The Gipper

by Jack Cavanaugh

  Newspapers across the country ran front-page headlines about Rockne’s death, along with obituaries longer than those of famed entertainers, political leaders, members of royalty, and other leading sports figures of the day. Inside, editorials lauded Rockne as a pioneering and innovative coach who had not only changed the way football was played, but through his coaching and dynamic personality had almost single-handedly made Notre Dame famous. Hailing Rockne as “a football genius,” the New York Herald Tribune editorialized that, “He was not only a great coach, but a dynamic force that was able to turn mediocre material into extraordinarily fine teams.” The paper declared that he was as great a promoter as he was a coach. “He might have been a P. T. Barnum or a Tex Rickard,” the Herald Tribune stated, referring to the circus impresario and the legendary boxing promoter. “He molded fine teams, and he promoted them with a skill surpassed by no publicity agent. Scores of coaches adopted his football strategy and his promotion methods as well. He was everything to ‘big-time’ football.”

  In the Chicago Tribune, Arch Ward, Rockne’s first press attaché, wrote, “Rockne was a driver, but he never became abusive. He was an insistent master, but an understanding one. He was an uncompromising demander of discipline and rules of training, eligibility, and method.”

  Except, Ward might have added, if your name was George Gipp.

  The plane crash that killed Rockne also was a blow to the burgeoning aircraft industry, given the worldwide publicity it received because of Rockne’s celebrity. In all, there had been a dozen plane crashes in the world during the 1920s, which claimed a total of eighty-four lives. And in 1930 there had been only two crashes, one of which killed sixteen people in Oceanside, California, and the other, in Dresden, Germany, which took eight lives. But up until Rockne, no famous person had been killed in a plane crash, which made the story all the more significant and dramatic.

  Of Rockne, President Hoover, himself a football fan, said, “Mr. Rockne so contributed to a cleanness and high purpose and sportsmanship in athletics that his passing is a national loss.” Former Notre Dame president John W. Cavanaugh, whom Jesse Harper convinced to hire Rockne as head football coach in 1918, said of Rockne’s death, “It is not too much to say that the world went pale, trembled, almost wept.” Another longtime friend, the humorist, columnist, and actor Will Rogers, who once lassoed Rockne from the stage as the coach sat in a Manhattan theater, said, “We thought it would take a president or a great public man’s death to make a whole nation, regardless of age, race, or creed, shake their heads in real sincere sorrow. Well, that’s what this country did today, Knute, for you. You died a national hero.” Like Rockne, the nationally beloved Rogers championed flying and flew often in the late 1920s and early 30s. But, like Rockne, he, too, died in a crash when a plane piloted by the famous oneeyed pilot Wiley Post went down near Point Barrow, Alaska, in August 1935. Ironically, Rogers thus became only the second well-known person—and like Rockne an extremely popular one—to be killed in a plane crash, following his friend in death by a little more than four and a half years.

  In South Bend, within hours of the crash most downtown stores and other businesses closed out of respect for the city’s most famous, and beloved, resident. Everywhere one went—restaurants, speakeasies, pool halls, wherever—the talk was about Rockne’s death. Over and over, the expression “I can’t believe it” was heard, as if Rockne had been indestructible. Flags at Notre Dame and at all of the Big Ten campuses flew at half-staff for the next few days, an irony since Rockne had tried, unavailingly, to have Notre Dame accepted into the conference. Across the country, several state legislatures passed resolutions in the days that followed that expressed sadness and regret over Rockne’s death.

  On Good Friday, Rockne’s coffin—blue and gold, the school’s colors—was moved to the family home on East Wynne Street, where Rockne would lie all day in the living room in an old-fashioned wake as more than 1,000 mourners passed by, many after waiting for hours. On Holy Saturday, the pews in the awe-inspiring Sacred Heart Church were filled with 1,400 people, all of whom had been invited to the services, including Rockne’s elderly mother and his two sisters; hundreds of former Notre Dame players, among them the Four Horsemen and scores of the more than 200 high school, college, and professional coaches who had played for Rockne; New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker, along with the mayors of Chicago, Philadelphia, and South Bend; Will Rogers; Notre Dame students who had delayed their Easter break in order to pay their respects to their beloved coach; and hundreds of friends. For those who weren’t there, the service was broadcast live by the CBS Radio Network, which had also broadcast an hour-long tribute to Rockne by nationally known sportscaster Ted Husing the night before.

