SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The lies George O'Leary lived for 21 years unraveled in a span of about 30 hours, leaving him jobless and Notre Dame embarrassed and without a coach.

        It began 6 p.m. Wednesday with a question about O'Leary's playing career at New Hampshire and ended shortly before midnight Thursday, hours after O'Leary admitted to Notre Dame that he had made up the masters degree in education from New York University included in his biographical sketch.

        “It was a very disappointing and sad set of events,” Louis M. Nanni, vice president of public affairs and communication, said Sunday.

        Notre Dame's sports information office got a call Wednesday from The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., about a story on the new Notre Dame football coach, whose biographical sketch said that he had earned three letters as a UNH football player.

        The Union Leader interviewed the man who was New Hampshire football coach at the time, an assistant and some players, and none of them remembered O'Leary playing in a game, much less earning three letters.

        John Heisler, a Notre Dame associate athletic director, interrupted a meeting O'Leary was in about 6 p.m. Wednesday and asked him about his playing days. O'Leary admitted he had not earned three letters. In fact, he said he had attended New Hampshire only two years and had not played in any games because he had mononucleosis the first year and a knee injury the second.

        O'Leary said someone must have made a mistake along the way in his biographical sketch and he never noticed.

        “Frankly, at this point I didn't have the sense that it was a big deal,” Heisler said. “This was not something that anybody was too concerned about.”

        The Union Leader pressed on, however, and got a copy of a handwritten personal information form still on record at Syracuse, where O'Leary got his first assistant coach's job in 1980.

        The Union Leader again contacted Notre Dame, this time asking Nanni for a response. Nanni reached O'Leary, who was in New Jersey on a recruiting trip. He asked O'Leary if he had filled out the sheet that said he was a three-time letter winner at New Hampshire.

        “He said, 'Geez, it was 22 years ago. I'm not certain if I filled it out. But if they have it, I probably did.”'

        O'Leary immediately offered to resign, but university officials told him they did not accept.

        “We said, 'No, we'll weather this storm, we'll stick together,”' Nanni said.

        Nanni said he and others began working on a statement from O'Leary expressing remorse for the action, along with a statement of support from athletic director Kevin White.

        “It was going to express regret as well, but we were going to move forward,” Nanni said.

        Nanni said it was at this point that he asked O'Leary if there was anything else in his background that Notre Dame officials would be surprised by.

        “He kind of cryptically talked about a few different things. I then asked him if they were to look at his records with his masters degree at NYU, would it be fair to say they're not going to find your name there? He said, 'Yeah, that would be fair to say that.”

        That's when Nanni decided to get together a group of Notre Dame administrators, including White and the Rev. Edward A. Malloy, the university president.

        “We talked it through and looking at the details of the things we felt there was just a breach of trust there,” Nanni said. “George offered to resign five or six times during the course of that afternoon and evening. Finally late that evening we decided to accept it. He faxed over a statement around 12:30.”

        O'Leary flew back to South Bend early Friday morning, picked up the few things he had put in his office and took the Notre Dame private plane back to Atlanta.

        About 9:15 a.m., the university sent a copy of a news release announcing O'Leary's resignation to trustees, university officers and faculty board members. The release was sent to the media about 15 minutes later.

        Nanni said what made the revelation especially surprising was the fact that everything university officials had heard in interviewing about 50 people about O'Leary was that he was honest and a man of integrity.

        “Even after the story broke, we heard the same things,” Nanni said.

        Despite some statements by students and alumni that White is to blame, Nanni said the university still has confidence in him.

        “We know that obviously he has taken a lot of heat at this moment,” Nanni said. “So goes the job of being the athletic director at Notre Dame, especially when it pertains to something going wrong in the football arena.”

        Nanni also said the hiring fiasco also has hurt Notre Dame's credibility, at least in the short term.

        “In the long run, that remains to be seen,” he said. “If we hire the right coach who is the right fit and comes and restores this program to national prominence, people are going to say in retrospect, 'This was divine providence at work.' So a lot certainly rests on the next hire.”

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