A little over a week ago Notre Dame president Edward A Malloy convened a press conference to announce the appointment of George O'Leary as the university's new football coach. In the course of his address Fr Malloy described the search which had led to the selection of the erstwhile Georgia Tech coach as the lineal descendant of Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, and Ara Parseghian.

"This was a very vigorous process," said Fr Malloy. "We can tell you everything about (the candidates') background." The words would come back to haunt the Notre Dame president when, five days after signing a six-year, $12 million contract to replace Bob Davie, O'Leary resigned in disgrace after it was discovered that he had embellished his credentials by falsifying his CV.

The significant sticking points proved to be O'Leary's claim that he had won three varsity football letters in his collegiate career at the University of New Hampshire when he in fact had won none, and the fact that he had awarded himself a masters degree which he never earned.

Just a year earlier, Notre Dame had given Davie a five-year contract extension, which it will be paying off well into the next decade, but after the Fighting Irish endured their eighth straight season without finishing in the nation's top 10 collegiate teams, athletic director Kevin White opted to swallow the contract and bring in a taskmaster.

Davie's teams had won barely 50 per cent of their football games, but his tenure was earmarked by a more impressive credential: a 100 per cent graduation rate among his players. That barely 33 per cent of O'Leary's Georgia Tech got their degrees was apparently forgivable, but the fact that the new coach himself had only 50 per cent of the degrees he claimed was not.

It wasn't as if O'Leary was brought down by a swarm of media barracudas, either. The "investigation," if you can call it that, began innocently enough. Having read wire-service accounts of the new coach's football background at New Hampshire 35 years earlier, the Manchester Union-Leader, that state's largest newspaper, tried to contact his old coach, Joe Yukica, along with some former New Hampshire players, for a feel-good piece detailing their reactions to their old team-mate's elevation to the nation's top college coaching position.

When none of them could even remember George O'Leary, a bit of digging seemed in order. It wasn't difficult to conclusively determine that, far from being a three-year letterman for the Wildcats, George O'Leary had never played in a football game for the University of New Hampshire.

It took another day and a few more phone calls to discover that O'Leary had also fabricated his MA from New York University which, by the way, doesn't even have a football team. With that, a contrite O'Leary announced that he was abdicating his new position because he had "embarrassed" Notre Dame - although you'd have to say the Notre Dame people had done a fair job of embarrassing themselves as well.

O'Leary's explanation that he had manufactured his fictitious football background "many years ago, to pursue my dream as a football coach" was understandable, as far as it went. The suspicion is that as one of many young candidates looking to get his foot in the door with a Long Island high school coaching job, he contrived a credential so unassuming that it was unlikely to be verified. Who, after all, would lie about having played football for New Hampshire?

The invention of the masters degree from NYU is more troubling, since it seems to have appeared on his resume some years later, by which time O'Leary was living an existence reminiscent of that of Tull MacAdoo, the fictional protagonist of John B Keane's Letters of a Successful TD, who had been elected to office on the basis of his dubious participation in the equally dubious "Battle of Glenalee."

Now, since neither college football letters nor graduate degrees were prerequisites for the position O'Leary accepted at Notre Dame, there were those who suggested that his embellishments did not constitute a dismissible offence. Since O'Leary had demonstrated his fitness for the job with a stellar, 20-year career at the collegiate coaching level, it shouldn't matter that he fibbed to get a high school job back in the Carter administration, and that some reasonable statute of limitations should apply.

At a school less high-profile than Notre Dame, that might have happened, but having presented O'Leary as a paradigm, the Notre Dame folks had no choice but to take him down.

He might unquestionably be a good football coach and even a decent man, but he was also a proven liar.

They were not, admittedly, big lies. In fact, since these were such small and ultimately silly lies, one must now wonder why O'Leary didn't himself take steps to expunge them from his record somewhere along the line.

He might have needed to enhance his credentials to get his first job, but wouldn't it have been easy enough to quietly ask the sports information office at Georgia Tech (or before that, at Syracuse) to omit those details from his biography in the next season's press guide?

Or had O'Leary, like Tull MacAdoo, been living the lie for so long that he had come to believe it himself?