The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  The next day, over drinks at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan, Joseph Byrne, a Notre Dame alumnus and Rockne friend, told Frank Wallace about Rockne’s “win one for the Gipper” oration in the Notre Dame locker room. A few hours later, Wallace typed out his story for the Monday editions of the New York Daily News, quoting Rockne as having said that, on his deathbed, Gipp had requested of Rockne that, “when the time came, he wanted me to ask a Notre Dame team to beat the Army for him.”

  “It was not a trick,” Wallace went on. “George Gipp asked it. When Notre Dame’s football need was greatest, it called on its beloved ‘Gipper’ again.” Rockne’s written account two years later of what Gipp had said to him on his deathbed differed slightly from Wallace’s written account, using the “win one for the Gipper” exhortative quote for the first time. Still, Wallace had essentially broken the “win one for the Gipper” story. After reading Wallace’s story, Harry Schumacher, a copy editor in the sports department of the Daily News, realized that the story deserved a striking, catchy headline, and he wrote one that fit the bill. GIPP’S GHOST BEAT ARMY, Schumacher’s headline read, followed by a sub-head that said, “Irish Hero’s Deathbed Request Inspired Notre Dame.”

  “When the Daily News hit the streets a few hours later, the story of George Gipp soon became an American legend, as common to sports fans as a familiar fairy tale is to a sleepy-eyed youngster,” Jimmy Breslin, who later became a columnist for the Daily News, was to write years later. “The Gipp myth gained fantastic momentum through an era of newspaper sportswriting that saw athletes likened, in print, to Greek gods. Out of this came the legend of ‘The Gipper.’”

  In fact, Gipp had already become a legend at Notre Dame, as Breslin pointed out, but Wallace’s story, which attracted national attention, expanded his legendary status and anointed him with the nickname of “The Gipper,” far and away the most famous and evocative nickname in sports history. Indeed, forty-six years later, in 1984, the New York Daily News would refer to then President Ronald Reagan exhorting members of the United States Olympic team by quoting him in a front page headline that read, “Ron Tells U.S. Olympians before the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, ‘DO IT FOR THE GIPPER,’” a reference to Reagan’s portrayal of George Gipp in the 1940 movie about Knute Rockne.

  The year 1928 was especially significant to Notre Dame for another reason besides their upset of Army. It was also the year in which a Roman Catholic ran for president on a major party ticket for the first time. Because of his stature and popularity, and perhaps because he had converted to Catholicism three years earlier, Rockne was asked by some prominent Democratic leaders to campaign for New York Governor Al Smith, whom Rockne had met and liked—perhaps because they had much in common, even though Smith was a native New Yorker and Rockne a Norwegian immigrant whose family had settled in the Midwest. However, Rockne, very likely at the suggestion of Notre Dame administrators, chose not to campaign for Smith, although he supported him in the election, which he lost to Herbert Hoover the week before the Army game.

  Ironically, while the 1928 Army-Notre Dame game would best be remembered for Rockne’s recitation of a young athlete’s dying wish, a number of players in the game would die young, most of them tragically so. Chris Cagle, who averaged 6.4 yards a carry during his four seasons at West Point, went on to play five seasons in the NFL with the New York Giants and then the Brooklyn Dodgers. While living in New York, Cagle, then thirty-seven years old, fell down a subway stairwell on December 26, 1942, and died of a fractured skull. Jack Chevigny, after serving as an assistant to Rockne and then becoming the head coach at Texas, was killed at Iwo Jima in 1945 while leading a unit as a fortyyear-old Marine captain during World War II. Eight years earlier, in 1937, Johnny O’Brien, who caught the winning touchdown pass in the game and later served as an assistant to Elmer Layden, was killed in an auto accident. Then in 1954 Fred Miller, captain of the 1928 team who later became the president of his family’s Miller Brewing Co. in Milwaukee, was killed along with his son, Fred, when his private plane crashed. Miller had served as an assistant coach to Frank Leahy, who succeeded Layden in 1940. None of the four had reached the age of fifty. Nor, of course, had George Gipp, who had died at twenty-five. And then, of course, Knute Rockne would also die much too early.

