The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  As it developed, Army would be the only team to score against Notre Dame during the 1916 season. The Ramblers would go on to win their last four games, scoring 141 points while holding their opponents, including Nebraska, scoreless. With a solid nucleus of the 1916 team scheduled to return the following year, the outlook for another good season looked promising indeed. Not only that, Rockne mused, Gipp had three varsity years ahead of him. That was assuming that the enigmatic young man from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, who seemed to take for granted his unmistakable talent in a sport he had hardly ever played, would even complete his freshman year—let alone return to Notre Dame the following fall since, in April 1917, the United States would declare war on Germany. As it was, Gipp made it through the academic year with decent grades, including three consecutive grades in the nineties—the equivalent of an A—in German during the four quarterly marking periods. In December, Gipp decided to go out for the freshman basketball team. Clearly one of the team’s best prospects, Gipp lasted a few practice sessions before realizing that basketball was interfering with his lucrative pursuits of pocket billiards and poker, and to a lesser extent, his studies.

  Gipp lasted a bit longer in baseball, playing in one game for the Notre Dame freshman baseball team. Instructed to bunt, Gipp was unable to resist a fastball right across the plate, swung away and belted a home run. Chastised by the coach for his disobedience, as he had been for refusing to punt and instead kicking a game-winning 62-yard field goal the previous fall, Gipp turned in his uniform the next day. A few weeks later, as a prelude to the traditional spring game between the varsity football team and an alumni squad, the alumni team (with Rockne at quarterback, no less) took on what had been the freshmen side the previous fall. It gave Rockne, who played both ways, a close-up look at Gipp. As it developed, the bigger alumni team beat the freshmen 14-7, with Gipp’s passing leading to his team’s only touchdown.

  After the game, Rockne, never prone to applaud a team’s players individually, praised Gipp for his play. Then, in a rare gesture for Rockne, he told Gipp he was glad he had come out for the freshman team, but not without applying what had become a Rockne trademark—a barb intended to deflate a player’s ego. “I told you I thought you’d make a football player,” Rockne said to a smiling Gipp as they walked off the field. “And if you keep up what you’re doing, you will.”

  If not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, it marked another step toward the establishment of a close bond between one of the most charismatic and dynamic football coaches of all time and the baseball player Rockne had discovered—or so he claimed—booming out awe-inspiring dropkicks during a walk across the Notre Dame campus on a sunny, early autumn Sunday afternoon.

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  THE POOL SHARK FROM LAURIUM

  BY ALL ACCOUNTS, George Gipp morphed from being a teenage truant during his high school days into a directionless young man whose main goals seemed to be winning as much money as possible playing poker and shooting pool in his hometown of Laurium, Michigan, and nearby Calumet, while also establishing himself as a potential big-league baseball player.

  “George wasn’t what you could call troublesome as a kid, but he was lazy and somewhat indifferent to his studies,” Karl Gipp, a cousin, recalled. “He came from a strict family, but was very different from his father and his seven siblings. George pretty much did whatever he wanted to do, but he was never what you would call troublesome.”

  Another cousin, Harrison Gipp, remembered his first cousin well, especially his affinity for gambling on cards and billiards. “He was darn good at it,” Harrison Gipp said, “but otherwise there didn’t seem to be anything exceptional about George. He was a quiet, modest fellow, well-liked. He didn’t seem to have any real close friends. I guess you’d call him a loner.”

  Where Gipp’s seemingly diffident attitude came from is difficult to ascribe. Gipp’s father, Matthew, the son of German immigrants, was a somewhat dour disciplinarian who was unable to inculcate his own values into the youngest of his three sons. In effect, Gipp became the family’s black sheep during his teenage years and remained so until—to the astonishment of his family, friends, and even those who knew him remotely—he decided to go to Notre Dame at the age of twenty-one. From all accounts, the Gipp household was not a joyous one and was dominated by Matthew Gipp’s wife, Isabella, who was of Scotch-Irish descent and had been born in Belfast in Northern Ireland.

  That Gipp went to Notre Dame was surprising for two reasons. First, he had never expressed an interest in going to college, and, second, he had not graduated from high school—thanks to poor grades, even poorer attendance, and a number of infractions serious enough to get him suspended on several occasions, such as talking back to teachers or speaking up in class with what his classmates thought were witty remarks, but which infuriated his instructors. What was not surprising was that Gipp, on the recommendation of former Notre Dame catcher Wilbur “Dolly” Gray (who had played amateur ball with Gipp), had been offered a scholarship by Notre Dame to play baseball, which in the latter part of the nineteenth century and up until around 1910 had been the dominant varsity sport at the small Catholic school. While playing with strong amateur teams in the Calumet area, Gipp had established a reputation as a power-hitting outfielder with speed and a strong arm, good enough to attract the attention of several major league scouts. One of Gipp’s amateur clubs was in Elkhart, Indiana, not far from South Bend, where Gray, already aware of Gipp’s talents as a baseball player, had watched him play.

