The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  His boyhood friend and Notre Dame teammate was stunned, even though Gipp had lost considerable weight—perhaps as much as forty pounds—and was extremely pale. “Up until then, I thought George was going to pull through,” Anderson said years later, “but after hearing what he said, I began to think the end might be near.”

  By Monday, December 13, the doctors and nurses at St. Joseph Hospital thought so, too, as Gipp lapsed into and out of a coma. Anderson cut classes to be at the hospital all that day. Gipp’s mother and other members of the family who were in South Bend were summoned to the hospital early in the evening and, a short while later, Rockne arrived at the hospital and was led into Gipp’s room, where the family had gathered. Regaining consciousness for a short while, Gipp apparently spotted Rockne and said something to Doctor McMeel, who by now had spent most of every day of the last three weeks at Gipp’s side. Doctor McMeel thereupon waved to Rockne, indicating that Gipp wanted to see him. Rockne then walked to Gipp’s side and bent down to talk to him. The scene was dramatized in Knute Rockne: All American, in which Gipp is portrayed by eventual President Ronald Reagan and Rockne by Pat O’Brien. In the film, Rockne is alone with Gipp at the time, but recounting what he was to say years later, Rockne indicated someone else was with him at Gipp’s bedside.

  “It’s pretty tough to go,” Rockne quoted either someone else or himself saying at Gipp’s bedside. “What’s tough about it?” Gipp replied with a smile while looking “up at us,” according to Rockne’s account in the series he—or a ghostwriter—wrote for Collier’s magazine. Rockne said that Gipp then turned to him and said, softly, “I’ve no complaint. I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid.” It was then, according to Rockne, that Gipp, in what would become the most famous rallying cry in sports history, whispered, “Sometimes when things are going wrong, when the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out and win one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock, but I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.”

  The only problem with that account is that no one seems to recall anyone being with Rockne when he saw Gipp for the last time. Nor did anyone recall Gipp ever having been called the “Gipper.” However, Hunk Anderson did say years later that he and his fellow Calumet High School pals and Notre Dame teammates Ojay Larson and Perce Wilcox, occasionally called their fellow Calumet alumnus Gipper. “Rock occasionally called George that, too,” Anderson said. Anderson said the nickname was first used by Joe Swetish, who managed a baseball team that Gipp and Anderson played on back in Laurium. Recounting a particularly good game Gipp had had, Swetish, referring to his star outfielder, told an acquaintance, “The Gipper had a round-tripper,” employing baseball slang for a home run. “After that a lot of the guys on the team started calling George ‘Gipper,’” Anderson recalled while conceding that apart from him, Rockne, Larson, and Wilcox, he didn’t recall anyone else ever using “Gipper.”

  After putting a hand on Gipp’s forehead and saying good-bye, an ashen-faced Rockne left Gipp’s room. Family members, having been told that the end was near, then gathered around Gipp and remained for the rest of the evening as Gipp continued to lapse in and out of a coma. During the evening, Father Pat Haggerty made his fifth visit of the day to Gipp’s bedside, and, with Gipp conscious again, prayed over him.

  In the early hours of the next morning, Tuesday, December 14, with Gipp now in a deep coma, Father Haggerty—at Gipp’s prior request, he was to say later—gave Gipp conditional baptism and conditional absolution, which in effect converted him to Catholicism. A few minutes later, Father John O’Hara, Notre Dame’s prefect of religion (who would become president of the university in 1934 and later the archbishop of Philadelphia) administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church to the fallen football star. At approximately 3:30 A.M., Doctor McMeel felt for Gipp’s pulse once more, then turned to Gipp’s mother, his brother Matthew, and his sister Dorothy, put his head down, and then announced softly that Gipp was dead. The date was December 14, 1920. Coincidentally, and almost hauntingly, eighty-nine years later St. Joseph Hospital—by then known as the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center—would close on the same date, December 14, that its most famous patient had died.

