The Gipper Read online

  Also by Jack Cavanaugh:

  Damn the Disabilities: Full Speed Ahead!

  Tunney: Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey

  Giants Among Men: How Robustelli, Huff, Gifford, and the Giants Made

  New York a Football Town and Changed the NFL

  The Gipper

  George Gipp, Knute Rockne, and the Dramatic Rise of Notre Dame Football

  Jack Cavanaugh

  Copyright © 2010 by Jack Cavanaugh

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  9781616081102

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my favorite team:

  Marge, John, Tara, Lance, and

  our three wonderful grandsons,

  Rogan Jack, Tanner Patrick, and

  Rylan Donovan Alexander.

  Table of Contents

  Also by Jack Cavanaugh:

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  1 - THE RELUCTANT DROPKICKER

  2 - THE CHANCE MEETING OF A LIFETIME

  3 - THE POOL SHARK FROM LAURIUM

  4 - THE MISSING ARMY INDUCTEE

  5 - THE BEGINNING OF A LEGEND

  6 - FOOTBALL’S ODD COUPLE

  7 - DEADLY FLU PANDEMIC CUTS SHORT ROCKNE’S FIRST SEASON

  8 - THE FIGHTING HIBERNIANS

  9 - DORAIS TO ROCKNE AND AN UPSET FOR THE AGES

  10 - SHARPSHOOTER WITH A BASKETBALL AND A CUE STICK

  11 - GIPP’S BREAKOUT SEASON

  12 - HEAD OVER HEELS IN LOVE

  13 - HEARTBREAK IN INDIANAPOLIS

  14 - THE LAST GAME

  15 - GIPP’S FIGHT FOR LIFE

  16 - A HEARTFELT FAREWELL

  17 - THE FOUR HORSEMEN

  18 - WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER?

  19 - EVEN BETTER THAN THE HORSEMEN

  20 - THE END OF AN ERA

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  “I felt the thrill that comes to every coach when he knows it is his fate and his responsibility to handle unusual greatness—the perfect performer who comes rarely more than once in a generation.”

  —Knute Rockne referring to

  George Gipp, ten years after Gipp’s death

  INTRODUCTION

  WIN ONE FOR The Gipper. Has there ever been a better-known and more widely uttered rallying cry in sports? Not likely. Indeed, the expression found its way into the American lexicon long ago, at first as an exhortation, and later usually in jest and totally unrelated to sports. No less a figure than Ronald Reagan was prone to use the phrase when he was president, four decades after he had spoken it during a memorable movie portrayal. Among other times, Reagan employed the phrase during a commencement address at Notre Dame in 1981 to the delight of the school’s graduating class, most of whom no doubt were well aware of its origin.

  Yet, unlike other well-known phrases associated with famous athletes, such as “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” the lament of a young boy to the great baseball player “Shoeless” Joe Jackson after he had been implicated in the infamous “Black Sox” baseball scandal in 1919, the origin of the Win One for The Gipper phrase is as shrouded in mystery as the mystical figure to whom it refers.

  Just who was the “Gipper,” this seemingly mythical athlete whose name has aroused, in turn, awe, wonderment, curiosity, and amusement since the early part of the twentieth century and whose death while still a student plunged the Notre Dame campus, the city of South Bend, Indiana, and indeed much of the country into collective grief? And how, in such a short period of time, during one of the most colorful eras in American history, could have George Gipp’s exploits as a football player equaled or even overshadowed those of such football immortals as Jim Thorpe and Red Grange and elevated him into a pantheon of his own just before, during, and immediately after World War I, when most college players played all sixty minutes of every game?