  When first approached by Gray about going to Notre Dame in the spring of 1916, Gipp told him, “I’m too old to go to college, and, besides, I don’t have any money.” That was hardly surprising since Gipp had worked sporadically—driving a truck for a construction company, climbing poles for a utility company, waiting tables at the Michigan House restaurant, and ferrying copper miners to bars and a house of prostitution in Calumet by taxi—while spending much of his time playing poker and shooting pool, almost always for money, usually winning more than he lost. In mid-May, Gipp received a scholarship offer to play baseball at Notre Dame from Jesse Harper, who in addition to coaching the football team, coached the baseball team and was the school’s athletic director. That night, Gipp told his family about the letter, but said he was disinclined to accept it.

  “What was the deal?” Alex Gipp, the oldest of the Gipp children, asked.

  “A full ride for tuition, bed, and board,” George replied. “For that I’d have to play baseball and wait on table[s].”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Alex responded.

  “It’s kid stuff, money,” the younger Gipp replied.

  “What do you want? Egg in your beer?” retorted an increasingly perturbed Alex Gipp.

  “Look, if I’m a good enough ballplayer to have some college come after me, I figure I’m good enough to play in the minor leagues anyway,” George said.

  “It doesn’t follow that because a college wants you, the pros will,” Alex said. “And anyway, they can find you at Notre Dame just as soon as they can in the bush leagues.”

  “Like I say, Notre Dame won’t pay money, and I wouldn’t be able to hustle the students for the price of a haircut,” George said in response.

  “Aren’t you pleased they asked you to play for Notre Dame?” Alex asked.

  “Oh sure, that’s jake,” George replied, using a term popular at the time to denote good or even great.

  “Well then, you’re going to go,” Alex said loudly, obviously determined to see that his younger brother would be the first of the eight Gipp children to go to college.

  Alex Gipp thereupon went to a nearby butcher to borrow fifty dollars and launch a drive to finance his brother’s trip to South Bend. Eager to help his former teammate, who he regarded as a big-league prospect, Dolly Gray, along with some of Gipp’s closest friends, also pitched in, persuading a number of merchants in Laurium and Calumet to donate money to pay for Gipp’s train fare and some necessary expenses once he got to
South Bend. Finally agreeing to take advantage of the scholarship, Gipp boarded a train bound for South Bend in early September 1916 after being informed by a school official that he was being accepted as a conditional freshman, meaning he would have to make up necessary high school credits during summer school at Notre Dame (which Gipp never did). If Notre Dame thought it was getting a prototypical student, the school was mistaken. What it got was a twenty-one-year-old freshman known only to the school’s baseball coach who would become an athlete for the ages—and not because of his prowess in baseball.

  How George Gipp developed into an athlete is hard to fathom. His five-foot eight-inch father was unathletic, as were his three brothers, none of whom appeared to have encouraged him to get involved in sports as a boy. Nor were his mother or his sisters of an athletic bent. If he inherited anything from his parents, it could have been their even dispositions, along with the brown hair and blue eyes of his mother. Taller than his father and his siblings, Gipp, from an early age, demonstrated talent in baseball, football, basketball, and as a sprinter, even winning the annual Laurium foot race while competing against grown men at the age of thirteen. But school was another matter. “George was a bright kid, witty and smart, but he hated being restricted as he had to be in school,” said Fred “Ojay” Larson, a high school classmate of Gipp’s who played with him at Notre Dame, shortly before he died in 1977. “And being absent so often he wasn’t permitted to compete in sports beyond his freshman year. He made up for it, though, by playing with older guys on basketball teams at the Calumet YMCA and baseball teams in the Calumet area. The only football he played was on the amateur and sometimes a semi-pro level, but in all three sports he was outstanding, a natural athlete.”

  Neither Larson nor any other longtime friends from the Calumet area seemed to recall any particular reason why Gipp was so recalcitrant and rebellious as a teenager. “I don’t think it had anything to do with his family,” Larson said. “His parents had eight kids, and, as I recall, his father was strict, but then so were most of the fathers at the time. We were all competitive, but nowhere near as much as George, who hated to lose at anything, even marbles. But he never was nasty, and most of the other kids who played sports with him liked him. Even as a kid he was very cool and very confident in everything he did. And from the time he got into his teens, he tended to hang around with older guys, both while playing sports and gambling. I think he was attracted to the card-playing and pool-shooting because of his intense competitive nature. As I said, he hated to lose at anything.”

  Gipp’s constant truancy in school, especially at Calumet High, prompted letters to his parents, who seemed to have believed they’d done all they could to get him to go to school on a regular basis. “I think they often assumed George had gone to school when he hadn’t and spent most of the time playing poker with older guys,” Larson said. At Calumet High, Gipp was a good enough basketball player to become a starter as a freshman, the only year he played, but he was ineligible to play football and baseball because of his absences and poor grades. “George was a very smart fellow, but just didn’t care for school,” Larson said. “If he’d been eligible to play, he probably would have been great on both the football and baseball teams, but he didn’t seem to care about not being able to do so. But that was the way George was. He was a prankster as a kid, but never pulled anything that was serious or hurt anyone. And I certainly don’t recall him ever being in trouble with the law.”

