Behind this great game is a great woman

She didn’t like sports. She didn’t even like the outdoors. She attended a school that eventually became UCLA.

There is a building at USC that carries her last name, but it wasn’t named for her.

There is someone in her family in the USC Hall of Fame, but it’s not her.

Marion Wilson was a singer, not a song girl. She was a homemaker, not a groundbreaker.

But Saturday, on the 80th anniversary of the first USC-Notre Dame game, she will again be a legend.

Because it’s her game.

She set it up. She sold it. She closed it. She ran perhaps the greatest end-around ever on Knute Rockne, spinning the old coach on his muddy heels and driving him 2,000 miles to the Coliseum.

This country’s most enduring intersectional rivalry was set up by a woman who, as far as anyone can remember, never passed or caught a football.

“The game would come on TV and my dad would point to her and say, ‘That’s your game,’ ” said Joyce Nelson, her daughter. “And she would say, ‘Oh, Gwynn.’ ”

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You thought the “Bush Push” was big? And you thought nothing in the history of USC-Notre Dame was wilder than A.D?

The story of Marion Wilson is brasher than Reggie Bush and covers more ground than Anthony Davis. It’s a story of romance and resourcefulness and redemption.

It would be the perfect Trojans myth, except it’s all true.

“I’m still hearing about it,” said Joyce Nelson, who lives near her late parents’ Palos Verdes home. “My mother would never want the limelight. But it is a pretty good story.”

The story begins on Thanksgiving week in 1925. Gwynn Wilson was the equivalent of USC’s athletic director. Marion was his young wife of one year.

Hearing that Notre Dame was going to drop Nebraska from its schedule, Gwynn walked into the office of Hal Stonier, who was then the equivalent of the school vice president.

He suggested to Stonier that he visit Rockne in Nebraska during their final game there on Thanksgiving and persuade him to add the Trojans for a home-and-home series. Stonier thought it was a great, landmark idea.

“Hal said, ‘OK, you go back there,’ ” Gwynn recalled in an oral history written by Gordon Cohn.

There was one problem.

“I had only been married for a year and I had never been away from my wife,” Gwynn recalled. “I told Hal that I would love to take Marion.”

It was, at the time, a highly unusual request. But Notre Dame’s having an empty date on its schedule was just as unusual. So after some discussion, USC relented and the Wilsons boarded a train for Lincoln, Neb.

They arrived on the day before Thanksgiving, and, the next morning, Gwynn Wilson met Rockne in a hotel lobby.

“He looked at me for a minute and said, ‘What are you doing here, Gwynn?’ ” Wilson recalled.

Rockne said he was too busy to talk because the game was that afternoon but suggested that the Wilsons join the Irish afterward on their train ride back to South Bend, Ind.

The Irish lost the game, moods were dark. And on Friday morning, one of their players, thinking he was awakening a teammate, accidentally pulled Marion’s leg out of her sleeping car.

“Hey, there’s a dame in there!” he shouted.

This series could have ended before it started. But a Notre Dame team manager intervened and everything was settled and, in the early afternoon, Gwynn Wilson finally held a meeting with Rockne in an observation car.

Where his request for a game was quickly rejected.

According to Wilson, this was Rockne’s reasoning: “He said, ‘No, Gwynn, we can’t do this. We travel too much. They are beginning to call us Rockne’s Ramblers, and I don’t like that. It would keep the boys away from classes and be too expensive.’ ”

Wilson thought his long journey had been in vain.

But he didn’t realize that, at the same time, Bonnie Rockne had invited Marion to meet with her in another compartment.

Bonnie apparently thought they were going to have a nice afternoon chat. She had no idea she would soon be caught up in the charm of a woman fighting for her husband.

“My mother was so nice, so likable, you couldn’t help but get caught up with her,” recalled her daughter Joyce. “It happened to everybody.”

And so, instead of a discussion about the Midwestern landscape, this Marion woman who knew nothing about football began talking football.

While Gwynn was attempting in vain to sell Knute, Marion was selling Bonnie.

“Marion painted a picture of our big stadium and told how we would welcome Notre Dame, help them with their reservations and put oranges and other fruit in their railroad car when they left,” Gwynn recalled. “She had emphasized that they would be our guests, not our enemies. That impressed Bonnie Rockne, who had a great love for Southern California and wanted to come out here anyway.”

How impressed? Bonnie left the meeting and immediately marched up to Knute and ordered him to change his mind.

Knute then sauntered over to Gwynn with a funny look.

“With an embarrassed grin on his face and a gleam in his eye, he said, ‘Well, Gwynn, what was this you were saying about football games?’ ” Wilson recalled.

The following season, the two teams began a series that will be renewed for the 78th time Saturday, a series that has become a college football landmark that will live forever.

Gwynn returned to USC a hero, his lifetime of service to the university resulting in a campus building named after him and a place in USC’s Hall of Fame.

Marion returned home to quietly raise a family.

She never received an award. She never gave a speech. She spent her life raising two successful children and enjoying her days with a man who affectionately called her “Ma.”

In the end, perhaps, for both of them, the biggest reward from the series was something much greater than all of that.

Gwynn Wilson’s devotion to Marion by insisting that she accompany him on the trip, coupled with Marion’s devotion to Gwynn by selling the game for him, set the tone for a wonderful 65-year union that ended only in her death in 1990.

Gwynn died two years later.

Their dream relationship quickly became displaced by college football reality. A year after his death, USC sent a letter to Joyce Nelson asking that she become a substantial Trojans donor or lose her family’s lifelong season tickets.

The required donation was so large, Nelson declined, and has not attended a USC-Notre Dame game at the Coliseum since.

The stands at Saturday’s game will once again be absent any extended members of the family who set it up.

“I was put out by it at first, but I don’t want to make a big deal about it anymore,” Joyce Nelson said. “These days it’s all about the money anyway, right?”

She holds a photo of her mother in pearls and a corsage, elegant and tender and tough, and she smiles.

There was, indeed, a time when it was all about something much richer.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.