The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  In mid-December 1919, the Notre Dame squad, along with Rockne, Dorais, and the university band, gathered in the dining room of the Hotel Oliver to celebrate the team’s unbeaten season. The squad would also elect a captain for the 1920 season to succeed Pete Bahan, who had skippered the last two teams. Despite his missed practices and late arrivals for practice sessions, Gipp was elected by a margin of one vote over tackle Frank Coughlin. Gipp’s election demonstrated the respect his teammates had for him, especially for his leadership on the field of play. Gipp may have been irresponsible in many ways, but, as Hunk Anderson was to say years later, “the guys loved him.”

  Something ever more special than being elected captain was about to happen to George Gipp before the 1919-20 academic year was over.

  12

  HEAD OVER HEELS IN LOVE

  JUDGING BY KNUTE Rockne’s comments about George Gipp, it’s easy to get the impression that his wayward wonder was an ascetic, especially when it came to women. “He lived quietly, had few companions, (and) apparently cared nothing for female company, of which there’s none whatever on the Notre Dame campus,” Rockne was to write about his halfback in 1930. Of those four elements, only the fourth—that there were no women students at Notre Dame—was demonstrably true, although Notre Dame men were welcome guests at frequent dances at St. Mary’s College, a fifteen-minute walk from the Notre Dame campus. But then Rockne was prone to stretch the truth, and, at times, even concoct stories—whether to inspire his players, assuage dubious administrators and faculty members, or impress sportswriters, all of which he succeeded in doing.

  In Gipp’s case, Rockne went even further, as he did when he once said, that “a check-up on his habits showed him with fewer than the usual faults of star athletes.” If Gipp’s lifestyle of spending endless nights shooting pool and playing poker for high stakes, chain-smoking, considerable drinking, missing most of his classes, chronically reporting to campus late for preseason practices, and skipping many practices during the season fell short of the standard, one is left to wonder what the “usual faults” of most star athletes of the era entailed and whether Rockne was feigning ignorance of Gipp’s off-campus peccadilloes. But then Rockne, like many coaches, affected a macho image and liked his players to do so, too. In Rockne’s perspective as a coach, it was a blessing that Notre Dame had no female students, since it meant the absence of what could be a major distraction for his football players.

  As for Gipp apparently caring “nothing for female company,” that was a stretch, too. A handsome and intelligent star athlete, Gipp was the object of a lot of women’s affection, and it was unlikely that he would resist all of that female attention, especially since by the fall of 1919 he had his own room at the elegant Hotel Oliver, which he primarily used on weekends when the tempo in both billiards and poker picked up markedly. Most of his female interests were young working women in South Bend, including the manicurist at the Hotel Oliver with whom he was seen often even though he managed to keep such relationships private.

  That changed, though, when he met a stunning brunette from Indianapolis named Iris Trippeer—who, at about twenty, was four years younger than Gipp—in South Bend while she was visiting a friend at St. Mary’s in the winter of 1920. Indications are that he met her at a dance at St. Mary’s, although the worldly Gipp hardly seemed likely to have been going to college dances, even though he was a very good dancer and liked to dance. However, Trippeer’s granddaughter, Victoria Adams Phair, said in May 2010 that Trippeer had indeed met Gipp at a dance at St. Mary’s, to which she had gone with a friend who was a student at the school. There, she and Gipp met and became smitten with one another. For all of his good looks and fame, Gipp had never met a woman like Trippeer, who, apart from her beauty, was highly intelligent, personable, and witty, as both Hunk Anderson and Victoria Adams Phair attested. Trippeer also was a mystery woman of sorts, and although she showed Gipp outward affection in public, she turned out to be as elusive in her way as Gipp was on a football field.

  It would be a long-distance romance, and while, at least for Gipp, prolonged absences made his heart even fonder for Trippeer, the fact that she lived and worked in Indianapolis, about 125 miles from South Bend, meant they saw each other infrequently even as their ardor apparently intensified. Since neither had a car, when they did see one another it was after a train trip between the two cities.

