In June, Gipp, along with Bahan, also a very good baseball player, was recruited to work and play baseball for a Buick plant in Flint, Michigan, which had several teams in a strong league consisting of a number of area factories whose level of play was close to that of a Triple-A circuit in the minor leagues. The “work” was hardly strenuous, essentially requiring Gipp and Bahan to do little more than show up at the plant each morning, according to Bahan, although Gipp would indicate to his paramour, Iris Trippeer, that it was arduous. Once again, Gipp had an excellent season, batting close to .400 while playing two games a week for the Buick team and a third game on Sundays in a General Motors league, and attracting the interest of a number of scouts. Before one home game in Flint, at the Buick team management’s request, Gipp put on a drop-kicking exhibition, booting several balls more than 50 yards over the outfield fence. On another occasion, Gipp showed his dancing prowess at a Flint amusement park, winning a dancing contest (along with a gold watch) with a young woman he had met at the contest.
For Gipp, his partner was just that, a dancing partner. His one and only romantic interest remained Iris Trippeer, whom he got to see only once during the summer of 1920 when he took a train to Indianapolis, where he spent two days with the woman with whom he now was totally smitten. Meanwhile, Gipp wrote to Trippeer often, referring to her as his “little sweetheart,” “honey,” and “Iris of mine,” while signing off as “yours only” and “always yours.” In a letter dated August 27, 1920, Gipp wrote of “the sunny happy days we had together,” and added “some day we’ll have them all again forever this time and not just for a few sweet hours.” Reflecting the influence his relationship with Trippeer had had on him, Gipp also wrote, “I’ve conquered every little habit, honey, and then, honey, you’ll never have to doubt any more.” Whether “every little habit” referred to his pool and poker playing, he never did say. Rockne, for one, would most certainly have hoped so.
In a letter a week earlier, Gipp told Trippeer about a bad cold and a routine that included “work, play ball, and then go to bed.” Gipp went on to report he had received a letter from the University of Detroit, which, he said, was “going to send a man down to see me. Guess I won’t stagger him a little when I tell him the price.” That comment indicated that Detroit, like Michigan, was willing to pay Gipp for his services on the football field, not an uncommon lure at the time. In a curiously worded last sentence in the August 21 letter, Gipp wrote, “Iris dear I’m sorry but some day you’ll know that I didn’t mean any of the things that bring regrets to you.”
Meanwhile, Gipp drew rave reviews in the Flint Journal for his play. In one story, sportswriter Harry Dayton called Gipp the best baseball player ever to play in the city. That was saying a lot, since the factory leagues included former major and minor league players, including Kiki Cuyler, who went on to an eighteen-year Hall of Fame career as an outfielder with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Chicago Cubs, and Brooklyn Dodgers. One of the Buick team’s players, Joe Collard, raved about Gipp as a teammate: “George was a most likeable fellow, always smiling, very good-natured, and humorous. He was very deceptive in his movements, giving you the impression of not trying, but he had such fine coordination that he always seemed to do the job, getting under fly balls or stealing a base with nothing to spare.”
Another story in the Flint Journal said that the legendary Jim Thorpe, the owner and star of the Canton Bulldogs of the fledging National Football League, had offered Gipp $200 a game to play for Canton, an offer Gipp apparently declined. If he was going to play professionally, it was going to be baseball for the Cubs or White Sox, and for more than $200 a week—but not until he was finished playing football at Notre Dame.
While at home, Gipp, bothered by a sore throat and shortness of breath, visited a doctor in Calumet, A. C. Roche, who told him that his tonsils were severely infected and should be removed. During his examination, Dr. Roche found that Gipp’s blood pressure was very high—180 over 110—and deduced that Gipp’s shortness of breath stemmed from possible rheumatic fever that he may have had as a child, but had not been detected. Despite the doctor’s advice that he have his tonsils removed, a simple procedure for young people even during the early part of the twentieth century, Gipp declined the operation, explaining to Roche that he already was late for preseason practice and felt that a tonsillectomy would delay him further.
