Steve Boda is a college football statistics/records pioneer, authority, and legend. His expertise is in exhumation, research, re-creation, and restoration of football stats history in the pre-1937 era, before official NCAA recordkeeping began.

Boda, 87, of Shawnee, is also regarded as more knowledgeable about Notre Dame football records and statistical history than anyone.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association and Notre Dame have often honored his work, which still goes on every day from the small, toasty, upper-story office in Boda's home, where his beloved cat, Duffy, keeps him company.

As one writer said in a profile of Boda for Notre Dame, "Without him, it is fair to say that many sports-writers would be left with unfinished stories and bar patrons with unsettled arguments."*

From the original hand-drawn drive charts he used to capture the flavor and facts of games, Boda has moved to complex computer programs, yet he doesn't seem to grieve the old days or the old ways. As long as he can continue his historical research, he's a contented man.

He shared his story recently:

Your early years were tough ones.

Yes, they were. I was born in 1924 in South Bend, Ind., the eldest of five children. Our father worked in the Studebaker plant in South Bend, but we were very poor. I remember coming home from school one day and finding that our family had been dispossessed. Our furniture was in the street, and there stood my mother, who was ill, holding the two babies.

When I was 9 years old, my mother died from surgery complications. My father was unable to care for five young children during the Depression. So, on the day after a blue, no-present 1933 Christmas Day, being a war veteran he was able to place us in the Indiana Soldiers' and Sailors' Children's Home, 150 miles away.

While we were at the home, which had 600 children, the five of us became wards of the State of Indiana and adoptable. We were separated by age groups, and I never saw any of my siblings while we were there.

How did football enter your life?

I grew interested in Notre Dame football in my hometown of South Bend when I was 6, hearing friends talk about Notre Dame and Coach Knute Rockne. I pestered my father to take me to a game, and on Oct. 4, 1930, he did—for the opening of Notre Dame Stadium. Never having done it before, I took a pad of paper and began drive-charting the plays.

We attended all 16 home games every year between 1930 and 1933. We walked, saving streetcar fare and money for a bag of peanuts for him and a box of Cracker Jack for me. I also charted the away games.

Coach Rockne liked to connect with people. He was known for letting South Bend city kids attend practice. In 1931, I got to shake hands with Rockne during spring practice. Two weeks later, he perished in a plane crash in Kansas.

I've told people how important Notre Dame football (and later the NCAA) was to me. At an early age, I was exposed to tuberculosis and could not participate in sports until I was 16. Meanwhile, I continued to chart Notre Dame games from radio at the orphanage while other kids were playing outside. Finally, when allowed to play football, I made first team as a 150-pound blocking back.

At age 12, I convinced the local high school coach to let me keep stats. We shared our football field with a cow pasture, and I think those cows had priority! At one game, I told the referee that there was something wrong with the field. He snarled, then asked me what was wrong. We walked the length of the field and determined it was only 90 yards. He gave me a dollar and patted me on the back. It was the first money I ever earned.

For me, the diversion of football was welcome. The orphanage was a sad place, although we were well-fed, well-clothed, and well-educated. The staff resented that and made life difficult for us.

Early on, I learned that if you were not going on a vacation in the summer, you could attend summer classes that would count when you graduated. I went to summer school for three years, and with those credits I graduated a year early in 1941, one month after my 17th birthday.

What happened then?

After I graduated from the orphanage in June of '41, I returned to South Bend. Because I wasn't 18, I couldn't get a good defense job at Bendix Aviation, so I applied to keep football statistics for South Bend high schools and the superintendent hired me for $10 a game.

At the final high school game of the season, a tall man visited our press box. After the game he said he'd never seen football recorded in the way I'd done it. He handed me a pass and invited me to join his stats crew for Notre Dame's season finale. The man was Joe Petritz, Notre Dame's sports information director. He added me to his press box crew for Notre Dame's six home games in 1942.

At Central High School, the city offered free classes for residents to qualify for trade work in defense plants. I attended classes from midnight to 7:00 in the morning, learning the tool-and-die trade. On my 18th birthday, Bendix Aviation hired me. Often the old-timers didn't want to work on weekends, but I did—earning time-and-a-half and double-time.

That was significant. With my salary and my father's, we were able to convince the Indiana State Welfare Department that we could care for my four siblings (with an aunt helping). The kids were discharged from the orphanage and never returned.

