That may have been why Rockne put up with Gipp’s absence at many practice sessions, the missed classes, the inordinate amount of time he spent shooting pool and playing poker in downtown South Bend, and during his last two years, his near full-time residence at the plush Hotel Oliver—all of which Rockne, with his downtown contacts, had to know about. Wayward and carefree as he was off the field, Gipp perceived Rockne’s genius as a coach and motivator, even when, his voice dripping with sarcasm, he would direct a cutting remark at Gipp for his nonchalance during practice or even during a game. Gipp knew that the verbal attacks were justified and intended to show the rest of the Notre Dame squad that, even though most of the players sensed that Rockne tended to treat Gipp with kid gloves, the coach was not about to let his star halfback go too far over the line.
Rockne no doubt recalled that, as a player at Notre Dame, he himself had indulged in some questionable behavior. Like Gipp and many other Notre Dame players of the era, Rockne often played for money with semi-pro teams in South Bend and other Midwestern cities on Sundays, the day after college games (usually, but not always, under an assumed name), which he continued to do while an assistant and even as the head coach. Like Gipp, too, Rockne liked to gamble on games as a player and was known to frequent some of the same downtown South Bend establishments that Gipp later did.
To make extra money while he was an undergraduate, Rockne also boxed professionally throughout the Midwest as a welterweight (usually under the name of Frankie Brown, Jab Brown, or Kid Williams) for purses that generally ranged between five and ten dollars. Also like Gipp, Rockne, while a player and coach, would place bets on Notre Dame for gambling friends from downtown South Bend and himself, even though Rockne, so far as is known, did not come close to Gipp when it came to gambling and breaking university rules.
None of this was displayed in Pat O’Brien’s somewhat saintly portrayal of Rockne in the movie Knute Rockne: All American, which also portrayed Gipp as a clean-cut All-American-boy sports hero without any shortcomings whatsoever. Even though many Midwestern sportswriters were aware of Gipp’s gambling and late hours, Rockne ignored all the rumors and tried to convince nationally known writers like Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice that Gipp was close to being the very personification of the college football ideal, a star who had even fewer frailties than most athletes. That would seem to indicate that initially, Rockne also was unaware (perhaps willfully so) of Gipp’s poor academic performance. Indeed, during two of Gipp’s four and a half years at Notre Dame—the 1917-18 academic year and 1918-19, Rockne’s first season as head coach—his transcript had no grades whatsoever. Certainly, someone must have brought Gipp’s academic shortcomings to Rockne’s attention, which he ultimately said he had become aware of.
As close as they became, Gipp and Rockne could hardly have been more different. At a shade over six feet and around 180 pounds by his senior year, Gipp was the personification of an athlete. On the football field—as on the baseball diamond and basketball court—he made everything he did look easy and effortless. Work hard at practice? No need to, Gipp felt. He knew what he could do and would do it on Saturday.
By comparison, Rockne, at five foot seven inches and, at most, around 160 pounds during his final season as a player, had to struggle and go all-out in practice to make the Notre Dame varsity, having played only intramural football for a while as a freshman. (He’d played football only sparingly in high school, as well, and had not played the game for five years before enrolling at Notre Dame.) It was while playing interhall football, which involved students from the six residence halls for Notre Dame’s college students, that Rockne attracted the attention of the Brownson Hall team’s coach, Joe Collins, an end for the Notre Dame varsity, who recommended the odd-looking, twenty-two-year-old freshman to varsity coach Shorty Longman.
Even after that, nothing in football came easy for the bandylegged, prematurely bald, pot-bellied, undersized end with the pumpkin-shaped head, flattened nose, raspy voice, and the up-and-down staccato way of talking. Supremely organized, intense, and always looking ahead, Rockne was the antithesis of the carefree Gipp who rarely gave a thought to tomorrow (and not much to today, either) but yet somehow managed to compartmentalize his rampant gambling and his football-playing.
Academically, they were polar opposites. Rockne was a dogged, diligent student who graduated with a degree in pharmacy and a 90.52 scholastic average, played the flute in the school orchestra, appeared in a number of campus theatrical productions, was an editor of the campus magazine, The Dome, and was a student chemistry department assistant. Rockne’s course load was a heavy one, including several chemistry courses, as well as biology, botany, human anatomy, geology, physiology, and philosophy. “He had a very good mind, and was an attentive student,” Father Thomas Irving, Rockne’s physics instructor during his junior year, said, “and you would never make the mistake of taking him for a dumbbell.” Particularly impressive was that most of Rockne’s grades during his freshman year—usually the most difficult year for a student—and his senior year, when he was captain of the football team and involved in a number of other extracurricular activities, were A’s.
That academic determination enabled Rockne to overcome a stammering manner of talking that he’d brought to Notre Dame and was responsible for his shyness while an undergraduate. Later, as an assistant coach, he privately took elocution lessons, which rid him of his stammer and boosted his confidence when he spoke. Gipp, though demonstrably intelligent and well-spoken, never applied himself to his studies, cut classes repeatedly, and, apart from sports, had no interest in any extracurricular campus activities, or, if one would believe Rockne, in women.
Still, there were similarities that may have drawn Rockne and Gipp close together. Neither had graduated from high school, both came from families of limited means, both had worked for three years before coming to Notre Dame at an advanced age for freshmen, both were Protestants in a milieu that was heavily Catholic, and both arrived in South Bend unheralded and without scholarships, and felt, once they got there, that they might have made a mistake in coming.
“I think that Rock may have envied George in a way, mainly because of his carefree devil-may-care manner,” Hunk Anderson was to say five decades after he played under Rockne. “Rock was too organized and too disciplined to ever have been that way, and yet I think he probably understood George better than anyone.”