  Even more than eight decades after his death, Gipp is regarded by football historians as probably Notre Dame’s best all-around football player—a dazzling runner who averaged 8 yards each time he carried the ball as a senior, a Notre Dame record that still stands today; the best college passer of his era, who completed more than 50 percent of his passes at a time when a football was blunt-shaped, more rounded, and more difficult to throw, than the sleek, much narrower ball that became popular in the 1950s; a punter who boomed most of his kicks more than fifty yards, and once drop-kicked a 62-yard field goal; and a defensive back who never, in four seasons, allowed a pass to be completed in his area. That he did so at a time when there was not yet a National Football League, and when college football was becoming one of the most popular sports in the country after baseball, boxing, and horse racing, made Gipp one of the most famous athletes in the country. His ascendance to fame came at a time when the so-called Golden Age of Sports was emerging with such legendary athletes as Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, and Ty Cobb, and while America was rejoicing in the aftermath of World War I in what became known as the “Jazz Age,” an appropriate era for the fastliving lover of the nights, George Gipp.

  The handsome and intelligent (albeit somewhat undisciplined) Gipp, Notre Dame’s first first-team All-American, also established a reputation in South Bend, Chicago, and a number of other Midwestern cities as one of the best high-stakes billiards players and a skilled poker player at a time when prohibition already had taken hold in Indiana (in April of 1918, before it became the law of the land in 1920), not that it would have much, if any, effect on the ingenious Gipp. Though pursued by women who were attracted to him as much by his good looks as his celebrity as an athlete, Gipp seemed to disdain such attention until he met a stunning young woman who became the love of his life in what turned out to be a bittersweet romance.

  Not surprisingly, Gipp’s lifestyle, in particular his association with gamblers and fellow pool sharks along with his drinking and inattention to his studies, made him a cross to bear for both his coach, Knute Rockne, and administration officials at Notre Dame. Yet Gipp’s name can hardly be mentioned without also mentioning the charismatic Rockne, with whom he became—and still is—inextricably linked, as much as a wayward son as he was a great player. Rockne, who like Gipp did not expect to play football at Notre Dame, also turned out to be an unlikely football hero thanks to his involvement in what became a touchstone victory for an unheralded Notre Dame team in 1913. That Rockne became the nation’s best-known football coach during the Roaring Twenties was a remarkable achievement, since his college counterparts included such coaching immortals as Pop Warner at Pittsburgh, Amos Alonzo Stagg at Chicago, Fielding Yost at Michigan, Bob Zuppke at Illinois, and Tad Jones at Yale. Yet Rockne, more than any other coach, put his school on the map, as bent on making Notre Dame famous as he was on winning football games.

  The link between Gipp and Rockne had begun serendipitously when Rockne spotted Gipp, in street clothes, launching dropkicks of more th
an fifty yards on campus, and talked him into coming out for football. Or so, at least, claimed Rockne, who became renowned for stretching the truth and at times concocting stories, mostly to motivate his players before or during a game. Fortunately for Gipp, Rockne—alternately bemused, angered, and amazed at his supremely talented halfback —seemed willing to ignore his off-campus peccadilloes, his habitual tardiness, and his reluctance to practice as long as he performed well on Saturdays during the football season, which he unfailingly did. Gipp never let Rockne down on the field, and even demonstrated a leadership that he never manifested during the rare practice sessions he attended.

  As it was, Gipp and Rockne, in tandem, were largely responsible for making the small Midwestern all-male school nationally known. Gipp became the most famous football player and Rockne the best-known, and most colorful, coach in the country by the beginning of the 1920s. But their names were to resonate well beyond that era as they attained immortal status, both because of their football achievements and their distinctive, albeit vastly different, personalities—Gipp, the enigmatic and undisciplined loner and Rockne, the charismatic, highly organized and disciplined coach, famous for his stirring orations to his players and his ability to bring out the best in the insouciant Gipp. It was the close and symbiotic relationship between the two disparate football legends that led to “Win one for The Gipper,” an expression that Gipp—portrayed by Reagan in what he always said was his favorite role—may or may not have uttered to Rockne on his deathbed.

  Well-known sportswriter George Trevor of the old New York Sun provided what turned out to be a prophetic observation following a spectacular performance by Gipp against Army at West Point in 1920: “He blazes fiercely like a meteor, not long destined to dazzle earthly eyes.”

  Nine decades later George Gipp remains an almost mythical sports figure, Notre Dame’s most legendary football player, and an athlete for the ages.

