Weren't You... Chuck Sweeney?

Notre Dame football legend always seemed to be in the right place at the right time

BY BILL MOOR // POSTED JANUARY 18, 2025

At the start of Notre Dame's 1937 football season, Chuck Sweeney, a senior from Bloomington, Illinois, wasn't even a starter. He was listed behind Irish captain Joe Zwers on Coach Elmer Layden's depth chart at defensive end. It looked like tough going for Sweeney to get any real playing time.

“But things just fell into place that fall,” he told me during a 1977 interview. “The second game was back home in Illinois and I had a good game so Elmer started me the rest of the games.”

Layden, one of the Four Horsemen for Knute Rockne, soon looked like a genius. Sweeney quickly went from a bench warmer to the hottest commodity in college football.

Against Navy, he tackled a Middie ball carrier in the end zone for a safety, providing the winning margin in a 9-7 Notre Dame victory.

Against Minnesota, he blocked an extra point attempt that made the difference in a 7-6 win.

Then against Northwestern, he blocked a punt that was returned for a touchdown for the game's only score. He also intercepted a pass, recovered two fumbles, and downed a punt on the one-yard line in that 7-0 victory.

“I guess there were three pretty good weeks,” said Sweeney, who died in 1999 at the age of 85. “I got a lot of copy in papers all over the country, too. But in reality, I was an ordinary ball player with things just breaking my way.”

Yet this “ordinary” ball player was a consensus all-American and received the most votes for the 1938 College All-Star team that beat the NFL champion Washington Redskins and Hall of Famer quarterback Sammy Baugh that following summer. He also was on the game program's cover

After college, Sweeney was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, although he never played for them and instead took a job at Sinclair Oil in South Bend where he and wife Helen raised their nine children.

But he wasn't done with football. And Elmer Layden wasn't done with him.

Sweeney's old college coach had become the NFL commissioner and hired Sweeney in 1941 as an official. He had already been officiating high school contests, making $1.50 a game. “Then when Elmer became the NFL commissioner (and hired me), I was making $75 a game and $150 and later $250,” he said. “That was quite a jump.”

On December 28, 1958, Sweeney was the field judge during what some people think was one of the greatest football games ever played. It was the NFL championship (nine years before the world title game was named the Super Bowl) and played at Yankee Stadium.

The Baltimore Colts and New York Giants were tied, 17-17, at the end of regulation to force pro football's first-ever sudden death overtime. Fifty million people were watching on NBC as Alan “The Horse” Ameche of the Colts took a handoff from Johnny Unitas and scored on a one-yard touchdown for the victory. What the viewers didn't see was the frantic television crew trying to find out how they had suddenly lost their feed during a Giants' timeout. One person even ran onto the field and he was rumored to be an NBC employee hoping to get a delay of the game.

 

 

When the teams came back to the line of scrimmage, they were ready for the game to continue. So were the coaches. So were the fans in the stands.

“That's when I saw the television people on the sidlines going crazy,” Sweeney said. “Somehow their cable had been broken and all those millions of viewers were going to be without a picture if the game resumed.”

Can you imagine that happening during a Super Bowl?

But in 1958, television coverage of sporting events was fairly new and the referee wasn't sure what to do. Sweeney, in his 18th season as an official, had two words for him: “We wait.”

And so they did — until the NBC sideline workers found an unplugged signal cable. Three plays later, Ameche became the hero in all the headlines.

Sweeney, meanwhile was the unsung and unknown hero. He was unbending under what had to be unbelievable pressure.

That Colts' victory was labeled The Greatest Game Ever Played with 17 future Hall of Famers participating. In 2019, a nationwide poll of media members also voted it the best game in the NFL's first 100 years.

By the way, the first labeled Greatest Game of the Century was Notre Dame's 18-13 come-from-behind victory over Ohio State in 1935.

So guess who was one of the Notre Dame players in that 1935 contest? Yep, Chuck Sweeney — the “ordinary” guy who was a part of some extraordinary and epic sporting spectacles.

Bill Moor wrote for the South Bend Tribune for 48 years, mainly as sports editor and human-interest columnist. He and his wife, Margaret, have three children and eight grandchildren.