  Early in the burgeoning relationship, Gipp and Trippeer double-dated with Anderson and his wife-to-be, Marie Martin. On those dates, Marie Martin Anderson was to say, Trippeer was overly amorous with Gipp, which seemed to have annoyed Marie, accustomed as she was to the mores of the era that dictated propriety in social settings. While hardly resisting Trippeer’s affectionate gestures, Gipp, Martin said, always remained a perfect gentleman, which was the persona he seemed to demonstrate in public, both on and off the football field. On one date, Martin noticed that Trippeer was wearing a gold football on a necklace and, when asked where she got it, Trippeer told her it was from Gipp. It turned out that Rockne had dipped into his own pocket to buy gold football charms for members of the undefeated 1919 team, and Gipp had given his to Trippeer. Martin’s opinion of Trippeer differs from that of several of Gipp’s friends who found her to be cultured, sophisticated, and demure—hardly the type to be clinging to a boyfriend in public. Perhaps Martin, though very attractive, may have been jealous of the attention the stunning Trippeer received when she was in her company. It is also possible Martin was envious of Gipp’s courtly and sensitive demeanor toward Trippeer, contrasted with that of the earthy and far less polished Anderson’s mannerisms.

  As it was, Trippeer rarely came to South Bend. More often, Gipp visited her on weekends in Indianapolis, where she lived with her parents. Gipp never did meet Trippeer’s parents though, apparently because she had told him that her father, a railroad brakeman, disapproved of her seeing Gipp because, from what he had heard and read, Gipp was a ne’er-do-well football player. As a result, Gipp and Trippeer were somewhat circumscribed during his visits to Indianapolis, confining their time to the Claypool Hotel, where he stayed while visiting Trippeer, and to downtown restaurants and clubs where they were able to dance. Gipp soon fell in love with Trippeer, and she in turn appeared enraptured with the handsome football star.

  The romance flourished during occasional meetings through the winter and early spring of 1920, and they eventually became engaged. In the few times she came to South Bend, Gipp and Trippeer continued to double-date with Anderson and his fiancée. On one occasion when the four of them were together, Trippeer’s ardor for Gipp came close to causing a serious auto accident, according to Marie Martin. Gipp, whose football exploits and good looks made him a favorite of a number of prominent South Bend business executives and others in the upper echelon of the city’s social spectrum, had been invited to a party at a lakeside retreat of a businessman he knew. Gipp was told he was welcome to bring along friends, if he wished, to the businessman’s house on nearby Diamond Lake in Michigan. Gipp asked Trippeer to come, of course, along with Anderson and Martin. Gipp drove the car, which he had borrowed from a friend, along a rutted dirt road. Trippeer snuggled up to him, impeding his driving on the unfamiliar road and eventually causing him to lose control, sending the car down an embankment and almost into a lake before Gipp was able to bring it to a stop. With the car mired in a ditch, Gipp and Anderson, despite the slippery terrain, managed to push the car up the embankment and back on the road, undamaged and operable. “Marie was pretty upset with Iris, feeling that she caused George to lose control,” Hunk Anderson recalled. They finally made it to the party, where Gipp danced the night away with his beauteous girlfriend as partygoers, recognizing the Notre Dame football star, could not help but stare at the good-looking couple.

  Gipp saw less and less of Trippeer during the spring, but if anything, their separation served to intensify Gipp’s feelings. Gipp wrote to Trippeer often, but rarely got a response, and occasionally phoned her at her job as a secr
etary with the Indiana State Public Service Commission, which she tried to discourage him from doing since, she said, it incurred the wrath of her superiors.

  For the cool and seemingly unflappable Gipp, who rarely if ever showed any emotion on or off the field, Trippeer’s elusiveness was both puzzling and upsetting. Matters took a turn for the worse on March 8, when Father James Burns, the new Notre Dame president, wrote a letter to Gipp—who for some reason had gone home to Laurium—informing him he had been expelled. The letter, which began with “Dear Sir,“ read: “Due to the fact that you have been found to not be attending classes on a regular basis, or taking the final exams in your chosen major, it is the decision of this office to expel you from this university as of this date.” Burns went on to say that if “in some time in the future” Gipp wanted to return to Notre Dame, his application would be considered. That it had taken Notre Dame almost four years to realize Gipp rarely had gone to class seemed odd. His professors certainly were aware of his chronic absenteeism, and so was Rockne. Some administration sources said the last straw came when word got back to the administration that Gipp had been seen patronizing a South Bend dance hall, which had been declared off-limits to Notre Dame students, apparently because the dance hall’s hostesses tended to be more than just dance partners.