  George Gipp, who had come to Notre Dame as an unknown in the fall of 1916 and by the fall of 1920 had become one of the best-known athletes in the United States, was twenty-five years and ten months old when he died. Shortly after Doctor McMeel’s announcement, a nurse at St. Joseph, by pre-arrangement with the Hotel Oliver, called the hotel and told the night clerk that Gipp was dead. The clerk then pulled a master switch on and off three times to let the staff know that Gipp, the hotel’s best-known resident, had died.

  No other Notre Damer had ever been, or ever would be, so honored in death.

  In what could have been a fitting epitaph for Gipp, Father Charles O’Donnell, who would become president of Notre Dame in 1928, said shortly after Gipp died, “He was an enigma that we never solved.”

  16

  A HEARTFELT FAREWELL

  A PALL OF GRIEF settled across the Notre Dame campus on the morning of Tuesday, December 14, as word of George Gipp’s death during the night spread from dormitory to dormitory, from classroom to classroom, and into the university’s dining halls. Scores of students, faculty, administrators, and staff workers converged on Sacred Heart Church close by the administration building to pray for Notre Dame’s most revered sports star, whose exploits on the football field had lifted their spirits and whose fame had enhanced the reputation of the school. American flags on campus flew at half-staff, as did the flag at the Marion County Courthouse in downtown South Bend. As on the Notre Dame campus, Gipp’s death was the main topic of conversation downtown, where he had spent as much, if not more of his time, and had become extremely popular.

  The death of Notre Dame’s first first-team All-American football player, whose spectacular 1920 season had made him a national sports icon, was front-page news in many American papers the afternoon of the day he died (it was an era when afternoon newspapers still flourished in the United States). Among them was the South Bend Tribune whose headline read, STUDENT BODY PLANS ITS FINALTRIBUTE TO IDOL. Meanwhile, tributes of sympathy poured into Notre Dame’s administration building from across the country in an unprecedented degree. Many of the tributes expressed a sense of shock and incredulity over how a great athlete, in the prime of his career, and after having enjoyed his best season as a football star, could have been stricken and then died two weeks later. That shock was understandable, since Gipp initially had been diagnosed with tonsillitis, hardly a life-threatening affliction, but the cause of death given by the hospital was a streptococcus infection that presumably had set in after Gipp had been admitted to St. Joseph Hospital on November 30.

  Among those hit hardest by Gipp’s death was Knute Rockne, who of course had discovered Gipp’s football talents on the Notre Dame campus. Both during Gipp’s time in the hospital and in the aftermath of his death, Rockne indulged in self-flagellation, feeling that he should not have acceded to Gipp’s request to send him into the Northwestern game on a frigid day in Chicago when Rockne knew his star halfback was not well. Since Gipp already had complained of a sore throat for more than a week before the Northwestern game, and, at that, played less than a quarter in the game, doctors who treated Gipp at St. Joseph Hospital said they were convinced that Gipp’s participation in the game had no bearing on his illness or his death. Nevertheless, Rockne felt a heavy sense of guilt.

  The grief hit home to the Rocknes, since Gipp had been a frequent dinner guest at their home on St. Vincent Street, which Knute and Bonnie had moved into following their marriage in July 1914. Their oldest son, William, then five years old—the Rocknes had two other children, Knute Jr., who was two, and Mary Jean, who had been born that year—was thrilled whenever Notre Dame’s biggest star visited the Rocknes, which made the youngster the envy of his friends.

  Responding to a telephone request from the South Ben
d Tribune, Rockne sat down at a desk in his study and began writing a statement about Gipp, who, though only six years younger, had in a way become a surrogate, if somewhat incorrigible, son—and whose death, he realized, had left a huge void in his life. Writing on a long white legal pad in longhand, Rockne wrote, “George Gipp was the greatest halfback who has ever represented Notre Dame, and his unquestionable ability was surpassed by a grit which featured in all his work on the gridiron and was the marvel of his attending physicians. The outstanding feature of his character was a deep affection for his mother, and in his death I feel a keen personal loss.”

  It was a heartfelt tribute, and as he read what he had written, Rockne began to cry. He then called the Tribune, read the tribute over the phone, and drove to his office on campus, knowing it would be a very busy, and very emotional, day.

