The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  “Rice was the only one who picked up on it,” said Strickler who went on to become the publicity director of the fledging National Football League and then assistant sports editor of the Chicago Tribune. “In later years, my appreciation of Granny (Rice’s nickname) as a writer and a reporter grew as I recalled that others had the same opportunity to pick up a chance remark and build it into a classic, but missed it entirely.”

  But then, of course, none of the other writers, good as some of them were in the Golden Age of Sportswriting, was Grantland Rice.

  When Strickler saw Rice’s story on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune—which wasn’t inclined to put sports stories on page one—he got an idea, which would lead to a classic sports photo. He immediately wired South Bend to arrange to have four horses and a photographer on campus Monday afternoon, by which time Strickler and the rest of the Notre Dame party would have returned to South Bend. Unbeknownst to Rockne, Strickler then had the four horses trot onto Cartier Field during a practice session.

  “Rock gave me hell in a polite way,” said Strickler, who had explained to the coach what he had in mind. “He thought it was a swell idea, but he objected to the timing that barged unannounced into his practice.”

  Eventually Strickler managed to get Crowley, Layden, Stuhldreher, and Miller, all in uniform and clutching footballs, onto the horses, who were more accustomed to pulling ice and coal wagons than being mounted, and the photos were taken by a South Bend photographer whom Strickler had called on Sunday. Within an hour, Strickler sent the best of the photos to the Associated Press and other wire services and by the next day the shot of the Four Horsemen astride four horses appeared in sports pages across the country.

  For at least a few minutes while the photos were being taken, Notre Dame’s formidable linemen were neither amused nor appreciative of Strickler’s stroke of genius. But if Rice’s lead had led to the Notre Dame backs being crowned the “Four Horsemen,” a comment by center Adam Walsh led to a nickname for him and his fellow linemen. While watching the photo shoot, Walsh turned to a few reporters and said, “We are the seven mules who do all the work so these four fellows can gallop to fame.” Thereafter, the Notre Dame line became known as the “Seven Mules.” That nickname stuck, but was far overshadowed by the one Grantland Rice had bestowed on Crowley, Layden, Miller, and Stuhldreher, which ultimately became the most famous, but not necessarily the best, backfield in football history, thanks also to George Strickler’s prescient photo idea. Playing the triple-threat position of left halfback, as Gipp had done, Layden was the best runner among the “Horsemen,” but not in Gipp’s class. Strickland was another example of Rockne’s tendency to hire bright and creative student press aides at a time when few colleges had sports information directors. Strickler’s predecessors were Francis Wallace and Arch Ward, both of whom became nationally known sportswriters. Ward, who like Wallace also worked on South Bend newspapers, later became the sports editor for the Chicago Tribune, where, in the 1930s, he created both the Major League All-Star game and the College All Star game, which, until the 1960s, matched a group of recent college graduates, most of whom had been All-Americans, against the defending National Football League champion. Later press aides included Paul Butler, who became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and J. Walter Kennedy, who after a career in public relations that included tours of duty as sports information director at Notre Dame and publicity director for the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, became mayor of his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, and later commissioner of the National Basketball Association, for which he had served as its first publicity director in the mid 1940s.

  Two years before their immortalization as the Four Horsemen, Crowley, Miller, Layden, and Stuhldreher were members of the first Notre Dame team to play in the Deep South, when the Irish met Georgia Tech in Atlanta on October 28, 1922. Because Atlanta was the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, one of whose main targets was the Catholic Church, Rockne warned his players that it was entirely possible they could receive a verbally hostile, or even worse, reception in the Georgia capital. Before the game, Rockne let loose with his most vigorous pep talk of the season, telling the players that they were about to play the best team in the South, who would be playing for the honor of Southern football. “We’re a young and green team, but I want you to show what you can do for me and for yourselves and for Notre Dame,” he said in his customary and dramatic staccato style of speaking.