  Unfortunately, Notre Dame was unable to extend its three-game winning streak and lost its last two games. The first of those losses was to underrated nemesis Carnegie Tech by three touchdowns at Cartier Field, where the Irish hadn’t been beaten since 1905; and the second was in Los Angeles to USC by two touchdowns. Thus, Notre Dame finished with a record of 5-4, Rockne’s worse mark since becoming head coach in 1918. Besides ending Notre Dame’s twenty-three-year long winning streak at home, the loss to Carnegie Tech was also jarring, since the Tartans, so called in honor of the school’s Scottish-born founder, Andrew Carnegie, were coached on a part-time basis by Walter Steffen, a Chicago judge.

  Among the sportswriters on hand for the Carnegie Tech game was well-known New York Herald Tribune sports columnist W. O. McGeehan, who, though he had written glowingly about George Gipp, had expressed doubt, seemingly in jest, as to whether Notre Dame actually had a campus and suggested that the football team—because of all of its long-distance traveling—spent the football season living in sleeping cars aboard trains. Following the Notre Dame upset of Army, McGeehan decided to travel to South Bend to cover the Carnegie Tech game and to check out the school’s campus or at least see if there really was one. When Rockne got wind of McGeehan’s train trip, he invited him to stay at his house, which McGeehan did. On his return to New York, McGeehan wrote that Notre Dame “is no place of mystery and no recruiting camp, but just an American university with some fine traditions and some very human undergraduates.” McGeehan even got to look at some of the university’s financial records and concluded that much of the money made from football went toward the building of dormitories and classrooms on campus. Rockne and the mandarins at Notre Dame couldn’t have been happier over McGeehan’s prose relating to the university. Also, the columnist never again referred to Notre Dame teams as “Knute Rockne’s Wandering Irishmen,” as he had in the past.

  Despite the upset of Army, and the fact that the team still ended with a winning record, some disgruntled alumni apparently felt that Rockne, at the age of forty, should be replaced, not only because of the four defeats but due to his growing number of outside interests. Whether Rockne had heard such rumors or not, he did consider an offer at the end of the 1928 season from Ohio State. It was tempting since it meant that Rockne would be coaching a team in the Big Ten and thus would have a shot at beating two coaches who had refused to play Notre Dame—Fielding Yost of Michigan, whom he disliked intensely, and Bob Zuppke of Illinois. Rockne’s demands apparently had been met, but then the deal unraveled when it became public during a coaches’ meeting in New Orleans, whereupon Rockne backed out of what had been a tentative agreement. According to Francis Wallace, who was close to the coach, top executives at Studebaker wanted Rockne to stay in South Bend, and, indeed, shortly after Rockne’s second thoughts about going to Ohio State, the company hired Rockne to travel around the country to deliver speeches motivating Studebaker’s sales force. The charismatic coach turned out to be so good at it that Studebaker not only kept raising his salary, but eventually named a car for Rockne.

  Nevertheless, Rockne came close to leaving again the following June, when, upset over two appointments that had been made within the athletic department without his knowledge, he sent a wire to the new Notre Dame president Charles O’Donnell from one of his coaching camps asking him to accept his resignation. Another reason for his ostensible intent to quit was O’Donnell’s refusal to re-admit a promising halfback who had flunked out the year before. In a subsequent letter to O’Donnell, Rockne also said he felt that there were a group of professors and some other staff members at Notre Dame who had been conspiring against him, resentful of his success and the attention the football team had receive
d. Unwilling to lose Notre Dame’s renowned coach, O’Donnell made a number of changes that mollified Rockne and convinced him to stay. It would be the last time Rockne would consider any outside coaching offers. The main reason could have been his new association with Studebaker.

  June 1929 was even more notable for another reason; it marked the last graduation of a minims class, the students from first through the eighth grade who had been a part of Notre Dame since its founding in 1842. The prep school, which included students from the ninth through the twelfth grades, had closed seven years earlier, in 1922, when its last senior class graduated. (Freshman and sophomore years had been eliminated in 1920, and the junior year in 1921.) While the minims and “preps,” as they were called, shared the same campus, they attended classes in separate buildings. During Notre Dame’s early years, the minims and preps outnumbered the college students, but they were a small minority by the time the grade and prep schools were closed.

