The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  On Notre Dame’s next possession, which started at its own 45-yard line, Gipp outdid himself when he connected with halfback Norm Barry on a 55-yard touchdown pass (which traveled 40 yards in the air) to make it 33-7, which turned out to be the final score. Again, the thousands of Notre Dame fans roared with delight. On the Notre Dame sideline, Rockne, knowing that Gipp was not well, felt guilty about yielding to Gipp’s entreaties to put him in the game.

  In another memorable, albeit brief, performance, an ailing Gipp had completed five of six passes for 129 yards, including two touchdowns. After his second touchdown pass, Gipp, in defiance of Rockne’s instructions, told Brandy that he wanted to field the ensuing kickoff, obviously to give the crowd a chance to see him run at least once. Seeing Gipp as the deep back on the kickoff, Rockne was furious, fearful that he might be hurt even worse than he already was. Sure enough, the kick, a high, soaring, but short end-over-end boot that hit the ground and bounded toward Gipp; either Northwestern guard Graham Penfield or quarterback Charles Palmer, who both were closing in on Gipp, could have downed the ball. Instead, Gipp stunned Rockne when he fielded the ball with the intention of running it back. But after he had gone only a few yards, Penfield and Palmer, aware that Gipp was playing hurt, grabbed him and, in a beau geste maneuver, gently pulled him down to the frozen grass.

  Francis Wallace, a Notre Dame student and part-time sportswriter for the South Bend News-Times, who would go on to a successful career as a sportswriter in New York and author of more than a dozen books, said some forty years later that the gesture by the Northwestern players “was the finest thing I have ever seen on a football field.” And by then, Wallace had seen hundreds of college and professional football games.

  After the game, Penfield, an all-Big Ten guard, raved about Gipp’s touchdown pass to Anderson. “It was one of the best passes I’ve ever seen thrown,” he said.

  Only Michigan Agricultural College, scheduled five days later on Thanksgiving Day in East Lansing, stood between Notre Dame, its second straight unbeaten season and possible recognition as the national champion of college football. With his left arm back in a sling on the train ride to South Bend, Gipp hardly looked like a man who only a few hours before had thrown two long touchdown passes. Asked by Anderson how he felt, Gipp said, “The shoulder and collarbone still hurt quite a bit, but my throat is getting worse and worse,” he said. “I really don’t feel good at all, Hunk.”

  Back on the Notre Dame campus, Gipp spent most of the weekend in bed at Sorin Hall. Reading the South Bend and Chicago papers Sunday morning, Gipp was moved anew by the crowd calling for his appearance against Northwestern and the cheers he heard when he went into the game, which grew even louder when he threw his two touchdown passes. “That crowd was great,” he said to Anderson at one point.

  “Hey, you’re actually human,” Anderson responded with a smile. “You really were touched by that, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was,” Gipp replied. “It made me feel good.”

  Little did Gipp or Anderson realize that the Northwestern game had been George Gipp’s last hurrah.

  On Monday night, Gipp, though feeling increasingly weak, and his teammates and coaches were honored at a banquet at the Hotel Oliver that was sponsored by the University Club, an organization of South Bend businessmen. The affair, which attracted more than 400 people, had all the trappings of a football game, most notably the Notre Dame band and the team’s cheerleaders. Chet Grant recalled many years later that about midway through the banquet, Gipp turned to him and asked to use his handkerchief, and then, after telling him he didn’t feel well, excused himself and left. “To me, it was obvious that he was a sick man,” Grant said.

  Some cynics at the table, unaware of Gipp’s sore throat and prolonged coughing spells, presumed he might be going elsewhere in the Oliver in search of action at a pool or poker table. As it was, Gipp did go elsewhere in the Oliver—to bed in the room he had kept there for more than a year, far sicker than Chet Grant or anyone else realized.

  Anderson offered another version of the story. He said he had noticed that Gipp had not touched his dinner at the banquet. “Are you all right, George?” Anderson asked, aware that Gipp had been coughing on and off for more than a week and looked even paler than usual.

  “I feel awful, Hunk,” a haggard-looking Gipp replied. “My throat feels like it’s on fire, and I think I have a fever.”