  Then came the bombshell. Pulling a telegram out of his pocket, Rockne suddenly became emotional and appeared barely able to talk. “I want to read this to you,” he said solemnly, staring down at the telegram. “PLEASE WIN THIS GAME FOR MY DADDY. IT’S VERY IMPORTANT TO HIM. The telegram is from Billy who’s very sick and in the hospital.” The players were stunned. Six-year-old Billy Rockne often came to practices and home games, and the players regarded him as their mascot. Jumping from their stools in the locker room, they let out a collective roar and raced onto the field, where, ignoring anti-Irish and anti-Catholic taunts from a crowd of about 15,000, easily defeated Georgia Tech, 13-3. When the team returned by train to South Bend the following day, among the several hundred on hand were Bonnie Rockne and little Billy, who was jumping up and down on the station platform. “You never saw a healthier kid in your life,” Jim Crowley was to say sometime later. Once again, as he was prone to do when he thought desperate measures were required, Rockne had not only stretched the truth, but had pulled a fast one, and it appeared to have paid off. Was there resentment? Not at all. Even sophomores like Crowley, Layden, Miller, and Stuhldreher had heard about Rockne’s tendency to deal in apocrypha, and they would hear it again before their careers at Notre Dame were over.

  Having allowed only 10 total points in its first five games, Notre Dame was heavily favored the following Saturday to beat Indiana, which was making its first appearance in South Bend. Fans of the Hoosiers, who had arrived from Bloomington in chartered trains, along with large Notre Dame alumni groups, resulted in an overflow crowd at Cartier Field. Prohibition may have been in effect in Indiana for four years, but it was not apparent before, during, or after the game in South Bend, which had more speakeasies in 1922 than it had bars before Indiana had gone dry in 1918. Notre Dame would win the game easily, 27-0, its fourth shutout victory in six games. After blanking Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), 19-0, for its fifth shutout, the Irish would lose their only game of the season, to Nebraska, 14-6, in Lincoln in the season’s final game. Again in 1923, Notre Dame’s only loss would be the Cornhuskers, 14-7, again in Lincoln, where, after the team’s arrival, Rockne had flashed the front page of the Lincoln Star, which, above a story on the next day’s game carried a headline that read HORRIBLE HIBERNIANS ARRIVE TODAY. Rockne was furious, but neither the headline nor the coach’s fiery pregame talk would be enough to lift the Fighting Irish to victory. However, the Four Horsemen and the Seven Mules would get even in a big way during their final game against Nebraska, a 33-6 demolition of the Cornhuskers the following season, when Notre Dame would win all ten regular season games and then beat Stanford in its only Rose Bowl appearance to cap a national championship season. At the time, the Rose Bowl had New Year’s Day all to itself in football; it was the first and, during its early years, only bowl game in the country.

  During the Four Horsemen’s three varsity seasons at Notre Dame (college players were limited to three years of varsity play at the time), the Fighting Irish won 28 games, lost two, and tied one, while winning the national championship in 1924 when the Four Horsemen were seniors. Crowley, Layden, and Stuhldreher were named consensus All-Americans in 1924, as were Adam Walsh and tackle Rip Miller. Only Crowley—called “Sleepy Jim” because of his heavy eyelids, which gave the impression that he was perennially tired—played in the NFL, appearing in two games with his hometown Green Bay Packers and one with the Providence Steam Roller in 1925. All of the Four Horsemen later became head coaches: Miller at Georgia Tech (before becoming a lawye
r and then the United States attorney for northern Ohio); Layden at Duquesne and Notre Dame, where he later served as athletic director; Crowley at Michigan State and Fordham (where he coached the famous “Seven Blocks of Granite” line that included Vince Lombardi); and Stuhldreher at Villanova and Wisconsin, where he also served as athletic director.

  Crowley, Layden, and Stuhldreher all would become successful business executives, while Layden would serve as commissioner of the NFL from 1939-1946. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Crowley became the first commissioner of the new All-America Football Conference in 1946, and the next year was part owner and the coach of the league’s Chicago Rockets. Crowley later became the manager and sports director of a television station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and then commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission. Throughout their lives, though, each of the foursome would be forever linked to their collective designation as the “Four Horsemen of Notre Dame.” Speaking of her husband’s legacy as one of the Four Horsemen, Mary Stuhldreher was to say, “No matter where he speaks or what he says, he is always remembered as the quarterback of the Four Horsemen.”