  Having dropped out following the fall semester in 1911, he spent the intervening years driving a construction company truck and a taxi in Calumet, playing semi-pro baseball for money and establishing himself as one of the best pocket billiards and baseball players in Calumet and, according to Larson, earning a considerable amount of money in the process. For unknown reasons, Gipp returned to Calumet High in the fall of 1914. Again ineligible for sports, he stayed until the end of the school year in June 1915, but still did not have enough credits to graduate. Fifteen months after leaving Calumet High for the last time, Gipp enrolled at Notre Dame, leading some friends to believe that, by returning to school for a year, he thought he could manage to pick up enough credits to get into Notre Dame or whatever big-time college would accept him, although, according to Larson, he never mentioned the possibility of going to college when he went back to Calumet High.

  “Even though he never mentioned it, some of us thought that he came back to high school because he had begun to have thoughts of going to college, probably to attract the attention of baseball scouts since he was such a good baseball player,” said Larson, who went on play five years with the Chicago Bears in the National Football League. “But certainly none of us ever thought he would go to college to play football. That wasn’t his game, although we played together on some amateur and semi-pro teams around Calumet and George was very good, both as a runner and passer and as a defensive player.”

  Bob Erkkila, who taught in the Calumet school system for many years and has researched Gipp’s career in the area, said Calumet’s wayward son was a prankster and practical joker, albeit a harmless one. “But when it came to sports, he seemed to be good at everything he did,” Erkkila said. “He just loved to compete. But he also definitely did not live by his family’s code.”

  Erkkila’s best source on Gipp was Wilfred “Jazzy” Giroux, whose older brother, Peter, was one of Gipp’s best friends. “Jazzy was about six years younger than Gipp, and very small for his age. When he was about twelve and George and Peter were around eighteen, Jazzy would slide down a coal chute to get into the Elks club in Calumet when it was closed and then open the door to let in his brother and George so that they could play pool,” Erkkila said. “Jazzy was in awe of Gipp, who often took him along in a World War I-era liberty truck that Gipp drove for the Houghton Traction Company in Calumet both before he went to Notre Dame and during summer vacations. Once, when Gipp had driven a shipment to Hurley, Wisconsin, which was a wide-open town, Gipp got into a dice game with some older local guys and began to win a lot of money. The local guys became furious at this outsider winning their money and eventually threw Gipp down a stairway. Gipp then got into the truck with Jazzy and drove it right into the front of the building where the dice game was going on, then said to Jazzy, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and drove off in a hurry. That was George. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone.”

  Much of the money Gipp won at poker and at pool tables came from older men, many of whom worked in the Calumet area’s mines, which contained some of the richest copper deposits in the world. Following the discovery of copper in the middle of the nineteenth century in northern Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, which projects into Lake Superior, thousands of potential miners from as far away as Europe (including Gipp’s paternal grandfather) streamed into the area. This increased Calumet’s population to almost 40,000, making it the second largest city in Michigan after Detroit.

  Like many of their relatives, most male Calumet High School students in the early part of the twentieth century wound up working for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, a coppermining behemoth that dominated the industrial landscape. Because of that predestined future for so many students, courses were offered in carpentry, blacksmithing, and other subjects that related to mining. Gipp was among the relative few who, having no intention of working for the C & H (as the mining company was called), took none of those courses. He did not fare well in any of those he did take, although he did display creativity, a sense of humor, and awareness of three famed writers in a poem that he wrote for a freshman English class.

  After mentioning the early nineteenth century poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in his first two stanzas, Gipp concluded:

  Now Gibbons they say wrote a history true

  Of things that had happened after me and you

  Of battles and wars and of wayward sons

  Whose only ambition was great battles won

  Of great men I’d tell with their ways so quaint

  If I
were a Keats and I’m sorry I ain’t.

  This is the only sample of Gipp’s high school work that lives on, so far as is known; it may have been his only effort, and an admirable one at that, at poetry.

  Having played a varsity sport, in his case basketball, only during his freshman year, Gipp never achieved the Big Man on Campus status that usually accrues to high school sports stars. Several acquaintances, including Ojay Larson, claimed that Gipp was the high scorer on the Calumet High team during the one year he played, and once scored 52 points in a game. That seems to have been a mind-boggling feat, since Gipp played in an era when basketball teams rarely scored more than 40 points in a game. (A jump ball was mandated after each basket—a rule that lasted until 1936—which kept fast breaks to a minimum and slowed down the pace of games considerably.)

  Given his diffident manner, it’s unlikely that the lack of attention he drew while at Calumet High bothered him, nor did much of anything, it seemed, during most of the rest of his life. Yet he did feel ill at ease during his early days at Notre Dame. Fortunately, the relatively old freshman from little Laurium, Michigan, would soon get over his discomfort—mainly because of his superb athletic talents and his skill at the pool and poker tables.

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