  Anderson then put his hand on Gipp’s head and was stunned by how hot it felt. “George, you’re hotter than hell. You better tell Rock right away,” Anderson advised his longtime friend and teammate.

  According to Anderson’s version, Gipp then approached Rockne at the dais and told him how bad he felt. After delivering a brief talk, an alarmed Rockne called nearby St. Joseph Hospital and made arrangements for him to be admitted.

  “Don’t worry, Rock, I’m going to be OK,” Gipp told his coach before leaving the banquet hall to go to his room at the Oliver.

  “I’m sure you will, George,” Rockne replied. “I’m sure you will.”

  A short while later, a hoarse and haggard Gipp hailed a cab outside the Hotel Oliver and told the driver to take him to nearby St. Joseph Hospital. It was the beginning of a drama that would capture the attention of much of the nation for the next three weeks.

  15

  GIPP’S FIGHT FOR LIFE

  SICK AS HE was, Gipp walked into St. Joseph Hospital unaided and was brought to a private room, where his temperature was immediately taken. It was 104 degrees, nearly six degrees above normal. A prominent South Bend doctor who certainly knew who Gipp was quickly diagnosed his condition as tonsillitis, hardly, it would seem, a cause for alarm and something which he had been warned about only three months earlier. The doctor, James McMeel, was the president of the Indiana State Medical Association and later became head of the American Medical Association, so Gipp appeared to be in good hands. As a precaution, however, Doctor McMeel called in an associate, Doctor Thomas Olney, for a second opinion and Olney concurred with McMeel on the tonsillitis diagnosis.

  An initial concern of both doctors was streptococcus, an infection of the throat commonly known as strep throat, which is more serious. It then became apparent to the doctors that George Gipp had been a sick man when he played, even though briefly, against Northwestern on a bitterly cold and raw day in Evanston three days earlier. The question probably rose in their minds as to why Gipp, coughing constantly and with an elevated temperature, had not been checked out by a doctor before the game. As it was, the football team had no team doctor. Indeed, Rockne, despite his limited medical knowledge, also acted as the team trainer, which was not unusual at the time.

  Gipp was immediately put on a liquid diet and prescribed aspirin to keep his temperature down; a mixture of borax, glycerin, and honey was used to swab his inflamed sore throat. Neither penicillin nor antibiotics were options, since they had not yet been devised.

  That Tuesday afternoon, Rockne and Anderson visited Gipp at the hospital and found him in good spirits but looking haggard and frail. Doctors assured them, however, that Gipp was merely suffering from tonsillitis, and that his prognosis was good. Both Rockne and Anderson were further encouraged when they returned to see Gipp on Wednesday and were told that his temperature had lowered to a point where it was almost normal and that he seemed to be doing all right. Following the brief visit, Rockne, Anderson, and the rest of the Notre Dame football team left by train for East Lansing to face Michigan Agricultural College on Thanksgiving Day in the final game of the season. Gipp was much on the minds of the players, who were encouraged, though, when Rockne told them that Gipp appeared to be doing well and that he was on his way to a complete recovery. Ironically, in a story that appeared in the South Bend Tribune on the day Gipp was taken to the hospital, Arch Ward wrote that Gipp would play against the Michigan Aggies “should the going get too tough for his mates.” Ward, of course, did not know that Gipp’s Notre Dame career had ended the previous Saturday when he thr
ew two touchdown passes while playing with a separated shoulder, a broken collarbone, and severe sore throat.

  By game time on Thanksgiving, Gipp’s hospitalization had made it onto the Associated Press wire and into newspapers across the country. Even without Notre Dame’s greatest runner, the Fighting Irish easily beat the Michigan Aggies, as they were called, 25-0, to complete their second straight unbeaten season. Gipp’s replacement at left halfback, Dan Coughlin, gave a good imitation of Gipp when he ran back the opening kickoff 80 yards for a touchdown, and Rockne played his second unit more than half of the game.

