The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  Though bruised and still sore from the pounding he had taken at West Point, Gipp—described in an advance story by Arch Ward in the South Bend Tribune as “the Babe Ruth of the gridiron”—put on a dazzling display against Purdue before a standing-room crowd of roughly 12,000, about 4,000 more than the enlarged capacity of Cartier Field. For the second week in a row, Gipp totaled well over 200 yards on offense, rushing 10 times for 129 yards, an average of almost 13 yards a carry, and completing four of seven passes for 128 yards—a grand total of 257 yards—as Notre Dame routed the Boilermakers 28-0. Red Salmon, who had been keeping tabs on Notre Dame players since 1900, said after the game that Gipp was “the greatest player ever to play for the old school.”

  Purdue players also had high praise for Gipp. “Many times I was sure I had him, but then ended up with empty hands,” guard Cecil Cooley said. “I remember looking around after he had evaded me and seeing him going down the field weaving, side-stepping, hesitating, speeding up, and twisting like a young colt that had just got out through an open gate.”

  By that stage of the season, no other college player in the top tier of college football was producing such glittering offensive statistics, and the Associated Press was by now taking note and carrying stories of his achievements on its newswire to newspapers and radio stations throughout the United States. By then, almost everyone had heard of Gipp’s exploits, albeit not at the pool or poker tables. Sportswriters, far more restrained at the time, tended to overglorify famous athletes while divulging hardly anything about their lifestyles, no matter how scandalous, unless it was in a positive vein. (Babe Ruth was a classic example, as was the belligerent racist but great baseball player, Ty Cobb.) Despite his frailties, Gipp was angelic by comparison. Some sportswriters led readers to believe that he was an incarnation of Frank Merriwell, the fictional star all-around athlete at Yale whose exploits were chronicled in magazines, newspapers, and so-called dime novels by the writer Gilbert Patten, who used the pen name Burt L. Standish, aimed at young male readers. The only problem with that analogy was that Merriwell, in Standish’s words, “never drank, never smoked, and exercised regularly,” in addition to solving mysteries and righting wrongs, all while he was an outstanding student at Yale. Apart from his athletic feats, Gipp, by contrast, was hardly a role model in that he drank, smoked, and gambled, all to excess. The only similarity between the real Gipp and the fictional Merriwell was that both were college athletes.

  Notre Dame, which had scored 28 points in each of its one-sided games against Valparaiso and Purdue, was expected to face a far more difficult in-state foe when it met Indiana University in its seventh game of the season in Indianapolis. Since losing its opening game to Iowa, Indiana had beaten four Big Ten rivals—Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin—along with DePauw, by far the toughest schedule any of Notre Dame’s opponents had played. Gipp looked forward to the trip to Indianapolis, since it meant he would see Iris Trippeer again. He had seen her briefly the week before when she went to South Bend to spend part of the homecoming weekend with Gipp. While en route to Indianapolis on Friday afternoon, Gipp told Hunk Anderson he felt a chill and had been coughing a lot. After arriving in Indianapolis and checking into the Claypool Hotel with his teammates, Gipp went out for a walk and found himself besieged by Indiana fans, many of whom recognized him from photos of him in store windows advertising the Notre Dame game. “Wherever Gipp went, he was followed by a host of admirers,” Gene Kessler was to write in the next day’s South Bend Tribune. “Gipp started up Illinois Street, and police thought it was an Indiana parade.”

  A few hours later, Gipp’s sense of elation turned into a devastating sadness. According to Anderson, Gipp met Iris Trippeer on the hotel’s mezzanine, their usual rendezvous. It was, Gipp felt, to be a highlight of the trip to see Trippeer, who had accepted his proposal of marriage earlier that fall. As Gipp approached to kiss Trippeer, she turned her head away. Obviously nervous and ill at ease, Trippeer then said, “I’ve got something to tell you, George. I got married.”

  “You what?” a stunned Gipp replied. “How could you? And why didn’t you tell me this was going to happen last week when you were in South Bend?”