A few days later, in mid-September, Gipp boarded a train for South Bend to begin his fifth year at Notre Dame. Once again, Gipp’s whereabouts became cloudy. One version is that he checked into a single room in the basement of Sorin Hall, while another had him move into Rockne’s house for a while because he had very little money. Wherever he was staying, Gipp was notified on September 16 that he had been put on probation for failing to take final examinations at the end of the spring semester after he had been reinstated. Gipp immediately left campus to return home, thanks to a twenty-dollar loan from Hunk Anderson at a time when Gipp was uncharacteristically short on cash after a losing streak at the poker tables. Eleven days later, for reasons never made clear, Gipp was reinstated, five days before Notre Dame’s opening game against Kalamazoo. Again, Rockne’s persuasiveness apparently had convinced Father Burns that with Gipp in the lineup Notre Dame had an excellent chance of going unbeaten and being declared the national champion—thus gaining the school immeasurable publicity and no doubt hundreds, if not thousands, of new applicants for the 1921-22 academic year. As it was, Gipp’s academic troubles were getting Notre Dame the kind of publicity it did not want, although it did show that, unlike many other big-time football schools it would not tolerate lax academic behavior, even by a star athlete.
At any rate, Gipp finally agreed to return to Notre Dame in late September, only a few days before the game against Kalamazoo. It would be an unforgettable season, marked by glorious accomplishments and unimaginable sadness.
13
HEARTBREAK IN INDIANAPOLIS
BY THE FALL of 1920, when George Gipp was re-admitted to Notre Dame for the second time in six months, the country had undergone a number of major changes. Though jobs were still scarce, the United States had become the world’s major economic power after Europe’s long domination of the world economy had ended. South Bend, the home of several major defense manufacturers during the World War I, continued to thrive in the war’s aftermath. The Studebaker plant in South Bend, which had produced trucks and personnel carriers for the Army during the war, now was turning out automobiles and trucks, while the Singer Sewing Machine Co. and other local factories quickly made the transition to peacetime manufacturing. As a result, more and more immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe, found their way into the city seeking jobs at those plants.
Socially, too, the country had changed considerably. In addition to earning the right to vote, many women had shed many long-standing inhibitions by taking up smoking cigarettes, and, to the horror of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—a major force in the enactment of the Prohibition Amendment—drinking more than ever in the thousands of speakeasies that had sprung up in town after Indiana enacted its own prohibition law two years prior. As it was, it soon became apparent that the illegality of alcohol consumption had made it more alluring to many people, especially women who found it adventurous to circumvent what came to be called America’s “noble experiment.” Indeed, the empowerment of women as voters and the lure of alcohol marked the beginning of an era of “gin and jazz.” And if women were shedding inhibitions, they were shedding even more on the stage, such as in the popular Ziegfeld Follies, begun by show business entrepreneur Florenz Ziegfeld, whose Broadway revues featured scantily clad chorus girls and dancers.
The year also marked the beginning of the so-called “Roaring Twenties,” an era made for a handsome, young, and famous football star like George Gipp, who loved the lights of nights and more than an occasional drink, legal or illegal, as much, it seemed, as he did running for a touchdown or hitting a 400-foot home run. As word sprea
d, albeit slowly, of Gipp’s double life as a star halfback and skilled high-stakes billiards and poker player, his defiance of conventionality made him even more popular with much of the American public, both men and women, who felt that his aloofness and quest for privacy made him all the more attractive.