  In his moving eulogy, Father O’Donnell, the university’s poet-president, alluded to the national outpouring of grief and tribute by pointing out that President Hoover had sent a special tribute and the King of Norway had dispatched a delegation to the funeral. His death, O’Donnell said, had “struck the nation with dismay and has everywhere turned heads in grief.” Behind Father O’Donnell as he celebrated the funeral Mass were three former Notre Dame presidents who served while Rockne was head football coach—Father John W. Cavanaugh, Father James Burns, and Father Matthew Walsh. By the end of the Mass, there were few, if any in the church, who had not shed tears.

  Rockne’s casket was later carried to a hearse by pallbearers Tom Conley, captain of Rockne’s last team; Tommy Yarr, the captain-elect of the 1931 team; and the great backfield of Frank Carideo, Marchmont Schwartz, Marty Brill, and Moon Mullins. Thousands lined the route from the campus through downtown and to Highland Cemetery, where the final prayers were said as family members gathered around the grave.

  Apart from presidents, no other American’s death had ever drawn so much attention, attracted so many mourners, and evoked as much grief and sympathy as the onetime spindly legged and undersized end who had achieved immortality as a football coach. It would be fourteen years until America would again collectively grieve on such a grand scale following the death, in April 1945, of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And few people outside of the presidency have had as many places named in their honor. The largest tangible tribute was the Rockne Memorial, an intramural sports facility that was opened on the Notre Dame campus on June 3, 1939.

  A statue of Rockne also was unveiled near one of Elmer Layden, one of his Four Horsemen and an eventual Notre Dame coach, outside of Notre Dame stadium in October 2009. Statues of two other former Fighting Irish coaches, Lou Holtz and Ara Parseghian, had previously been erected inside the stadium. For Rockne to be the fourth Notre Dame coach honored with a statue seems strange, since Rockne had largely been responsible for the construction of the stadium. John Heisler, the university’s senior associate athletic director for media and broadcast relations, explained that Holtz and Parseghian’s players had raised the money for their coaches’ statues, while most of Rockne’s players had died by the time sculptor Jerry McKenna, a Notre Dame alumnus, had created the statues of Layden, Holtz, and Parseghian. Heisler also noted that Rockne had previously been honored on a much grander scale by the construction of the Rockne Memorial building. True, but until Rockne’s statue was erected, most fans attending Notre Dame games got to see the statues of Layden, Holtz, and Parseghian, but not the Rockne Memorial building, which is a considerable distance from the stadium. At the unveiling ceremony of Rockne’s statue, Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, perhaps trying to assuage the feelings of members of Rockne’s family on hand, said, “We saved the best for last.”

  As it was, the Rockne statue was the idea of Joseph Mendelson, a lawyer and businessman from Santa Barbara, California, with close ties to Notre Dame. “I was running on a beach one day when I got to thinking how Rockne wasn’t among the statues at the Notre Dame Stadium, and I said to myself, ‘Hey, this is wrong,’” said Mendelson, who then put up the money for a statue of Rockne. Mendelson, who has two children who graduated from Notre
Dame, previously had donated $2.5 million to endow the Mendelson Center for Sport, Character, and Culture at Notre Dame. “Not having a statue for Rockne at the stadium would be like having a Republican museum without Abraham Lincoln or a Democratic museum without Franklin Roosevelt,” said Mendelson, who in the past has owned standardbred horses for harness racing named Rockne and The Gipper.

  A similar statue of Rockne, also sculpted by McKenna, stands in downtown South Bend near the College Football Hall of Fame, which was scheduled to be moved to Atlanta in 2012. Other tributes have included streets named for the coach in South Bend, Taylorville, Illinois (a onetime hotbed of semi-pro football, where a number of Notre Dame players, and possibly Rockne, had played for money under assumed names before and after World War I), and Stevensville, Michigan, where the Rocknes had a summer home on Lake Michigan.