  Gipp’s condition remained stable through the Thanksgiving weekend. His fever had lowered, raising hopes that he was out of the woods. But then on November 29, six days after he had been admitted to the hospital, pneumonia set in, and doctors said that the next forty-eight hours would be critical. At that point, his parents were notified, and his mother, his brother Matthew, and his sister Dorothy arrived in South Bend to be at Gipp’s bedside. Rockne also hurried to the hospital, both to see Gipp and to tell Mrs. Gipp that he had made arrangements for her to stay with George Hull, the co-owner of Hullie and Mike’s, and for the two children to stay at his own home. Hunk Anderson was to say that Mrs. Gipp, who was a Methodist, told her son that she preferred having him moved to another hospital because the nuns who worked at St. Joseph and the priests who visited him made her nervous. However, still according to Anderson, Gipp told her he felt that he was getting very good care and did not want to be moved, whereupon, apparently, she did not press for him to be transferred.

  To assist the South Bend doctors who had been tending to Gipp, Rockne and administration officials at Notre Dame arranged to have two eye, ear, and throat specialists from Chicago come to St. Joseph for consultations and to stay by his bedside around the clock. By now, fearful that Gipp’s heart may have been failing, doctors began to administer digitalis to stimulate the organ. A blood transfusion also was deemed necessary, and blood from Anderson, who had been determined to be a compatible donor for his boyhood friend, was transferred to Gipp in a direct transfusion.

  “George Gipp’s condition was pronounced grave by attending physicians last night,” the South Bend Tribune reported in its editions the following morning, November 30. “A decided change for the better or worse is anticipated before another night has passed.”

  The news cast a pall of gloom over the campus, where students and faculty had been led to believe that Gipp was merely suffering from tonsillitis. Students, faculty members, and others at the university converged on Sacred Heart Church (now Sacred Heart Basilica) on the Notre Dame campus to pray for the most famous athlete in the school’s history as they would do in subsequent days. The hospital’s announcement, carried throughout the country by the Associated Press, both stunned and saddened tens of thousands of Notre Dame alumni and football fans who had come to idolize the sensational halfback from the small, Midwestern Catholic school, which had been virtually unheard of a decade prior. By now, in an unprecedented vigil, scores of students gathered each day on the sprawling lawn of St. Joseph Hospital, directly outside of Gipp’s second-floor room, to pray for the school’s most famous, and most enigmatic, athlete.

  In the next few days, Gipp’s condition improved. Gipp, who had lapsed into a coma, was conscious again by December 2, and doctors said he apparently had overcome his pneumonia. Though his condition was still listed as critical, they also said they expected Gipp to recover. By December 4 Gipp’s sixty-six-year-old father, Matthew, who had not been well himself, had arrived from Laurium to see his son. Told that his condition had improved, Matthew Gipp returned home the following day. Meanwhile, visitors from outside the family were allowed to see Gipp, who, though obviously having lost a considerable amount of weight, appeared alert and in good spirits. Among the visitors were Rockne, several of Gipp’s teammates, Father Patrick Haggerty (a priest at Notre Dame who had become a regular caller and seemed to have established a close relationship with Gipp), and Father James Burns, the Notre Dame president who had expelled Gipp nine months before for failing to attend classes, but then reinstated him a month later. Another visitor was Johnny Evers, the second baseman in the legendary Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play combination for the Chicago Cubs, whom club president Bill Veeck had dispatched to sign Gipp for the 1921 season when Evers was to take over as manager of the Cubs. Gipp, who had received a contract from the Cubs the previous summer, was still too ill to consider such a proposal, but Evers’s visit heartened him, according to Anderson, a daily visitor to his best friend’s room. Gipp was even more heartened when Rockne told him he had been named to Walter Camp’s All-America team at fullback, becoming the first Notre Damer selected to a Camp first team by the legendary football pioneer.

  “How does that make you feel being the first player from Notre Dame to make Camp’s first team?” Rockne asked Gipp with a smile.

  “That’s jake with me,” Gipp replied.

  In naming Gipp to his All-America team in Collier’s Weekly magazine, Camp wrote, “In the backfield, Gipp of Notre Dame gets the first place on account of his versatility and power, able as he is to punt, drop-kick, forward pass, run, tackle—in fact do anything that any backfield man could ever be required to do and do it in well-neigh superlative fashion.” Some Notre Damers and others thought that Camp was again showing a bias for Eastern players when he put Gipp at fullback, rather than at his normal position of left halfback, a spot that went to A. C. Way of Penn State. However, the prestigious Helms Athletic Foundation did pick Gipp as a first-team All-American at left halfback and also selected him as the College Football Player of the Year, the equivalent at the time of today’s Heisman Trophy, which was first awarded in 1935.