  Burns’s action was taken around the time Notre Dame was to begin spring football practice. As a result of Gipp’s expulsion, the team no longer had a captain. Rockne filled that void by appointing Frank Coughlin, whom Gipp had beaten out for the captaincy by one vote at the team’s post-season dinner three months earlier.

  When he returned to South Bend, Gipp promptly moved out of Sorin Hall, where he hadn’t spent much time to begin with, and into his room at the Hotel Oliver, while spending more time at Hullie and Mike’s and continuing to write to Iris Trippeer. As word of Gipp’s expulsion spread, the college football vultures went to work. Maybe Notre Dame no longer wanted one of the country’s best halfbacks, but a lot of schools did. Gipp had barely finished Father Burns’s letter when he began to receive scholarship offers—some of which included financial inducements—from such major football powers as Michigan, Pittsburgh, Detroit (now the University of Detroit Mercy), and West Point. In the latter case, Gipp received a letter from the head of the West Point Athletic Association saying he had been “recommended for appointment to the United States Military Academy,” whose superintendent, ardent football fan General Douglas MacArthur, was reportedly the one who did the recommending. Apparently neither West Point nor any of the other schools trying to capitalize on Gipp’s expulsion asked to look at his weak academic transcript and his attendance record at Notre Dame. Given the zeitgeist of the big-time college football world during the era, that was hardly surprising. Much like today, many of the country’s college football powers cared far more about a player’s playing statistics than his academic ones.

  Gipp’s expulsion was hardly undeserved considering how he had gone through two academic years without receiving any grades and had failed to take final examinations in any of his classes. Enrolled as a law student during his fourth academic year, Gipp had continued along the same truant path, rarely showing up for classes. Though Father Burns was well aware of Gipp’s poor academic record, he did not take action until several of Gipp’s professors complained to him about Gipp’s absenteeism and failure to do assigned class work and to take examinations.

  Very likely at Rockne’s suggestion, a group of about eighty businessmen and civic leaders in South Bend signed a petition urging that Gipp be reinstated and sent it to Father Burns. The petition was hard to ignore since many of those who signed it had pledged support for the proposed expansion of Cartier Field and also supported Notre Dame’s fund-raising program. “Increasingly, South Bend is taking pride in the splendid accomplishments of Notre Dame,” the petition read. “The most spectacular of these are, of course, your victories upon the athletic field. Here George Gipp has been truly worthy of the University.” Rockne also was to say that, at his request, Gipp was given a closed-door examination by several of his law professors, which ostensibly covered subjects he was taking, and passed with flying colors, and it was understood that he would complete a term paper by the start of the fall semester in September 1920. Such a deal seems highly unlikely, however, since it would smack of favoritism toward someone, his football talents notwithstanding, who hardly seemed to deserve such special treatment. And he was unlikely to get it from Father Burns, who, although a former Notre Dame baseball player, was a staunch disciplinarian, far more concerned with the university’s academic reputation than its performance in sports. If his predecessor, John Cavanaugh, had wanted to turn Notre Dame into the “Yale of the West,” Father Burns had taken that academic goal even further, saying, on his installation, that he wanted to see the school become the Yale, Harvard, and Princeton of the country’s midland. Furthermore, giving a private test to an individual student by a panel of professors was not part of university policy. Yet Rockne insisted, in dramatic and hyperbolic fashion, that that’s exactly what happened after Gipp asked him if he could take an oral examination to get re-admitted.

