‘They’d Be 100 Percent Wrong’

(Editor's note: This is the first article in a five-part series that will run each day this week. Part 2: "Winds Of Change" coming tomorrow)

You might not like Charlie Weis. If you don’t, so be it. He doesn’t care what you think.

He also doesn’t understand why you seem to care so much.

Why would you, really? You don’t have an opinion on the random stranger that lives halfway around the world – because you haven’t met him. And because he hasn’t met you, he shouldn’t have any reason to dislike you, either. Right?

Well, just because Charlie coaches your favorite football team, and you’ve read about him and seen him on TV for the last three years, doesn’t mean you know him, either. It’s easy to twist soundbites and paint someone a certain way. It’s even easier to buy into it. But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

“There’s so many people that have an opinion of me as a person that have never met me,” Weis said, “that when they meet me, they’re almost caught off guard that it’s the same person. And I don’t understand how that happens. I just don’t understand it.

“They take me off the road recruiting, so I go do a few alumni clubs every week. And they think it’s great. But what did they think, that I was going to come in here and be somebody that wasn’t going to be somebody you could come up to and talk to and all this stuff? You know, you’re put on this pedestal, deserved or undeserved, I don’t understand why that happens, when in reality when they talk to you, they almost are caught off guard, like ‘It’s the same person?’

“And it’s probably the biggest, I don’t know if it bothered me the most, just the thing that I don’t understand the most, is all these people have an impression of you. They’ve never even met you. I mean, they’ve never even talked to you.”

Then again, they have heard clips of what you’ve said and read numerous things about you. For some people, that’s enough – but is that fair? It’s amazing how little it takes to form an impression, but one has to remember that the less information you have to work with, the more likely you are to be off base.

There is a reason, after all, that the national media – which often only comes around when it smells blood in the water – paints a much different picture of Weis than the one usually painted by the press hounds who cover Notre Dame football on a daily basis.

“You deal with me with the media every day,” Weis said. “Am I hammering you when you ask a question? Am I trying to be adversarial? Am I getting argumentative? I just answer the questions. But everyone from the national media will call you and say, ‘Well, is this guy just an ass all the time?’ How does that happen?

It’s certainly a fair question. Logic, though, often goes out the window when you’re in the public eye. Most of us have no problem calling Britney Spears a train wreck, even though we’ve never met her. We’ve never come anywhere near Michael Jackson, yet are still quick to label him as a freak. We form “educated” opinions on presidential candidates, usually based almost entirely on 15-second news clips.

When you’re the target of that, you have two choices – drive yourself insane worrying about it, or just shrug it off. Weis has opted for the latter choice.

“It’s not where I don’t care,” he stated. “I can’t care. I mean, what am I going to do? If these people have an impression, if people have an impression of somebody that they’ve never even met, okay, especially one that’s unfavorable, how can I worry about those people? Never, ever have I made an impression of somebody who I don’t know. So if somebody asks me a question, I’ll say, ‘I’ve never met the person. I can’t really tell you,’ which I think any intelligent person would give that answer. ‘I’ve never met them, so I really can’t tell you.’ But all of these people feel that they have the right to say what I’m like without having even met me. I think that’s not right.”

Weis as a coach, on the other hand, can be judged a little more fairly – because it all boils down to the team’s performance, and that’s right there on national television for the world to see. That part of the negative perception he definitely understands.

“That’s the nature of sports,” Weis said. “People want to root for you. People don’t want to root against you, they want to root for you – but they want you to win. As quickly as they’ll root against you, they’ll root for you when things are going well. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad fans. It just means that they’re fans.”

Some fans, of course, are different than others, and Weis made it clear that he has a very strong respect for those who can be critical and yet still have your back no matter how frustrating things get.

The core of that group, he maintains, is the Notre Dame student body.

“There’s a difference between when you do this for a living or you have a true love of the place versus when you decide when to root for a team and when not to root for a team,” Weis noted. “I can tell you the student body, as disappointed as they were this year, you still saw all of them standing there at the end of the game regardless of the score of the game. They go beyond being fans. They’ve taken ownership of the team. They’ve become part of those wins and part of those losses, and that’s why almost all of them would be there at the end of the game even when things weren’t going well.

“When you’re a student here, you live the wins and you live the losses. You live both of them. You live the wins and the losses. You don’t feel like you’re just not affiliated. You don’t feel like an outcast. That’s the one thing that the sports programs are at Notre Dame – they’re just microcosms of the University. And I think that, really, is where it all starts.”

Realistically, it ends there too. It’s natural for a fan to have an opinion about the team he follows – but it doesn’t mean you really know the man coaching that team. His effectiveness on the job can be judged by numbers, but you can’t be that informed about Weis as a person without having met him.

Of course, that doesn’t stop people from making the judgment anyway. It just means they’re likely to be inaccurate.

So while we’re on the subject, just what is the biggest misconception about Weis as a person?

“I think that anyone that works with me will probably tell you that there probably isn’t anyone who’s more caring than me,” he said. “And I think that if you had a poll out there, that I’d probably lose in that poll, and they’d be wrong. They’d be 100 percent wrong, too. But I think that anyone who knows me would give that as an answer.”

The only thing Weis doesn’t care about? The opinions of those who don’t know.