  By noon, only eight and a half hours after Gipp had died, his open coffin was on display at the McGann Funeral Home on North Michigan Street. Closed coffins were a rarity at the time, but more than a few people who knew Gipp well were stunned at how emaciated he looked, and felt that it would have been better if his coffin had been closed. Some reports said Gipp had lost eighty pounds while he was on his deathbed, which would have left him weighing around 100 pounds when he died. The owner of the funeral home, Lewis McGann, said in fact Gipp had lost only twenty pounds while he was at St. Joseph Hospital.

  Nearly 1,000 people paid their respects between noon and 10 A.M. the following day. Appropriately enough, given Gipp’s penchant for spending late hours in downtown South Bend, his coffin was on view throughout the night. Among those who extended condolences to Gipp’s mother, his brother Alexander, and his youngest sister Dorothy were university president James Burns, more than a score of former players, almost all of his thirty-four teammates, Knute and Bonnie Rockne, assistant coach Walter Halas, numerous city officials and civic leaders, prominent South Bend businessmen, and an estimated 500 Notre Dame students who were given fares for the streetcar that ran to and from the Notre Dame campus. Also paying their respects were numerous friends—and billiard- and poker-playing cronies—from Hullie and Mike’s, Goldie Mann’s, the Hotel Oliver, and other establishments where Gipp had made hundreds of acquaintances over the last four and a half school years.

  Wakes at the time tended to be as much social gatherings as opportunities to pay respects to the dead and to extend condolences to family members. But the wake for Gipp was solemn, and remarkably quiet given the throng of mourners passing in and out of the funeral home and past Gipp’s coffin. At times, as many as 300 people were lined up outside waiting to view the body of Notre Dame’s greatest player, many of them still stunned by his death at such a young age.

  By then, almost all of the mourners had read the front-page story in the South Bend Tribune about Gipp’s death, which included plans for a service the next day. The story also included a statement from Frank Coughlin, captain of the 1920 Notre Dame football team, in which he said, “George Gipp was a man among men, brilliant and unassuming; and has endeared himself to the heart of every Notre Dame student by his athletic prowess, magnetic personality, keen mind, and his great love for the old school. He will forever be remembered as a friend, a student, an athlete, and a gentleman, for to know him was to love him.”

  Maybe Coughlin was stretching it a bit to say that Gipp would be remembered as a student, but, still, it was a heartfelt and pretty accurate description of perhaps the most unusual student-athlete Notre Dame had ever had and who, indeed, would forever be remembered.

  The next morning, December 15, with classes canceled for the day and snow falling, hundreds of students and other mourners packed Sacred Heart Church to attend a mass for Gipp, which was celebrated by Father James Burns, the university president. From the church, most of the mourners went by automobile or streetcar to the McGann Funeral Home, where Gipp’s mother, his brother, and sister bade him farewell. An eerie quiet hung over the normally bustling industrial city, which had virtually come to a halt. Some stores and other businesses closed for the day so that their employees could attend the service or watch the ensuing procession through the heart of the city to the train station. Scores, perhaps even hundreds, of children, were kept out of school so that they could watch the farewell to South Bend’s most famous athlete and, unbeknownst to most, perhaps the best pool-shooter in the city’s history.

  A large crowd had gathered outside the funeral home by the time Gipp’s coffin was carried out and placed in a hearse to begin the short trip to the New York Central train station. Despite the snowstorm, thousands more lined the route of a procession, which included a police escort; Gipp’s teammates, with ten of them lined up in formation with one position—Gipp’s left halfback—empty; members of the Notre Dame Monogram Club (who had won letters in various varsity sports); almost the entire Notre Dame student body of 1,500; scores of faculty and other staff members; the hearse; and then three cars carrying family members, President Burns, and other Notre Dame dignitaries. Walking alongside the hearse were the pallbearers, all starting members of the football team. On one side were the three players from Calumet whom Gipp had recommended to Rockne—Hunk Anderson, Ojay Larson, and Perce Wilcox; on the other side were Frank Coughlin, Norm Barry, and Joe Brandy. At the train station, Gipp’s coffin was placed in the baggage car of a New York Central train bound for Chicago on the first leg of a train trip that would end in Calumet.