  Engulfed by a combination of anger, sadness, and a sense of betrayal, Gipp realized that Trippeer, despite proclaiming her love for him as recently as a week ago, had been seeing someone else. “I can’t believe you could have done this,” Gipp said as Trippeer, her head in her hands, began to sob. Whereupon the distraught Gipp, no longer the cool, poised, and supremely confident football star who had been pursued by so many women, but now a jilted lover, walked away and back to his room, leaving a sobbing Iris Trippeer sitting on a love seat on the Hotel Claypool mezzanine. Suddenly, the game against Indiana was the furthest thing from his mind, and for the first time in his life George Gipp felt alone and helpless on what would turn out to be worst night of his young life.

  In an effort to get Trippeer off his mind, Gipp went from bar to bar and pool room to pool room that Friday night, trying to place bets on Notre Dame while hoping no one would recognize him; since he wore a cap and pulled-up aviator’s jacket collar, only a few people did. But even though he offered as many as 14 points to Indiana bettors, he found no takers. Desperate to get a bet down, Gipp finally began to identify himself and offered that he would personally outscore Indiana, a type of bet he had made in the past. So far as is known, Gipp still found few takers before giving a friend from South Bend $100 (the equivalent of $1,000 in 2010) to bet on Notre Dame, giving Indiana a “spot” of 15 points, meaning the Fighting Irish would have to prevail by more than 15 points for Gipp to win his bet. Finally, still distraught over his meeting with Iris Trippeer, Gipp returned to the Hotel Claypool about eleven o’clock, the curfew that Rockne had set, and went to bed, more deeply hurt and angry than he had ever been.

  14

  THE LAST GAME

  AFTER A RESTLESS night, made particularly uncomfortable by his lingering cough and his distress over the breakup with Iris Trippeer, Gipp had breakfast at the Hotel Claypool with his teammates, Rockne, and Walter Halas (Rockne’s new assistant coach and brother of George Halas). He then took a taxi to the Indianapolis train station to pick up his sister, Dorothy, a schoolteacher in Evansville, Indiana, who was known as Dolly. Gipp’s brother, Alexander, the oldest of the eight Gipp children, had attended the Army game at West Point, but so far as is known neither of his parents had ever watched Gipp play football at Notre Dame or for that matter ever visited the school. But that was hardly unusual in an era when parents of modest circumstances, as was the case with Matthew Gipp and his wife, Isabella, rarely visited their children when they were at a distant college, which Notre Dame was from Laurium, Michigan. At any rate, Dolly Gipp would be the second family member to watch her famous brother play.

  Gipp had told only one person, Hunk Anderson, about the surprise breakup of his relationship with Iris Trippeer. After greeting and hugging his sister on her arrival at the Indianapolis train station and chatting about her life in Evansville, the conversation turned to Gipp, whereupon he told her how Trippeer, whom he had told family members about, shocked him by saying she had gotten married. Stunned and aware that her brother obviously had been hurt, Dolly Gipp hugged him as they stood on the station platform and expressed her sorrow over the strange turn of events. Gipp then hailed a taxi and returned to the Claypool Hotel, where he checked his sister into her room before leaving to join his teammates, who were about to leave in their uniforms, no less, for Washington Park stadium. His sister’s presence and the knowledge that she was going to watch him play football for the first time lifted Gipp’s spirits, which had been dashed the night before, and made him all the more determined to play well. And besides, there was that $100 bet he had on Notre Dame.

  By game time, about 15,000 spectators had jammed into Washington Park stadium to watch Notre Dame take on a strong, heavier Indiana team, which was a prohibitive underdog to its in-state rival. Notre Dame student
s, the school band, and other fans of the Fighting Irish accounted for more than a thousand members of the crowd, none of whom knew that George Gipp would be playing with a broken heart and, by game’s end, several serious injuries.

  To the delight of its screaming fans, Indiana scored on a field goal in the second quarter and a touchdown in the third period, while holding Notre Dame scoreless throughout, to take a 10-0 lead into the final quarter. As Hunk Anderson was to say, the Hoosiers used a stunting defense, “screwed us up and gangtackled Gipp.” One of the gang tackles in the second period dislocated Gipp’s left shoulder and rendered him virtually ineffective and on the bench for much of the bitterly fought game. Finally, early in the fourth quarter, the Fighting Irish reached the Indiana one-yard line. After two plunges had failed, Rockne turned to the bench and asked an injured Gipp, “George, can you put the ball in the end zone?”