By 1920, Notre Dame had also become much more attractive. Where the university enrollment was only 700 at the start of World War I in 1917, it had grown four years later to a school of 1,821 students and 81 professors. And where as few as thirty-five players would turn out for varsity football before the war, more than fifty were on hand for the start of preseason practice in September 1920. With nine returning starters and a strong nucleus of past monogram winners and former freshman players, Notre Dame entered the 1920 football season more heralded than any other Notre Dame squad had ever been. The biggest loss had been that of Dutch Bergman, the fleet halfback and a three-year starter who had spent two years in the Army during the Great War and whose place would be taken by Norm Barry, a three-year letter-winner. As a student, Barry was a Notre Dame “lifer” who had been a minim, a prep, and a university student, all on the Notre Dame campus. Barry then went on to play for the Chicago Bears, the Chicago Cardinals, and the Green Bay Packers of the NFL, and in 1925 coached the Cardinals to the NFL title, all while attending law school.
Also gone from the 1919 team was left end Bernie Kirk, Gipp’s favorite passing target, who had transferred to Michigan, where no doubt Fielding Yost had made Kirk an offer he found impossible to refuse. Rockne, who hadn’t liked Yost to begin with, believing that he harbored anti-Catholic sentiments, never forgave Yost for luring Kirk to Ann Arbor, and most likely having tried to recruit Gipp away from Notre Dame, too. Rockne also felt, perhaps justifiably (as he would for years) that Yost, Bob Zuppke, and Amos Alonzo Stagg had conspired to keep Notre Dame out of the Big Ten Conference on the grounds that it recruited ineligible players and then subsidized them, which to a degree was true. But Yost, Pop Warner, Zuppke, Stagg, Jock Sutherland of Lafayette (and then Pittsburgh, where he would replace Warner in 1924) and a number of other well-known coaches were believed to have done the same, if not worse; in Rockne, they were up against one of their own. As professor Murray Sperber wrote in his voluminous and illuminating book about Notre Dame, Shake Down the Thunder, Rockne’s “‘ruthless side’ allowed him to prosper in a very corrupt and cutthroat world—college coaching.” Sperber went on to say that the Notre Dame coach “learned to swim with sharks, including Pop Warner, and not bleed.”
By midseason, Gipp would almost be as famous as America’s biggest sports icons—Heavyweight Champ Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth, who, in his first year with the New York Yankees in 1920, had hit an astonishing 54 home runs to break his own record of 29 set the previous season with the Boston Red Sox. Even thought he had been reinstated shortly before the season began, Gipp, now twenty-five but looking much older, had taken a single basement room at Sorin Hall on campus and had again signed up for six law courses. Keeping a promise he had made to Iris Trippeer, who had told him she was concerned about his post-football future, Gipp attended classes on a fairly regular basis at the start of the academic year, and would spend more time on campus during the fall semester than he had in the past. However, Gipp still kept his room at the Hotel Oliver, where he now received free lodging in exchange for being the hotel’s “house man” in billiards, meaning that at any billiards competition in South Bend or elsewhere, he would represent the hotel. It hardly seemed like an arrangement conducive to attending six law courses on campus, and Rockne and Notre Dame officials could not help but know this. They read the South Bend papers, where Gipp’s name cropped up for playing pocket or three-cushion billiards almost as often as for his derring-do on the football field. But so long as he showed up for most of his classes, no one seemed overly concerned, even though neither Rockne nor Father Burns liked the thought of the school’s most famous student being a high-stakes pool shark and poker whiz. No longer would Rockne occasionally venture into South Bend some mornings to get Gipp out of bed at the Oliver and accompany him to campus in Rockne’s car so that his star running back would remain eligible to play.
In large measure because of Gipp’s growing fame, Cartier Field had been expanded by 3,000 seats to bring the capacity to 8,000, which was relatively large for the era, even at a school that now had a national reputation in football. While Notre Dame students could still attend home games for 50 cents, outsiders paid $1 for general admission seats, $1.50 for reserve seats, and $3 for box seats. College football games on the high level that the Fighting Irish had now reached were a far cry from 1913, when Notre Dame had upset Army at West Point. With almost every team using the pass more often as an offensive weapon, the game was now far more open, college bands played before and during games, and cheerleaders performed acrobatic feats, albeit not as spectacular as today, on the sidelines. Those features, along with the festive atmosphere that prevailed on crisp fall afternoons, made big-time college football a major pastime, rivaling baseball and horse racing, which along with boxing were the country’s most popular sports for media and spectator attention on Saturday afternoons.