  From his worst team, in terms of records at 5-4 in 1928, Rockne’s 1929 unit was probably as good as any he ever had, winning all nine of its games, all of them on the road, which prompted many sportswriters to restamp the Irish as the “Ramblers” once more. After years of trying, Rockne had finally persuaded the top administrators at Notre Dame that a new stadium was desperately needed to attract major football-playing schools, and, of course, produce more money for the university. Since construction was well underway, the Fighting Irish were unable to play at home, but would play three games at Soldier Field in Chicago, only eighty-five miles away, where the team had a huge fan base and which was less than a two-hour train ride from South Bend.

  Fortunately for Rockne, he would have one of his best backfields ever, if indeed not the best, in Frank Carideo, Joe Savoldi (at least for a while), and halfbacks Marchmont “Marchy” Schwartz, who had spent the first part of his freshman year at Loyola of New Orleans but left when he found out that many of the football players rarely went to class, and Marty Brill, a rare transfer from the University of Pennsylvania, where he felt his running and outstanding blocking talents had not been appreciated. Ethnically, they was hardly the “Fighting Irish.” Of the four backfield men, two, Carideo and Savoldi, were Italian; and two, Schwartz and Brill, were Jewish. A year later, Rockne, in what would be considered a gross faux pas decades later, told a San Francisco sportswriter that Schwartz was particularly smart “from the Jewish blood in him.”

  Indelicate ethnic comments such as Rockne’s on Marchy Schwartz were hardly unusual in sports stories in the 1920s, and rarely drew complaints from readers. Brill’s backup at left halfback, Clarence Kaplan, also was Jewish, as was guard Norm Hewitt, a mainstay of a strong line, but Rockne refrained from attributing their intelligence to their religion. As Rockne, ever the promoter and visionary, saw it, that backfield quartet would help produce a lot of victories and would no doubt attract Italian and Jewish fans, which they did. Rockne’s greatest loss was his line coach and right-hand man, Hunk Anderson, who had become the head coach at St. Louis University. Anderson’s replacement, though, was an excellent one in Tom Lieb, who had been a teammate of Anderson’s in 1921 and had returned to South Bend in 1929 after serving as an assistant coach at Wisconsin.

  Rockne’s other “coaches” were his quarterbacks, in whom he had supreme confidence. “All Rockne quarterbacks called their own plays,” Carideo, a two-time All American and probably his best quarterback, recalled. “Rock simply trained us to think the way he did and react the way he would to a changing situation. The best way to put it, without sounding immodest, is that Notre Dame quarterbacks were an extension of Knute Rockne himself. For example, he would say to us, ‘I want you to be cocky at all time. At all times! And without a let-up. For several reasons. First of all, it shows the other team that you have complete confidence, and you know exactly what you’re going to do next. That there’s no doubt in your mind.’”

  Rockne also disavowed huddles, where he thought debates and disagreements could occur. He wanted only the quarterback to talk between plays. “‘I’m not asking you to put on phony airs,’” Carideo quoted Rockne as having told him, and probably other quarterbacks, too. “‘You’re just playing a role. It isn’t you personally that I want to be cocky. It’s you the Notre Dame quarterback. But be wise enough to know a limit. Don’t get your teammates soured on you.’ That was Rock’s way.” Rockne hardly had to tell Carideo to be cocky; it was one of his trademarks.

  Playing on the road in 1929 proved to be no disadvantage whatsoever, although three of the games were decided by one touchdown, and one, against Southern California at Soldier Field, by a single point. What appeared to be a disadvantage, though, was Rockne’s health. In the week before the second game of the season, against Navy in Baltimore, Rockne was diagnosed with phlebitis. A blood clot had developed in his right leg and there was a danger of it going to his heart. Doctors convinced him not to make the trip to Baltimore that Saturday or to Chicago for the Wisconsin contest a week later. They also told him that rest and the immobilization of his ailing leg were the only way to cure the phlebitis. The garrulous and outgoing Tom Lieb turned out to be an excellent choice to fill in for Rockne, especially against Wisconsin, whose system he knew so well. During the weeks leading up to all of Notre Dame’s games during the 1929 season, Rockne conducted practices from a platform erected at Cartier Field, from where he bellowed instructions to his players and coaches through a megaphone. And before each game, he carefully charted what he wanted Lieb to do. Lieb may have been in charge on the sidelines of most of the 1929 games, but Rockne was still calling the shots, and even calling the Notre Dame locker room before games to talk to his starting players.