  “I’ll try, Rock,” a usually confident Gipp replied, knowing he would be hard-pressed just to catch a snap from Ojay Larson, one of the first centers to snap the ball with one hand.

  Re-entering the game to a huge ovation from the Notre Dame fans, Gipp, still writhing in pain from his dislocated shoulder, tried to burst off left tackle on third down only to be gangtackled again for no gain. But on fourth down, on what would turn out to be perhaps the most crucial play of the game, Hunk Anderson, the left guard, and captain Frank Coughlin at left tackle, opened up a hole in the Indiana defense that they had been unable to create on the previous play, and Gipp bolted through it for a touchdown, banging into the goalpost on the goal line as he did. Gipp then drop-kicked the extra point to cut the Indiana lead to three. In South Bend, several hundred Notre Dame rooters let out a collective roar as the Gridgraph, a lighted gridiron facsimile in front of the South Bend Tribune building, which received play-by-play descriptions of the game from Western Union, recorded the Notre Dame touchdown and Gipp’s conversion.

  Shortly after Gipp’s ensuing kickoff, Notre Dame fullback Chet Wynne recovered a fumble on the Indiana 28-yard line, which had been forced by Anderson’s bone-rattling tackle. Three plays later, from the 15-yard line, Gipp completed a 10-yard pass to right end (and future Holy Cross coach) Eddie Anderson, who reached the one-yard line before being tackled. Quarterback Joe Brandy then drove across the goal line to give Notre Dame a 13-10 lead. Gipp, having difficulty catching the snap from center, missed the extra point. That miss could have been crucial, as Indiana’s Elliot Risley’s field goal attempt with several minutes left in the game sailed just wide. After the Fighting Irish had run out the clock, hundreds of Notre Dame students swarmed onto the field to engulf the Irish players, while the school band struck up what would eventually become the best-known fight song of all time, “The Notre Dame Victory March.” Meanwhile, Gipp, in severe pain both because of his dislocated shoulder and what he would eventually discover was a broken collarbone, boarded a bus that took the players back to the Claypool Hotel to change and shower. Dressing for a game at a hotel and then showering there later was not uncommon at a time when not all stadiums had locker room facilities, as was the case at Washington Park. In Gipp’s case, because he could not raise his left arm, he needed the team’s student manager, Joe Donaldson, to help him undress, shower, and then dress again before having dinner with Hunk Anderson and Ojay Larson. While with Anderson and Larson, Gipp, his left arm in a sling, complained of a sore throat, which prompted his boyhood friends to ask a team aide to get some medication from a nearby drugstore.

  The next morning, Gipp had breakfast with his sister at the Claypool Hotel. After convincing her he would be all right, Gipp made arrangements for her to be driven to the train station. Later, Rockne told Gipp he had made arrangements for his star halfback to be examined in Chicago by a specialist who was a friend of the coach, and also had made a hotel reservation for him. In addition, according to Dorothy Gipp, Rockne also had changed Gipp’s ticket so that when the train carried the team back to South Bend that Sunday afternoon, Gipp would remain on the train until it reached Chicago.

  What happened during the three days Gipp was in Chicago is unclear. Several published accounts said Gipp had mainly gone to Chicago at the invitation of former teammate Grover Malone to work with drop-kickers on the Loyola Academy football team that Malone coached. Since Malone had called Gipp a slacker the year before and Gipp was unable to drop-kick because of his injuries, that seemed unlikely, although, admittedly, Gipp could have given the kickers a verbal lesson. Also dubious were reports that Gipp and Malone spent the three days carousing at a number of speakeasies. That, too, seemed far-fetched unless the pair had made up since Malone’s slacker charge. The third version, provided by Rockne, is that Gipp did indeed see an orthopedic specialist who confirmed that he had both a dislocated shoulder and a broken collarbone. Rockne also said that Gipp had had dinner on Monday night with several members of the Chicago Notre Dame Alumni Society, which was making arrangements to honor Gipp at a game the following Saturday against Northwestern in Chicago, the first meeting between the two schools since 1903. At any rate, Gipp, his left arm still in a sling, returned to South Bend by train on Wednesday and took a taxi to Sorin Hall to rest up for at least the next few days.