  —Jack Cavanaugh

  July13, 2010

  1

  THE RELUCTANT DROPKICKER

  THE YEAR WAS 1916, and much of Europe was already engulfed in The Great War. (Decades later, when another worldwide conflict broke out, it would be retroactively renamed World War I.) To hundreds of young American men, the closest thing to warfare at the time was the country’s most popular team sport after major league baseball—college football. Typifying the growing popularity of the game, crowds of up to seventy thousand were common at the two-year-old Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut, home of the perennial national powerhouse Yale Bulldogs, among the first schools to start playing football (or at least an early, much rougher, version of the game) in the 1870s. Professional football offered virtually no opposition at the time, with the formation of the National Football League six years away, and the pro game relegated for the most part to relatively small cities in Ohio and Indiana where teams of part-time players performed before paltry crowds for around twenty-five dollars a game. Thus, college football had a virtual monopoly on the sport on the national level in the fall. Although the nation’s best teams were primarily in the Northeast, the sport was beginning to gain strength elsewhere, particularly in the Midwest and the South.

  Baseball, though, remained the so-called “national pastime.” Among the college athletes who preferred the game was George Gipp, who in September 1916 enrolled at a small school in northwestern Indiana, the University of Notre Dame, to play baseball and not football, which he had not played in high school and had scant interest. Yet on November 11, 1916, Gipp stood in a huddle wearing the uniform of the Notre Dame freshman football team on a snowy and cold day in Kalamazoo, Michigan, having been convinced by the varsity team’s assistant coach, Knute Rockne, one month earlier to go out for a game he had never played on an organized level. Like the twenty-one-year-old Gipp, Rockne had been a late bloomer in the sport, having played very little football in high school—in his case because he was too small and too light—and had not enrolled at Notre Dame until he was twenty-two years old. But Rockne had gone on to become a star end and helped popularize the forward pass as a result of his play during a stunning upset of a powerful Army team at West Point in 1913, in the first game between the two schools.

  By late in the 1916 season, amid a group of scholarship players who had been football stars in high school, the tall and slender Gipp had in a month’s time established himself as the best player on the freshman team in scrimmages with the varsity. Though he’d come out for the team late and lacked experience, Gipp’s leadership qualities soon manifested themselves and endeared him to his teammates, who elected him captain. He did not disappoint while establishing a reputation as a free spirit, unimpressed with his own talents and those of his opponents. A triple-threat halfback, he could run, pass, and kick as well as anyone on the Notre Dame varsity, with whom he was prohibited from playing because the rules of the day restricted freshmen to playing with other first-year student athletes.

  With about two minutes remaining in the freshman team’s second game against Western State Normal (now Western Michigan University) and the score tied 7-7, Notre Dame was positioned on its own 38-yard line facing a fourth down with about 15 yards to go for a first down. The situation obviously called for a punt.

  “Punt it, George,” quarterback Frank Thomas barked, relaying an order from the team’s head coach, Freeman Fitzgerald, who stood like a sentry on the sidelines in front of the Notre Dame bench.

  “Why settle for a tie, Frank?” Gipp asked a bemused Thomas in the huddle. “Let me try a dropkick. I’m sure I can make it.”

  Gipp’s teammates smiled at their star halfback’s suggestion, but Thomas did not.

  “Just punt the ball, that’s it,” he said firmly, whereupon Notre Dame went into its punt formation.

  Taking the subsequent high snap from center at his own 38-yard line, Gipp dropped the ball to the ground and then, with a powerful thrust of his right leg, sent a dropkick straight down the middle of the field to the astonishment of his teammates, their opponents, the coaches of both teams, the officials and the crowd of around 1,000 spectators. Onward the ball sailed, low and end over end until, finally, it cleared the crossbar 62 yards from the scrimmage line to make it the second longest field goal ever kicked in a college football game1. Since Gipp was positioned seven yards behind the scrimmage line, on the Notre Dame 31, the ball actually had traveled sixty-nine yards, which is how it would be recorded today when field goals are measured from the point at which they were kicked.