  Shortly after Rockne’s death, seventh-and-eighth grade students at the Sacred Heart School in the small, predominantly Catholic town of Hilbigville, Texas, inexplicably were entrusted with the task of renaming the town. The six boys voted for Rockne, while the six girls cast ballots for poet Joyce Kilmer, which posed a dilemma. The problem was solved the next day, though, when one of the girls, Edith Goertz, cast her vote for Rockne, breaking the tie and giving the farming community of about 200 residents a new name. Why Rockne? “Because almost everyone in town was Catholic and Notre Dame fans, and a lot of the residents listened to Notre Dame football games on the radio,” Minnie Bartsch, the curator of the town’s museum, said in the spring of 2010. And why did pre-teen Edith Goertz change her vote? “I think it was because her father was a very big Knute Rockne fan,” Bartsch said. A memorial for Rockne in the form of a bust stands in front of the Rockne, Texas, museum; many of the town’s approximately 200 residents are still Notre Dame fans eight decades after Rockne’s death.

  More than 2,000 miles Northeast of Rockne, Texas, the gymnasium at the Allentown Central Catholic High School in Pennsylvania is named Rockne Hall even though Rockne had no known connection with the city or state. Memorials also were established in Voss, Norway, the town of Rockne’s birth, and in the wheat field in Bazaar, Kansas, where he was killed. Another tribute, in the form of a plaque, was hung in a bathhouse at the resort in Cedar Point, Ohio, where Rockne and Gus Dorais, while working during the summer of 1913, spent off-duty hours practicing passing routines that led to Notre Dame’s historic upset of Army that fall and where Rockne met his wife, a waitress at the resort.

  On April 9, 1943, during the heart of World War II, a cargo vessel known as a Liberty ship, the SS Knute Rockne, was launched in Richmond, California. A month later, another liberty ship, the SS George Gipp, named for Rockne’s most famous player, was launched at the same shipyard. It was the only instance where two ships, named for a coach and one of his players, were launched during the war, if indeed ever. It also made Rockne the only football coach to have both a ship and a car named for him. Shortly after his death in 1931, the Studebaker Corp., for which Rockne had become its most magnetic sales executive and was on the verge of becoming a vice president, began manufacturing the “Rockne.” A six-cylinder automobile that had been on the drawing board when the coach died, the Rockne sold for $575, slightly more than a comparable Ford or Chevrolet at the time, and was on the market for about two years.

  Other honors would follow in the years to come, including the issuance of 160 million first-class postage stamps with Rockne’s face on them on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first of which went on sale in Rockne, Texas. President Ronald Reagan, who had an unabashed affection for Notre Dame that stemmed from his memorable film portrayal of George Gipp, unveiled the stamp at a ceremony on the Notre Dame campus on March 9, 1988, after arriving in a Studebaker Rockne.

  Reagan had won the role of Gipp forty-eight years earlier after campaigning vigorously for it while claiming that Gipp had been a hero of his when Reagan was a boy. Then in 1940, the year the movie came out, Reagan told an audience in Los Angeles that he had interviewed Gipp when he was a sportscaster in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1930s. That seemed highly unlikely since Reagan was only nine years old when Gipp died. Reagan, who was twenty-nine years old when the movie was made, also strongly urged the studio to cast Pat O’Brien as Rockne. However, Warner Brothers wanted Jimmy Cagney, a bigger star than O’Brien at the time, to play Rockne. But Notre Dame rejected Cagney because he had been a supporter of the Loyalist cause during the civil war in Spain in 1936. During the conflict, the Catholic Church opposed the Loyalists and backed the government of General Francisco Franco, which eventually was overthrown. As a pre-condition for their cooperation, Notre Dame and Rockne’s wife, Bonnie, had considerable say on the film, which accounted for the depiction of Rockne as a secular saint and Gipp as an unflawed hero. Portraying Rockne as a freshman at Notre Dame seemed like a difficult assignment for the forty-one-year-old O’Brien. But then Rockne came close to looking like a middle-aged man as a student, and O’Brien, after losing about twenty pounds in a month before the shooting started, managed to do a very creditable impression of Rockne, both as a college student and a young coach.