  When word of Rockne’s illness spread across the country, the now famous Notre Dame coach received hundreds of getwell letters and telegrams from fellow coaches, former players, alumni, and the legion of Fighting Irish subway alumni. Though he was still incapacitated and confined to a wheelchair, there was no way Rockne was going to miss the fourth game, in Pittsburgh against Carnegie Tech, which had beaten Notre Dame in their last two meetings. Wheeled into the locker room about fifteen minutes before the game was to start, Rockne sat quietly for several minutes while his players alternately looked at him, uneasily, and at each other, unsure of what he was going to say and, more importantly, concerned about his health. Off to one side, Rockne’s doctor, Maurice Keady, turned to Francis Wallace and said, “If he lets go and that clot dislodges and hits his heart or his brain, he’s got an even chance of not leaving this dressing room alive.” Wallace, who had become a close friend of Rockne, blanched.

  Finally, with just about everyone in the locker room in a collective state of discomfort, Rockne spoke. “A lot of water has gone under the bridge since I first came to Notre Dame, but I don’t know when I ever wanted to win a game as badly as this one,” he said, bundled in a heavy overcoat and his trademark fedora, “and I don’t care what happens after today.” Then, alluding to his illness, Rockne asked, his voice rising, “Why do you think I’m taking a chance like this? To lose? They’ll be primed. They’ll be tough. They think they have your number. Are you going to let it happen again?”

  By now, Rockne was shouting, much to the chagrin of Doctor Keady, Wallace, Tom Lieb, and others in the room who knew how ill the coach was. As Wallace recalled, “Now he shot the works. He really let go.”

  Shouting as loud as he could, Rockne, in one of his most emotional pep talks, bellowed, “Go out there and crack ’em. Crack ’em hard. Fight to live and fight to win, win, win!”

  After the last of the players had run out the locker room door, Rockne, sweating profusely, appeared to faint, whereupon Doctor Keady wiped the sweat from his face and his brow, took his pulse, and waved to a trainer to start pushing his wheelchair out onto the field before a crowd of about 60,000. On this day, as Wallace put it, Knute Rockne appeared to want to win more than he wanted to live. Fired up as they never had been before, Rockne’s superb 1929 team battled ferociously in
edging the powerful Tartans, 7-0, on a 1-yard plunge by Joe Savoldi on the last of four cracks at the Carnegie line starting at their 7-yard line. Two weeks later Rockne, again at the doctors’ suggestion, remained home when Notre Dame played Drake in Chicago, but was back in front of the Irish bench in his wheelchair the following week for the Southern California game, where he received a huge ovation from most of those in the crowd of 113,000 when he was pushed out on the field at Soldier Field.

  With the score tied at 6-6 at halftime, backup fullback Paul Castner got off his stool and, emotionally charged, told his teammates how much they owed Rockne, who had risked his life by travelling to Chicago by train to be with the team. It became even more emotional a short while later when Rockne was wheeled into the locker room, got up from his wheelchair, and implored his charges to “Go on out there and play them off their feet. Play ’em! Play ’em! Play ’em hard. Rock will be watching.” Inspired to fever pitch, first by Castner, and then by Rockne, the players almost knocked the door down as they burst out onto the field.

  Buoyed by their teammate and coach’s words, Notre Dame drove for a go-ahead touchdown on its first possession of the second half, with Joe Savoldi crashing over from the 5-yard line. Carideo, the talented triple-threat quarterback from Mount Vernon in New York’s Westchester County, had missed his first conversion attempt but made his second to give Notre Dame a 13-6 lead. But then USC responded dramatically as Russell Saunders ran back a kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown, something no other player had ever done against a Rockne-coached team. However, once again, USC missed the conversion attempt, and the Irish went on to win, 13-12. That night, what Doctor Keady had warned Rockne could happen because of his insistence on continuing to coach, did. While he was resting, the clot in Rockne’s right leg became loose, passed through his heart, and finally settled in his left leg. It was a close call that could have been fatal.