Given his heavy schedule, Gipp rarely got to see Iris Trippeer during the 1920 football season, although she did come to several of Notre Dame’s home games, sitting with Rockne’s wife, Bonnie, and spending Friday and Saturday nights at the Rockne’s home, according to Trippeer’s granddaughter, Veronica Adams Phair. However, a somewhat cryptic letter he wrote to Trippeer on September 24 of 1920 indicated he had gone to Indianapolis to see her, and, strangely enough, while in the Indiana capital had written to her. In a letter whose envelope bore an Indianapolis postmark, Gipp wrote, “Iris, I didn’t know that he knew that I had been told or I certainly wouldn’t have stayed last night, but I thought that I was supposed to be ignorant so just had to stay. Guess I was dumb alright. Wish that I had known that last night. Thought of coming out to-day because it might have helped matters, but was afraid of pulling a ‘boot.’”
Gipp did not say who the “he” alluded to in the letter was, but it may have been Trippeer’s father, who still did not want to have his daughter seeing a college football player, no matter how famous he was becoming. Later in the letter, Gipp perhaps indicated that another romantic interest may have come into her life when he wrote, “Some day the happiness that is due you shall come. I know it will Iris because you deserve it. The average has to be even some day so think of all the happy days that must come to balance the dark ones.” That sounded ominous, but then in the same letter Gipp suggested that the romance might still be on when he said, “Would have liked to have talked to you today but I’ll call you tomorrow from S. Bend. Good-bye dear and keep the proud little chin up as the champion should.” Gipp then closed with “Always yours, George.” So far as is known it was the last letter Gipp ever wrote to the love of his life.
One of the additions to the 1920 Notre Dame team was an unlikely one—twenty-eight-year-old Chet Grant, a 135-pound quarterback and all-around athlete who had spent two years as a lieutenant in the Army and who would back up Joe Brandy. Grant had been a sportswriter for the South Bend Tribune and a semi-pro quarterback when Jesse Harper recruited him in 1915 at twenty-three, even older than Rockne and Gipp when they entered Notre Dame in their early twenties. After World War I, he returned to the South Bend Tribune as a reporter for a year before re-enrolling at Notre Dame in the fall of 1920.
Bright, quick-witted, and an elusive runner, Grant had worked as a part-time sportswriter with the Tribune at night while playing on the freshman football team in 1915 and the 1916 varsity football, basketball, and track teams. In addition to returning to Notre Dame in 1920, Grant resumed his reporter’s job at the Tribune, where he covered Marion County Courthouse, usually before attending classes and then practices. How he managed to do it no one seemed to recall, including Grant. To say the least, that combination, along with his relatively advanced college age, made him a most unusual student-at
hlete, who would finish his football career at the age of twenty-nine in 1921, when he would be the starting quarterback for the Fighting Irish, and later would serve as an assistant coach under Rockne and Elmer Layden.
In 1946 and 1947, immediately after World War II, Grant managed the South Bend Blue Sox, one of the teams in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which became the subject of the popular 1992 film A League of Their Own. Then, in 1948, Grant managed the Kenosha, Wisconsin, team on the same circuit. (The league was organized in 1944 as an alternative to baseball’s watered-down major leagues, all of whose teams had lost most of their starting players to the military, and did surprisingly well before going out of business following the 1954 season.) Later, Grant became the curator of the International Sports and Games Research Collection in the Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame—named for Father Theodore Hesburgh, perhaps the university’s most liberal president when he served from 1952 to 1987—where Grant worked into his late eighties.
Of Gipp as a teammate, Grant said, “He was a man of great poise and intelligence, a glamorous figure and a gentleman, but also a quiet, private person.” That was quite a tribute, since Grant admitted that he did not particularly like Gipp, apparently because of his indifference to practice sessions and classwork, which in those respects made him the antithesis of Grant.
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