By John Brice
Special Contributor
Tommy Rees usually cannot see his starting quarterback.
Not on Notre Dame’s ‘Champions Walk’ as the Fighting Irish make their way from pre-game mass inside Notre Dame Stadium on any given home-game Saturday.
So Rees has not witnessed Pyne, omnipresent newsboy cap and dapper suit, part Sonic the Hedgehog, part WWE wrestler so on the verge of spontaneous combustion that Pyne bounces, skips and crashes through the gate and into the Irish locker room before making his way down to the field.
“I’m usually pretty far back, so I have not seen him but it does not surprise me because he’s got, he’s a ball of energy, he’s fired up on gameday and I think a lot of that comes from his preparation and his ability to be ready to go, have supreme confidence that he can get the job done.”
Pyne, as it turns out, typically is channeling a pair of motivational icons perhaps not often linked together: Aristotle and Muhammad Ali.
The two are blended in the “How Great I Am” inspirational video, with Aristotle’s sage missive “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit” precursor to the six-plus minutes of chants, clips and audio fuel.
“I used to do a whole entire routine, the same thing, before every game the past two years that I’ve been here but I kind of just go with whatever I feel that day. There’s a video I always watch called ‘How Great I Am,’” said Pyne, the undersized-but-skill-maximized Irish quarterback who’s helped spark this season’s turnaround. “I used to watch it with my brother (Brendan) in fourth grade, and actually against Clemson, we were on the ‘Walk,’ and I recited, I’ve watched that video forever, and you know the Muhammad Ali speech where he says, ‘And I’m going to show you how great I am!’? I can recite the whole entire thing.
“And the entire walk for Clemson, I was reciting it nonstop. Just stuff like that, being able to kind of hone in on what’s coming.”