And then came the war.

The military was not drafting 18-year-olds yet, but on my 19th birthday, in April 1943, I got my draft notice. I was sent to Camp Shelby, Miss., for training with the 69th Infantry Division. We shipped out in August to Casablanca, then to Oran, and finally Naples, which we took on Oct. 1. For a year, attached to elements of the 34th Division, we slugged our way up the west coast of Italy to Leghorn.

On Jan. 1, 1945, while serving as a top-kick combat sergeant with the 34th, I gave myself a pass to attend the Spaghetti Bowl game in Florence between the Fifth Army and the 12th Air Force. I kept the official statistics, a Spaghetti Bowl Queen was crowned, the Fifth Army won 20-0, and P-38s provided air cover because the Luftwaffe threatened a visit.

In a sad end to the festivities, Marlene Dietrich sang her haunting signature song, "Lili Marleen," when we returned to our respective battlefields. There were many tears. Within a month, nine who had played in that game were killed in action.

In early February, with the Italian campaign secured, our brigade was dispatched to France for a watch on the Rhine until the bridge at Remagen was captured. When it was, we crossed the Rhine in force and assaulted Nuremberg. Ten days later, the war was over.

I returned to South Bend on Dec. 12, 1945. In a month, I began attending Indiana University under the GI Bill of Rights. Why not hometown Notre Dame? I tried admittance, but didn't have the necessary credits in special subjects.

And your sports career started where?

In 1948, the National Collegiate Athletic Bureau, the NCAA's service bureau, was expanding its New York force. I applied and was notified to meet in Evanston, Ill., for an interview during the basketball championship being played there. I took the bus.

The NCAB's director was Homer Cooke Jr. He hired me on a strong recommendation from my old friend Joe Petritz. I was only a college junior, and Cooke would not take me until I was finished at IU. That was in August 1949, and immediately I received a brief telegram from Cooke: "Expect you in national office on Sept. 2."

Cooke is credited as being the founder of official guidelines for recording college football statistics in 1937, and he was a taskmaster. One day he came in waving a stack of papers that he claimed were letters from "others who would want your job." A few days later he had to leave town. Our office manager went into his office to check out those letters from so-called aspirants to our jobs. They were letters, all right, but not about our jobs.

During the early days of the NCAB, we also compiled stats for the All-America Football Conference until it folded in 1950, and stats for the National Basketball Association for 10 years.

I retired as the NCAA's associate director of statistics in 1989, after 40 years of service.

Share the "story of embarrassment" that kick-started the creation of football stats records.

It was on Oct. 14, 1950. On that date, Francis "Reds" Bagnell, of Pennsylvania, totaled 490 rushing-passing yards against Dartmouth. Naturally the media wanted to know whether that was a collegiate record. We didn't know, because we had only 60 listed records, and they were for seasons, not for single games or careers. We adopted the following rule: When there is an extraordinary performance that is likely a record, we will assign it as such.

So if Bagnell's performance was a record, whose mark did he break? It took me half the season to determine that. The previous record was 458 yards, by a player in 1943.

This episode marked the beginning of my NCAA career in the research and establishment of football records. From only 60 season records, the present-day football record references for all NCAA divisions has grown to a staggering total of many thousands.

Tell us what treasures are tucked away in this office.

It's all mostly about Notre Dame. There's a file for every game, from the first in 1887. For some games, like the Notre Dame-Army games played in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, there are at least 10 accounts because of the number of newspapers at the time. That allowed for a unique and unmatched compilation—a listing of every player who appeared in a game.

There are drive charts for every Notre Dame game from 1922 (the first year of Notre Dame's fabled Four Horsemen) to 1950; stats and data for Notre Dame's more than 1,000 games; and more than 150 films of the Fighting Irish back to the 1930s and 1940s.

Notre Dame has two sets of statistics records: for the period 1917-36 and for the period from 1937 onward. The 1937 season marked the first year, after 68 years of football, in which national football statistics were recorded in accordance with the official guidelines of the Football Rules Committee. In the NCAA football record books, therefore, there are no statistics records listed before 1937.

I reconstructed Notre Dame's 1917-36 records from play-by-play accounts, in accordance with the official guidelines of 1937. But Notre Dame's true national official statistics begin with the 1937 season, as all football records do. The purpose of researching Notre Dame's earlier stats is to render official recognition to those players.