  Visiting Gipp there to see how he was, Anderson recalled that Rockne asked Gipp if he was up for the trip, and Gipp said he thought he was. “If you’re not sure, why don’t you stay home and rest,” said Rockne, who also noticed that Gipp coughed often and that his voice was hoarse. “Are you sure you’re OK?” Rockne asked. “If you’re not, I won’t use you.”

  “I’m not great, Rock, but I’m OK,” Gipp replied with a smile. “If I don’t feel jake, I won’t play.”

  Gipp naturally did not practice Thursday or Friday before the Notre Dame team—which was heavily favored to win despite Gipp’s uncertain status—left by train late that afternoon for the two-hour ride to Chicago, followed by a half-hour bus trip to Evanston, a Chicago suburb. Not only were Gipp’s shoulder and collarbone still hurting, but what had become a persistent cough and sore throat had gotten worse, and he had a temperature of 102. Even though the Chicago alumni group had designated the game day, November 20, “George Gipp Day,” Gipp was sure he would not play, not just because of his injuries, cough, and sore throat, but also the forecast of cold, rainy weather.

  “I don’t think I can make it,” Gipp told Anderson, who also had a series of injuries, the night before the game at the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago. Once again, Gipp, coughing often and with his sore throat seeming to worsen, had a restless night. As predicted, the weather at Northwestern Field was raw and windy with a cold mist. A capacity crowd of more than 20,000 was on hand, including about 4,000 fans who had gobbled up the Notre Dame allotment in one day and had traveled by train to the game on a chartered twenty-five car special. Few, if any, knew what bad condition Gipp was in. Cynical as he was, Gipp knew that it was a special day for him, and thus, despite his cough, sore throat, and shoulder and collarbone injuries, he suited up. Knowing that he might not be up to playing, Gipp entertained the crowd briefly before the game by drop-kicking about 6 practice field goals almost 50 yards through the goal post uprights, evoking cheers from both the Notre Dame and Northwestern fans. Watching from the sidelines, Rockne beamed while recalling how he had discovered George Gipp doing just that—booting eye-popping dropkicks as the coach was walking across the Notre Dame campus four years earlier.

  As expected Gipp did not start, and heavily favored Notre Dame soon showed it could survive without their best player, who remained huddled in a heavy, hooded parka on the sideline. Once again, Rockne started his second string—his shock troops—which played Northwestern to a scoreless first period. With the first team on the field, minus Gipp, Notre Dame scored twice in the second quarter to take a 14-0 halftime lead. But after Northwestern scored in the third quarter to narrow its deficit to seven points, chants of “We want Gipp! We want Gipp!” reverberated through much of the crowd. Capitalizing on an interception in Northwestern territo
ry, Notre Dame scored later in the period to pull ahead, 21-7. By midway through the fourth period, the chant for Gipp grew even louder. By then a cold wind was blowing in from Lake Michigan and the field was frozen. On the sideline, Gipp was coughing sporadically and still running a fever. But hearing the growing chants for him, the normally stoic Gipp, who in the past had seemed oblivious of a cheering crowd, was moved. Given his condition and with only one other game remaining on the Notre Dame schedule, he knew this was probably his last game, and that, moreover, he owed it to the crowd to play no matter how briefly. Finally, he shed his parka, walked over to Rockne and said, “Put me in Rock. We can’t disappoint them.”

  Rockne by now had no intention of putting Gipp in the game, what with his condition, the cold weather, and the frozen field. Then, too, Notre Dame was doing all right without him. Looking at his pale and obviously still injured star, Rockne shook his head. Again, Gipp asked to go in. Realizing all that Gipp had meant to Notre Dame football, and that this was, indeed, probably his last game, Rockne said, “All right, George, but, remember, don’t run with the ball.” Not that Gipp wanted to. Before the game, he found that when he raised his right arm to throw a pass, the pain in his left shoulder was excruciating.

  As the Notre Dame Scholastic reporter wrote in his game story, “Pandemonium broke loose when Gipp went into the fray at the beginning of the last quarter.” With the ball on Northwestern’s 35-yard line, quarterback Joe Brandy, who had been told in advance by Rockne not to call any running plays for Gipp, called for a pass. On his first play from scrimmage, Gipp, at tailback, took the snap from center and, enduring the pain, fired a pass to right end Eddie Anderson at the 15-yard line. Anderson then outran two defenders for a touchdown that gave Notre Dame a commanding 27-7 lead.