  Part of the movie, including a depiction of Rockne’s funeral at Sacred Heart Church, was shot on the Notre Dame campus. The movie made its worldwide debut on October 4, 1940, at the Palais Royale Theatre in downtown South Bend. Several thousand people massed outside the theater in the hope of seeing Reagan, Pat O’Brien, who portrayed Rockne, and Gale Page, who played the part of Bonnie Rockne. All three were introduced on stage before the movie was shown.

  Rockne established a record that has never been surpassed at Notre Dame. During his thirteen years as head coach, he produced five national championship teams, won 105 games, including his last 19, while losing only 12 and tying 5—a winning percentage of .881, better than any other football coach in history, college or pro. He also had five unbeaten and untied seasons, developed twenty first-team All Americans, starting with George Gipp in 1920, and coached an astonishing seventeen players now in the College Football Hall of Fame—more than a third of the forty-three Notre Dame players who’ve been voted into that football shrine. Reflecting Rockne’s influence on those seventeen players, fourteen became coaches, including two—Hunk Anderson and Buck Shaw—who coached on both the college level and in the National Football League. Further, Rockne, Gipp, and Layden were among the first group of inductees into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951.

  Far more significant than Rockne’s record was the imprint he made on football and the recognition he brought to Notre Dame. Indeed, it is safe to say that Rockne, by his innovative skill as a coach and his engaging and outgoing personality, built the Notre Dame football team from a squad of about thirty in 1918 to one of about 125 by 1930 and made it America’s team, even while an anti-Catholic bias, albeit a dwindling one, still existed in the United States. What was particularly remarkable was that he did so while warring with some elements at Notre Dame who felt that the school, and mainly Rockne, had overemphasized football to the detriment of the school’s growing academic reputation. As a football coach, he was neither as innovative as Walter Camp at Yale—regarded by many as “the father of American football”—nor Amos Alonzo Stagg nor Clark Shaughnessy (generally acknowledged to have been the first coach to use the T formation), but he was perceptive enough to have studied their methods and those of other outstanding coaches of the era, including his predecessor Jesse Harper, and develop his own distinctive coaching style, which, coupled with his knack for promoting himself, his football teams, and Notre Dame, made him the most-famous college football coach of all time.

  Memorials to George Gipp are on a much smaller scale, which is understandable, since, dazzling as it was, his was a meteoric and much shorter career. In Gipp’s hometown of Laurium, Michigan, there are two tributes. In August 1934, a small park and fifteenfoot tall pyramid-shaped stone monument that includes a plaque with Gipp’s name and a football was dedicated. Not far away is the George Gipp Recreation Area, wh
ich includes the George Gipp Skating Arena, baseball and softball fields, tennis courts, and a basketball court. At Calumet High School, which Laurium teenagers still attend, a plaque with Gipp’s name on it is awarded annually to a senior who has distinguished himself in sports and academics, then put back on display in the school’s entrance lobby. That, of course, is somewhat ironic since Gipp was anything but a good scholar and played only one year of a varsity sport, basketball, for Calumet. At Notre Dame, Gipp is also memorialized by a plaque—in the football team’s locker room—which includes Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” oration.

  If Gipp was the best Notre Dame football player of all time, Rockne, of course, was largely responsible, since he had both discovered and nurtured “The Gipper” while overlooking his off-campus transgressions at the beginning of a coaching career that would lead both of them to immortality and the university to both academic and sporting acclaim. The irony of their legacies, of course, is that neither Rockne, a Lutheran immigrant from Norway, nor Gipp, whose parents were Methodist and Baptist, had even graduated from high school when they came to Notre Dame six years apart with no intention of playing football, and yet they wound up as the school’s greatest sports legends. It is highly unlikely that Notre Dame shall ever see such a disparate combination of football immortals again.

  EPILOGUE

  HE HAD BEEN one of Rockne’s favorites, both as a player and an assistant coach, but as the new head coach at Notre Dame, Hunk Anderson, found Rockne a very hard act to follow, as most any coach would have. That Notre Dame had lost three-fourths of its best backfield ever—only All American Marchy Schwartz returned in 1931—and most of the outstanding line of the 1930 national championship team, made it even more difficult. Anderson also soon found out that he would not have the broad authority that Rockne had enjoyed in running the football team, but instead would be working under tightened institutional control.