  In what was believed to have marked the first time that the term “Gipper” appeared in a newspaper, South Bend Tribune sportswriter Arch Ward wrote that as the hearse reached the train station, “the students bared their heads to the snow as the body of their Gipper went on to its appointed end.” It would, by most accounts, be another eight years before “Gipper” would appear in print again, and when it did, it would mark the launching of a legendary expression that would become the most famous sports quotation in American sports history.

  Two hours after its departure from South Bend, the train carrying Gipp’s body arrived in Chicago at one o’clock in the afternoon, where, according to an Associated Press account, almost 10,000 people had gathered, hoping, apparently, to see the coffin. Following a four-hour layover, the train, carrying members of Gipp’s family and his six teammate-pallbearers, departed for Calumet, arriving there at eight o’clock in the morning. A crowd of perhaps as many as 500 people—a large turnout for a small town—met the train and watched the coffin be carried from the baggage car onto a hearse and then taken to the Gipp family home on Hecla Street in nearby Laurium. On Saturday, Gipp’s coffin was taken to the Calumet Light Guard Armory, where about 300 people paid their respects as Gipp’s coffin lay in state from 10:30 A.M. until 2 P.M., when a service was conducted by a Baptist and Congregational minister. That, of course, meant that in a span of forty-eight hours, Gipp, never a religious person, had been mourned in death at both Catholic and Protestant services. As was the case in South Bend, business came to a halt in both Calumet and Laurium during the funeral service, and a church bell tolled in the nearby town of Red Jacket as a procession formed to head for Lake View Cemetery in Laurium.

  Three days of unrelenting snow had left roads in the Calumet area impassable; thus, having a hearse bear Gipp’s coffin five miles from the armory was out of the question. As a result, the coffin, covered by a blanket, was placed on a sled, which two horses then pulled five miles through the snow to a hillside in the cemetery overlooking Lake Superior. There, gravediggers had burrowed through snowdrifts as high as five feet to excavate a grave for the onetime Calumet High School dropout who many people had perceived as a directionless and cavalier young man not apt to amount to anything significant in life.

  Gathered around the grave at the cemetery were Gipp’s parents: four of his siblings; the two ministers; Gipp’s six teammate pallbearers; a group of baseball teammates from Laurium and Calumet, along with other longtime friends; and members of the Calumet American Legion Post, which gave Gipp a military burial ceremony that included
a twenty-one-gun salute. Why Gipp, who seemed to go out of his way to avoid serving in World War I, was given a military funeral was never made clear; like so much of his life, it was both incongruous and inexplicable. The service ended with a brief prayer by one of the ministers and then a few parting words by Gipp’s ailing father, after which the coffin was lowered into the grave.

  George Gipp’s premonition of dying young, so often expressed to Hunk Anderson and other close friends, had been borne out, and during a snowstorm he had been laid to rest, more than 200 miles from Notre Dame, where, in large measure because of his almost filial admiration for a direct opposite in Knute Rockne, he had found at least a modicum of direction and purpose, along with the affection of his classmates and football teammates, plus nationwide acclaim for his stardom in a sport he had never intended to play.

  How good was Gipp? Rockne would be asked that often in the years to come, and the answer would always be the same: “I have seen them all, and I consider George Gipp superior to both Jim Thorpe and Red Grange.”

  There could be no greater tribute.

  17

  THE FOUR HORSEMEN

  FEELINGS OF SHOCK and emptiness permeated the Notre Dame campus on Thursday, December 16, the day after George Gipp’s memorial in South Bend and the shipment of his body to Laurium, the day before the start of the Christmas break. No one could recall the scope of such grief following the death of anyone else in the Notre Dame family over the years. “Neither the death of Father Morrisey nor of Father Zahm affected the students,” wrote Father Arthur Hope, a professor and historian at Notre Dame, referring to two popular educators at Notre Dame—Andrew Morrisey, the school’s president at the turn of the twentieth century, and John Zahm, a professor at the university in the early part of the same century. “But the death of George Gipp was another matter.”