  By the end of the first week of December, Gipp felt well enough to get out of bed for the first time to walk around. During one of Anderson’s visits, he told Notre Dame’s star guard that he was thinking of becoming a Catholic.

  “What the hell do you want to do that for?” asked Anderson, a Protestant, as were both Gipp and Rockne (although Rockne would eventually convert to Catholicism, his wife’s religion).

  “Look, Hunk, my problems aren’t over, and I want to make sure when I die I go to the right place,” Gipp responded, according to Anderson’s recollection of their conversation. “I think the odds are better if I hold the right cards.”

  “George was barely able to talk,” Anderson told the author more than a half century later. “He said to me, ‘Hunk, I don’t think I’m going to make it.’ I tried to encourage him, and told him he’d been in tougher battles, which was probably not true. But he said to me, ‘Not as tough as this one, Hunk. I think I’ve kicked my last dropkick.’”

  It is more than likely that, although Gipp was not religious, he probably had heard at Notre Dame that salvation was not an option outside the Catholic church, a contention that the church had promulgated at the time. Though his father was a deacon in the Baptist church in Laurium, Gipp had drifted away from the family’s religion in his late teens and had adopted a fatalist attitude toward life, to the point of telling friends that he did not expect to live long. To which friends like Hunk Anderson would respond, partially in jest, by saying that if he continued his lifestyle of smoking, drinking, eating irregularly, and getting very little rest, he probably would not.

  According to Victoria Adams Phair, the granddaughter of Iris Trippeer, Knute Rockne—apparently unaware that Trippeer had been married recently and thus had ended her intense relationship with Gipp—sent Trippeer a telegram in early December telling her about Gipp’s dire condition and saying that Gipp wanted to see her. Even though Trippeer had married another man, she quickly took a train from Indianapolis to South Bend to see Gipp at the hospital, according to Phair. “She told me years later that she did go to see George Gipp,” Phair said in 2010. During the visit, Phair said, Gipp gave Trippeer the miniature gold football that Rockne had given all of the players on the 1919 team, who had finished the season und
efeated. Phair said Trippeer then wore the gold football on a charm bracelet every day until she died of cancer in 1973, when she was seventy-three years old.

  “She told me George Gipp was the only man she ever loved,” Phair said during one of our 2010 conversations. Phair, the daughter of one of Trippeer’s two sons, said Trippeer divorced her husband, Jack Adams, in the 1940s and became a successful interior decorator. “My sister and I took care of her the last two years of her life, and she was gorgeous till the end,” Phair said.

  However, no one else seemed to recall Trippeer visiting Gipp at St. Joseph Hospital. Also, her granddaughter’s version of Gipp giving Trippeer the gold football is at variance with the account by Hunk Anderson’s wife, Marie, who said she had seen Trippeer wearing the pendant when she and Hunk were on a double-date with Gipp and Trippeer earlier in 1920.

  One woman did definitely turn up frequently outside the door of Gipp’s room, but apparently was not allowed to see him, even though she claimed to be a former sweetheart. Hunk Anderson recognized the woman and said he thought she was the manicurist at the Hotel Oliver whom Gipp had dated before falling in love with Trippeer, and may have dated her again after their breakup.

  By December 7 calls went out on the Notre Dame campus for blood donors. Hunk Anderson immediately offered to donate again, but was turned down since he had given blood the week before. In the next two days, around 150 Notre Dame students offered to donate blood to their stricken campus hero, and ten were placed on standby in the event another transfusion was deemed necessary. Then on December 10, the South Bend Tribune reported that Gipp had “regained the strength lost yesterday. His condition was improved, and he once more showed signs of recovery. However, the following day, Anderson said, he was visiting Gipp along with Gipp’s mother and two of her children when Gipp told him, “Hunk, I don’t think I’m going to make it. But thanks for everything.”