  Remarkably, Rockne did virtually no recruiting and had nothing to do with Crowley, Miller, Layden, and Stuhldreher coming to Notre Dame. Miller was merely following in the footsteps of four older brothers who had played at Notre Dame, including Gerry, a backup halfback on the same team Don starred on; Crowley was steered to South Bend by Curley Lambeau, his high school coach at East Green Bay High School, who had played with Gipp; Layden was recruited for track and baseball by Walter Halas, who was coaching both sports at Notre Dame at the time and who had coached Layden in high school in Davenport, Iowa; and Stuhldreher merely had followed in the footsteps of a brother, Walter, who already was at Notre Dame.

  Rockne conceded that it was mere coincidence that the legendary foursome had arrived at Notre Dame at the same time. But then, of course, Rockne was prone to stretching the truth. “How it came to pass that four young men so eminently qualified by temperament, physique, and instinctive pacing complement one another perfectly and thus produce the best coordinated and most picturesque backfield in the recent history of football—how that came about is one of the inscrutable achievements of coincidence of which I know nothing, save that it’s a rather satisfying mouthful of words.” Rockne always insisted that he did no recruiting on his own, relying on alumni, especially former players, to steer promising high school and prep players to Notre Dame, or just hoping that outstanding young players would apply to the university. Again, when he said that, Rockne seemed to be spinning a yarn.

  The “Four Horsemen” were probably not the best Notre Dame backfield, even up until that time. The 1920 backfield of Gipp, Joe Brandy, Chet Wynne, along with Johnny Mohardt and Norm Barry, who alternated at right halfback, was at least equal and perhaps, because of Gipp, even better, as was the 1929 and 1930 unit of quarterback Frank Carideo, Marchmont “Marchy” Schwartz, Marty Brill, and Joe Savoldi (who was replaced by Larry “Moon” Mullins midway through the 1930 season), which Rockne felt was his best ever. But those outstanding backfields would became overshadowed by the Four Horsemen, who had achieved sports immortality, primarily as a result of Grantland Rice’s prose and George Strickler’s offhand comment about a movie he had seen shortly before the 1924 Notre Dame-Army game at the Polo Grounds in New York.

  Fortunately, the focus on the Four Horsemen in the early 1920s and the outstanding teams they were part of overshadowed several ugly incidents in South Bend. Though a northern state, Indiana had by 1924 become a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity, most of which had been previously confined to the South. By the middle part of the decade it was estimated that approximately one of every three men in Indiana were members of the ardently anti-Catholic Klan. During a number of klavens held in South Bend, much of the Klan’s venom was directed at Notre Dame, the pope, and Catholicism in general. On several occasions, hundreds of Notre Dame students confronted and clashed with robed Klansmen during Klan gatherings in downtown South Bend until the skirmishes were broken up by police officers, many of whom appeared more supportive of the Klan than the students. Fortunately, by the fall of 1929 the Klan’s influence in Indiana had waned considerably, and Knute Rockne’s biggest concerns were how he could possibly top another unbeaten season and a serious health issue.

  18

  WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER?

  AS ROCKNE’S TEAMS continued to win and his fame and popularity grew, he became more attractive as a potential head coach to a number of major universities. Starting in the mid-1920s, overtures reportedly were made to Rockne by Iowa, Northwestern, Wisconsin, Michigan State, and Princeton. General Douglas MacArthur, who as the superintendent at West Point once tried to recruit George Gipp for Army after Gipp had been expelled, albeit briefly, from Notre Dame, in the spring of 1920, apparently had his eye on Rockne as a coach of the Cadets as well. In a letter to Red Blaik, who had played for Army and who later became the coach at West Point, MacArthur wrote in 1924, “Had I stayed at West Point, I intended introducing new blood into our coaching system, and Rockne was the man I had in mind.”

  Apparently the most serious offer to Rockne—at least at the time—came from the University of Southern California. While in Pasadena for the Rose Bowl in January 1925, Rockne met with representatives of USC to discuss the possibility of him becoming the Trojans’ coach. Once an offer was made, the word got back to Notre Dame president Matthew Walsh, who knew Rockne had signed a ten-year contract in 1922, the year Walsh succeeded Father James Burns as president of the university. Despite that contract, Rockne in December 1925 signed an agreement to coach at Columbia, which by then had high hopes of elevating its football team to the elite level of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, who still dominated the college game.