  “I had caught a couple of 50-yard punts by Gipp during the game, so I was plenty far back,” said Walter Olsen, a safety who ran back punts for Western State Normal. “But this time, to my surprise, the ball sailed over my head and then over the crossbar for three points. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Olsen wasn’t the only disbeliever. Sprinting down the field to cover what he believed would be a punt, Notre Dame end Dave Hayes thought Olsen was trying to fake him out when the Kalamazoo safety turned his head. Olsen was even more confused when he heard a sudden and collective crowd cheer.

  “What happened?” Hayes asked.

  “The son-of-a-gun kicked a field goal,” replied an incredulous Olsen.

  Upfield, Gipp was engulfed by his teammates for his improbable field goal, which would turn out to be decisive in a 10-7 Notre Dame victory, its second in a row.

  Even though the field goal occurred in a freshman game, the Associated Press put an account of Gipp’s kick on its wires throughout the country. Hearing about Gipp’s dazzling kick—and how it was accomplished in defiance of his coach and quarterback—Knute Rockne, the chemistry assistant and assistant varsity football coach who had strongly suggested that a reluctant Gipp suit up for football, felt more than a sense of satisfaction when told about it by varsity coach Jesse Harper that night. Though he had barely gotten to know Gipp, Rockne, who at twenty-eight was only seven years older than his protégé, also felt that it very likely would not be the first act of disobedience on a football field, or elsewhere,
by the unlikely halfback from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

  Relatively tall for the era at six feet and weighing around 175 pounds, about normal for a running back at the time, Gipp, as a runner, had already showed Rockne, in the freshman team’s scrimmages against the varsity, that he was a marvel of speed, balance, and grace, who could slither through a defensive line with ease or streak around end. Rockne marveled at how the raw but talented running back utilized his blockers masterfully.

  “Take 50 to the inside!” he would call out to a blocker in front of him. Or to another blocker he would bark out, “Get 62!” Then, once in the open field and on his own, he became almost impossible to get a hand on as he dodged, twisted, and cut. He was able to outrun almost every defensive back on the varsity, a team that would go undefeated in nine games in 1916. Rockne also marveled at Gipp’s prudent tendency to run out of bounds when he knew he had no chance of making additional yardage, a rare technique at the time, feeling, correctly, that it was not worth risking injury.

  Turning to Harper after one particularly dazzling run by Gipp, Rockne said, “Jesse, he’s going to be something special.”

  A week after the dramatic victory over Western State Normal, the Notre Dame freshman team closed out its three-game season by losing to Kalamazoo College, 34-7, with Gipp accounting for the visitors’ only touchdown on a 65-yard run.

  Even by the standards of tramp athletes who often moved from school to school to play football before, during, and after World War I, George Gipp was in a class of his own as a freshman student at Notre Dame. For most of the football gypsies of the era, the sole reason for being at a university was to play football; they usually dropped out of school after the last game of the season, having attended few, if any, classes. Gipp, by contrast, was bright and capable of doing his course work at the small Catholic school eighty-five miles east of Chicago and actually did attend classes, albeit somewhat erratically. Like many college football players, Gipp was about three or four years older than most freshmen at Notre Dame, whose collegiate student body of about five hundred was predominantly made up of young Catholic men from families of modest means who were able to come up with the yearly tuition of $120. Notre Dame tried to help by offering jobs to needy students, but could offer little more, since the school had virtually no endowment. “We here at Notre Dame have a living endowment,” the school’s president, John W. Cavanaugh, often said, meaning that the university relied heavily on donations from some of its alumni. In addition to the college students, Notre Dame, from the time of its founding, included male elementary students from grades one through eight, and a four-year preparatory school. If they didn’t share the same classrooms, all of the students—from, roughly, the ages of six (the so-called “minims”) into the twenties—did share the same sprawling campus, an egalitarian concept that George Gipp and many other collegians did not particularly appreciate any more than that Notre Dame was an exclusively male province.