in integrity. So I was influenced to do the biography because I thought he’d be an interesting person for others to know about. The fact that he deferred so many times made me want to write it all the more because he wasn’t a cheerleader for himself. He was actually a very modest guy, and he didn’t view his life as being worthy of being in a biography. Now, a lot of us that knew him, especially Katie and his family, disagreed with that sentiment.
What is your writing schedule like?
I was trained as an architect, so I looked for a plan. I started by outlining how everything in this book was going to fit together. Katie and I talked about it. I was able to fit key things into the book that needed to be mentioned, but in a way that didn’t seem artificial. For example, we talk about the war in Vietnam. I had to tuck that into the book because it was a big influence during key years of his coaching tenure at Notre Dame. We also had to tuck in the Civil Rights Movement, of which he was a very strong proponent, because it was something that was generationally changing from when he started coaching to when he finished coaching. We needed to cover how he reacted to that and how he addressed it. So those were two big social issues that you don’t put into a book limited to blocks and tackles. We had to figure out how we were going to do this well, so that the reader understands that it’s about personality and character, not always about winning and losing.
Then, after all of those elements were figured out, I just wrote. I tried to do a chapter at a time and write a complete story, and then move on and do another chapter. But I can’t tell you how many nights and what parts of days that I wrote. Along the way, along came Covid, and then I was in the hospital multiple times for cancer. So, I had a lot of time laying in bed and thinking about how to say something or how to structure different sections. And then I kept tuning up the story and the information until I was comfortable with it. Once I put it all together, I asked myself, “What pieces am I missing? How can I tell a better story?”
Overall, I really just look at myself as the person who assembled this book. I had a lot of collaborators and resources, and I couldn’t have written it all by myself.
What advice would you give to a writer who wants to start a book?
I would advise them to talk to other writers and find out what the process is like and decide from that whether or not you want to start writing a book. It sounds glamourous, but that doesn’t sustain a serious writer. Don’t go too far down the road until you have a publisher because you’ll be disappointed unless somebody is really interested in helping with you with the process to completion.
Who would you like to read Ara and why?
Anybody who was at Notre Dame during the relevant time period will find this interesting because a lot of what I write will resonate with their experience. Also, a lot of people who are too young don’t even know who the coach was, and so this will be all new information to them.
And the other audience that I think would be interested would be people who think they know a lot about college football. They may not understand that Ara was one of the great football minds. He was able to simplify the game. When you read what he would say or what he would think, all of a sudden your attitude about watching football and criticizing coaches and players might change. I think that’s a useful thing in this day and age. I think a lot of fans don’t really understand football. But if you have to make your living with kids that are 18 to 22 years old, you have to be a good motivator and you have to have good fundamentals. So, I think this will resonate for people who have football knowledge and may want more.
What books are you currently reading?
I just finished Mosquito Bowl by Buzz Bissinger, which is about Marines getting prepared for the Pacific invasion of Okinawa in World War II. They had a football game, and Buzz traces the different college players that were there prior to going into battle. About a third of them eventually got killed in the battle.
So you know, he’s a real successful writer who has become a friend. I look at guys that can take history, write a good story and make me interested in it.
What project are you working on next?
Currently I’m resting from last summer, which was intense, but I have two projects that I am currently working on. I’ve got a small construction project here at my home in Nantucket, which I’m monitoring and very involved with every day because I was trained as an architect. And I am also working on a really short book of reflections of the time that I spent with Neil Armstrong. I want to put this together because I have two grandchildren and very few kids are going to have grandfathers that knew somebody like him pretty well. Neil was another quality person—quietly humble—and I was fortunate to know hi. So, I want to put together just a short little book and have that saved somewhere so Lucy and Jack can understand him through storytelling and know that their grandfather knew a person (another one) who did something important with their life.