  Columbia said it had offered Rockne $25,000 ($250,000 in 2010) a year for a three-year period, two and a half times what he was getting paid at Notre Dame, and which probably would have made him the highest paid football coach in the country. When news of the agreement appeared in New York newspapers, and eventually papers around the country, Rockne was embarrassed and furious at Columbia for releasing the news prematurely. Swayed to a large degree by friends who were Notre Dame alums, Rockne managed to back out of the deal. Saving face as it were, Columbia announced it had withdrawn its offer to Rockne when it learned he was under a long-term contract, which Rockne later claimed Columbia had known about all along.

  By 1925, Rockne’s relationship with Father Walsh and other administration officials at Notre Dame, who had begun to exert greater control over the school’s sports program through the school’s Faculty Board of Control, had begun to exasperate him. What led Rockne to accept the Columbia offer was a decision by the faculty board to cancel the 1926 game against Nebraska following anti-Irish chants and a demeaning halftime show during the 1925 game in Lincoln. Rockne thought the cancellation was overkill and deprived Notre Dame of a big-time rival. Already having seen how a number of Big Ten schools had built huge stadiums, including one at Michigan that could hold 85,000 spectators, Rockne was upset at the reluctance of Notre Dame to consider building a stadium at least half that size, rather than continuing to expand Cartier Field, which now held 12,000 spectators, puny by comparison. But Walsh and the faculty board, determined to improve the school’s academic reputation and not to have Notre Dame perceived as a football factory, said the school had other priorities, such as new classrooms and dormitories. For his part, Rockne was able to note that during the 1924-25 academic year, Notre Dame football had generated almost $300,000 in revenues, and that after operating expenses more than $200,000 went into the university’s general fund. That a varsity sports program could raise that much money for campus projects was extraordinary, and Rockne knew it. He also knew that although he was still the athletic director he had little to say about where the sports program’s allotment, around $100,000, would go. Despite his problems with the faculty board, Rockne stopped looking elsewhere
and ignored what coaching offers were extended to him during his remaining years as football coach at Notre Dame—with one exception.

  With the Four Horsemen and Seven Mules gone, the 1925 season was memorable for two reasons. First, with a team consisting primarily of sophomores (freshmen still were not allowed to play varsity sports), Notre Dame lost two games for the first time since Rockne became head coach in 1918, and indeed the first time since 1914. Secondly, Army ended a seven-game winless streak against Notre Dame by crushing the Fighting Irish, 27-0, before a crowd of about 70,000 in the first game between the two schools at two-year-old Yankee Stadium. (However, Notre Dame would rebound to beat Army in four of their next five meetings and lose only two of its nineteen games in 1926 and 1927.) It was also in 1925 that Rockne converted to Catholicism, and received his First Holy Communion, one of the first rites that a Catholic takes, on Saturday, November 21, the day of a home game against Northwestern.

  That conversion may have influenced the play of the Fighting Irish that afternoon—at least in the second half, according to fullback Rex Enright, the team’s best runner, who later became the head coach at South Carolina. “We were losing ten to nothing at the half, and our failing Rock on that particular day was heartbreaking,” Enright said. “I’m sure this had a great influence on our play in the third quarter when we scored two touchdowns and won the game.”

  But then, the players may have been trying too hard for their coach in the first half. Or perhaps they were motivated by his sarcastic halftime scolding. “We expected him to come in and let us have it, but we waited and waited and waited, and no Rockne,” tackle Joe Boland recalled. “Then suddenly, only three minutes before the second half kickoff, he burst in and said, ‘Fighting Irish, are you? You look like peaceful Swedes to me. You can have the honor of dandling your grandchildren on your knees and telling them that you had the honor of playing on the first team at Notre Dame that quit.’ After he walked out, we almost broke down the door going out on the field and took the kickoff and went 75 yards, all on the ground, for a touchdown. Then a little while later, we scored on another long drive without a single pass.”