When asked which would be mounted on the Shillelagh after Saturday’s game, Klose enthusiastically pointed at the shamrock.This is a list of Notre Dame Fighting Irish football head coaches. Regarding his expectations for Saturday’s game, Klose wasn’t shy about his hopes for an Irish victory. “We have a motto that ‘We’re different from the rest.’” “From that little humble beginning to this here, to that office in Chicago, now we sell jewelry across the country to over 900 jewelry stores,” Klose said. The jewelers opened a second location in Chicago’s Willoughby Tower in 1990 and relocated the Elkhart store from Princeton Street to its current location at 300 E. Klose and Lennox began their custom jewelry business in a small back street studio in 1976, first named Metal Images renamed Images Jewelers shortly thereafter. The gold-colored Trojan and shamrock are cast from yellow bronze, and the rubies and emeralds are lab-created on-site. It gives you something to brag about.”Īll aspects of the decorations are produced in-house by Images Jewelers. It’s fun to be part of the community surrounding Notre Dame … we’ve got a lot of pride about that. And we like USC too, because USC has given us such a great rivalry. “It’s cool because we’re Notre Dame fans. “Growing up a Catholic boy from a parochial school, doing the Irish stuff is a big thing,” Klose said. The original, now-retired Shillelagh is on display on campus by the Notre Dame Alumni Association in the Joyce Center.įor Klose, a life-long Notre Dame fan, playing a part in the tradition is a point of pride. In the past, the jewelers installed the winner’s medallion at their Elkhart store, but now they turn over the completed bronze medallions to Notre Dame, where the Trojan or shamrock is engraved with the year and score and then mounted. The new trophy, currently in possession of USC, features only medallions from Images Jewelers. The club, fashioned in Ireland, reignited the tradition and the medallions dating back to 1990 were installed. But by 1997, a new, larger Shillelagh was commissioned by the Notre Dame Alumni Club of Los Angeles.
USC won that year’s game, but Notre Dame kept the trophy, much to the chagrin of USC fans and critics in California. The rivals continued to trade off the trophy until 1996. In 1989, the original Shillelagh ran out of space. So we had to play catch up and engrave a lot of them … because it hadn’t been completed and finished up-to-date.” And we made a Tro-sham, they called it, and it was a Trojan head Siamese-twinned to a Shamrock, for ties. "We made a shamrock, because that was on the old one, and we made a Trojan head. “So we patterned our (designs)," Klose said. By the time Klose and Images Jewelers took over in creating the ornamentation, the trophy required a retroactive installation of pendants for multiple years of victories. The original Jeweled Shillelagh was introduced in 1952, as a donation from the Notre Dame Alumni Club of Los Angeles. And they wanted to make it a little more uniform to go into the future.” Three might be alike and two were different here. It was almost like a folk art project at that point because every one of the heads were slightly different. “The one they had was the original one and it was maybe a third of the way done. “They said they were looking for someone to do these Shillelagh trophies,” Klose said. The jewelers became a part of the storied tradition after Klose received a request from the daughter of his friend and fellow jeweler, Bill VanPatten. The local jeweler, owned by business partners Bob Klose and Steve Lennox, casts the decorative medallions and creates the jewels that are mounted on the Shillelagh for the winning team.
The winning team takes possession of the trophy for the next year and commemorates its victory with a bronze and emerald shamrock or bronze and ruby Trojan.įor the past 35 years, those shamrocks and Trojans have been created at Images Jewelers in Elkhart. ELKHART - Every year, Notre Dame and University of Southern California’s football teams vie for the Jeweled Shillelagh, a ruby- and emerald-bedecked Irish club.
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