  “Gipp claimed to have been ill and he got it on that account,” Rockne was to write in one of a series of articles he wrote for Collier’s magazine in 1930. “Gipp went into that examination room with the whole school and the whole city waiting on the outcome. Some of his inquisitors were no football fans. They were prepared to stop his scholastic run with tough tackling questions and blocking from the books. His professors knew that Gipp was not a diligent student. But he astonished everybody by what he knew when it came to cross-examination. He passed back into school, and there was general rejoicing. Not, however, by Gipp. Calmly, as usual, he accepted victory; but it was observed that he was once more irregular in attending class.”

  Rockne swore by that version. But more likely it was because of the pressure put on the administration by the South Bend petitioners that Father Burns yielded and Gipp was re-admitted as a student on March 29. In a letter to Gipp, addressed to his home in Laurium, where he had returned, Father Burns informed Gipp of his reinstatement. “It is my hope that you will take your obligations as a student in the law department seriously. And that you will attend classes on a regular basis, take exams given, and graduate with your degree.”

  It is entirely possible that Rockne had an influential hand in Gipp’s reinstatement by letting Burns know that a number of major football powers, including a Catholic college, the University of Detroit, were trying to recruit Gipp, and reminding Burns how much he meant to the football team and the national attention its success drew to Notre Dame. Unfortunately, neither Rockne’s apparent efforts to get his meal-ticket halfback reinstated nor a personal letter from the university president to Gipp seemed to have had an impact on the school’s most famous athlete. As it developed, Gipp skipped more classes than he attended during the last two months of the spring semester, and again failed to complete his assignments or take any final examinations, even though some students claimed that they had seen Rockne accompany Gipp to campus in his car from the Hotel Oliver on some mornings, ostensibly so that he would attend classes.

  Several days after his reinstatement, Gipp turned out again for the varsity baseball team, much to the delight of Gus Dorais, who was also the baseball coach. Hunk Anderson told of how scouts from the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox came to Notre Dame to see Gipp during a preseason intrasquad game. Aware of the scouts’ presence, Gipp asked Anderson, who was catching for the other team, if he could tell him what the pitchers were going to throw to him, and Anderson agreed to do so. Gipp proceeded to belt about a half-dozen pitches over the fence, whereupon after practice the scouts both offered Gipp contracts for around $5,000 (about $50,000 by the second decade of the twenty-first century). Gipp took the contracts, but did not sign them, telling the scouts he wanted to think about the offers.

  In his first game nine days after his reinstatement, on April 8 against
Michigan Agricultural College, Gipp clouted a home run and walked with the bases loaded in the bottom of the tenth inning to bring home the winning run. Gipp played in Notre Dame’s next two games, but then quit the team. Once again in baseball, as in varsity basketball, Gipp did not stick around long enough to get a monogram, though he had been a starting outfielder in three games. And again Gipp did not give a reason for quitting. Such formalities, it seemed, were not deemed necessary by the free-spirited Gipp, who may still have been smarting from his expulsion in March.

  Even after the spring semester had ended, Gipp apparently continued to resent his expulsion, feeling that Notre Dame had not treated him fairly, especially in light of the attention he had helped bring to the school. His resentment grew to the point that during the late summer of 1920 he accepted invitations to visit both the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of Detroit, and for a while he was conflicted as to which one he favored. Pete Bahan, his fellow halfback on the football team and one of his few close friends on campus, had enrolled at Detroit for the following academic year after being expelled from Notre Dame for academic reasons. That Bahan had captained both the 1918 and 1919 Notre Dame teams showed how strict President Burns was about athletes’ class attendance and their academic performances, as Gipp had learned firsthand himself.

  Given the virtually nonexistent eligibility rules that allowed football players to play as many as eight seasons at two schools, Bahan had been recruited by Detroit even though he had played three varsity seasons at Notre Dame, the maximum allowed at the time, at least for Notre Dame. He would play one additional year for Detroit and another at St. Mary’s in California under Slip Madigan, the coach of the Galloping Gaels, with whom he had played at Notre Dame. Bahan, a very good runner, also captained St. Mary’s in 1921, meaning he had been a football captain at two universities and had played five varsity seasons. So much for any interlocking eligibility rules.