For the reconstruction, I owe a great debt to my friend Bill Bennett, a local computer information technologist. Bill has played a significant role in modernizing my programs while creating many complex football statistics programs. For at least 10 years, Bill has been my "SOS man" when it comes to computer-based statistics.

With today's statistics, such as drives and red zone and third-down efficiencies, I can easily reconstruct them into the statistics of any or all games of the 1917-36 period. And I probably will.

What brought you from New York to Kansas City?

I came to Johnson County when the NCAA relocated its New York office.

I was married to my wife, Juanita, for 50 years, and in the early years we lived in New York. Juanita, a beautiful New York City girl and former hosiery model, worked in commercial real estate. It was her job to entertain prospective real estate buyers by taking them to dinner, Broadway plays, and for a bite to eat.  She'd meet buyers who boasted of gridiron feats, and she'd call to ask me about them. I would check rosters and inform her that not only did they not achieve gridiron immortality, they weren't even on the college's roster!

When the NCAA announced the move to the Kansas City area in 1975, Juanita was unhappy to be leaving her New York. The NCAA gave us unlimited time to come out and determine where we would live. After an agent took us around to look at properties, she realized she could put an end to a lifetime of high-rise apartments. For the first time in her life, she could live in a house! Once here, she loved the area until her death in 2002.

Can you summarize some of your accomplishments?

I'm extremely proud of the recognitions accorded me by the NCAA, Notre Dame, and the College Sports Information Directors of America (COSIDA).

In 1965, Notre Dame honored me with a plaque that read, "With deep gratitude and sincere appreciation of the University of Notre Dame Athletic Department for his many years of untiring, unselfish, painstaking and dedicated research and compilation of the countless number of Notre Dame football records. His contributions to Notre Dame football lore are of such singular magnitude that they must be considered the most earnest and significant historical documentation of any college football team in the land."

Other honors: The NCAA recognized me on college football's 1969 centennial, giving me a plaque. ~ COSIDA's prestigious Arch Ward Award in Houston in 1990 and for Meritorious Service, 1983, in San Diego. ~ As a statistician covering Bloomington High School basketball for the Bloomington Herald while attending IU in 1949, "An excellent job. The most complete record of any high school in the state of Indiana." ~ A member of the Football Writers Association of America for 50 years. ~ Recognition as a pioneer in the reconstruction and re-creation of statistics for football's gridiron greats of the pre-1937 era. ~ Co-author of three volumes of the Ronald Encyclopedia of Football for 1959-61-63. ~ Compiler of the first NCAA Football Record Book in conjunction with the sport's centennial in 1969 and updated annually for 20 years. Compiler, by re-creation, of statistics of notable pre-1937 players in the NCAA's Football Finest.

Tell us about your personal side.

Juanita and I had one child, a son, Terry, who was killed by a drunken driver in an accident in Florida. He was 37. We have one granddaughter, Kaela, who lives in the Indianapolis area.

The four-footed caramel-colored cutie is Duffy, who is 14 years old. He's a great companion.  When I come home after being away, he's always in the family room greeting me. I had begun to worry, should I pass, what would happen to Duffy? A lady in the neighborhood assured me he would be taken care of.

In advanced age, your doctor frequently wants every test available. My tests all come back normal, normal, normal. The best news I got was from one family doctor who said, "See you in a year."

I believe some of the normals are the result of my never having smoked the first cigarette. While in the Army in Casablanca, I sold cigarettes to the natives for an inflated price. They kept telling GIs that there really wasn't a Rick's Cafe (Humphrey Bogart's night spot in the movie by the same name.)

So you had a rough start in life, but the ending has been happy?

Career-wise, very much so. After graduating from the orphanage, it seemed everything came easy. No matter where I wanted to be, I had no competition: Notre Dame's press box 1941-42; South Bend High School's official football statistician and scorer 1941-42; Spaghetti Bowl game's statistician; work in Indiana University's athletic department; sports writer for the Bloomington Herald, and on and on to the ultimate goal—the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

A friend tells people this about me: "Every time I shake hands with him, I feel like I'm shaking hands with the past."

Other sources:

*"Steve Boda: The Ultimate Notre Dame Football Historian," by Mark Fitzpatrick.

New York Times story about the Boda family, Dec. 25, 1988.

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