Ojay Larson agreed with Anderson. “I think Rock also secretly got a kick out of how George could spend most of a week staying up much of the night shooting pool and playing poker—and for a lot of money, at that—but still went all-out and would play so brilliantly during a game on Saturday,” Larson recalled. “He also could relate to George’s playing professionally on a number of occasions while at Notre Dame, since he had done the same and had run the risk of getting kicked off the team as Gipp did.”
Though he made his high school team in Chicago as a scrawny, seldom-used 125-pound end and halfback, Rockne’s first love in sports was track. He excelled in the half-mile run and as a pole-vaulter. Rockne later held the Notre Dame record for fifteen years—remarkable given his relatively short stature. After spending a year at a variety of odd jobs after leaving high school, Rockne worked as a clerk and then a dispatcher for the United States Post Office in Chicago for two and a half years. During that time, he became one of the best distance runners in the Chicago area while totally forsaking football, even though he had filled out to 145 pounds. Only at the insistence of his sister did Rockne begin to think of enrolling at a college, preferably the University of Illinois. However, two fellow members of the Illinois Athletic Club who were going to Notre Dame to join the track team talked Rockne into come along, convincing him that he, too, could make the team. So it was that at the age of twenty-two Rockne enrolled at a school he claimed never to have heard of, although that seems to have been a stretch of the truth. (Chicago newspapers regularly carried stories about Notre Dame sports teams, especially its
rapidly improving football team, which in 1909, after losing to Michigan all eight times they had played, upset the highly rated Wolverines, 11-3.)
“I went to South Bend with a suitcase and a thousand dollars, feeling the strangeness of being a lone Norse Protestant invading a Catholic stronghold,” Rockne was to say. Prematurely bald with a nose that had accidentally been flattened by a baseball bat while he was a teenager in Chicago, Rockne appeared about ten years, if not more, older than his twenty-two years and hardly like a typical freshman. But he was hardly the lone Protestant at the school, since, by 1910, of its approximately five hundred college students, about one hundred were not Catholic. Indeed, anyone who could come up with the $120 yearly tuition fee at the time was welcome at Notre Dame, even if, like Gipp and Rockne, they hadn’t graduated from high school. It was—and was indeed perceived as by larger and far better known colleges and universities such as Michigan—a school for boys from families with limited means.
Gus Dorais, who became Rockne’s roommate and football teammate, said Rockne (like Gipp) was ill at ease during his early days at Notre Dame, when he slept in a single room in Sorin Hall that was not much bigger than most closets. “Don’t forget, he was about four years older than the rest of us at school,” said Dorais, the first in a long line of outstanding quarterbacks at Notre Dame. “He also had kind of a rough edge and certainly was not a genteel character.”
Regarding Rockne’s odd staccato speaking style, Dorais, who was from the small town of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, said years after their Notre Dame days, “His thoughts tumbled out in such bursts that he was inclined to stammer. This was the reason for his machine gun type of oratory later on. But he had trouble becoming a speaker. For a long time, he was always threatening to quit school, for one reason or another, but, of course, he never got around to it.” Rockne came closest to leaving Notre Dame when, during his sophomore year, his father died, but he was encouraged to stay by his mother and his sister.
Not only did Rockne overcome his shyness and come to love Notre Dame, but by the 1920s he had become a much soughtafter speaker, and a very good one, at that. Indeed, his staccato speaking style became a trademark and enhanced his appeal as a speaker. By the 1920s, too, Rockne, in the eyes of many, had become an archetype of a college football coach, with a style that was the envy of other coaches, many of whom would try to emulate the dynamic and creative Norwegian Protestant who would become the face of Notre Dame football.
7
DEADLY FLU PANDEMIC CUTS SHORT ROCKNE’S FIRST SEASON
KNUTE ROCKNE COULD hardly have become Notre Dame’s head football coach at a worse time. When preseason practice began, not only was World War I still being fought in France, but the deadliest flu pandemic in history had spread throughout the globe, infecting about a third of the world’s population, including millions in the United States. Among the least significant developments stemming from the pandemic was a drastic curtailing, and in some cases even a canceling, of the 1918 college football season.
Believed to have originated in the Far East, the flu spread rapidly, and was first detected in the United States at about the same time (March 1918) at Fort Riley, an Army base in Kansas, and in the borough of Queens in New York City. A more virulent strain of the influenza manifested itself in late August by which time millions of people had died on virtually every continent, including more than 20,000 in New York City, then a city of six million, and about 13,000 in Philadelphia. Particularly puzzling was that most of the victims were healthy young adults, rather than infants and the elderly who were usually most vulnerable to outbreaks of influenza. That made it of special concern to high schools and universities, including Notre Dame, which, like many colleges, canceled most of the 1918 football season because of the outbreak of the pandemic. (The deadly disease had been named the Spanish Flu because most of the reports about the flu had come from Spain, a neutral country, during World War I and whose press thus was not hindered by the censorship on the epidemic imposed in most of the countries involved in the war.)
As the epidemic spread into Indiana, the state board of health on October 10 prohibited all public gatherings in the state. By then about eighty cases of Spanish Flu had been reported in South Bend, and downtown movie theaters had closed. Then, during a single day, forty-two people in South Bend died of the disease, including two students and a nun at Notre Dame. By October 25, the flu had claimed eighty-seven lives in South Bend. After abating for a while, the epidemic resurged in early November when more than 750 additional cases of the Spanish Flu were reported in South Bend. By the end of the month, 152 South Bend residents had lost their lives.
Making conditions worse and contributing to the spread of the deadly virus was the closeness of soldiers during the massive troop movements in the United States, in Europe, aboard cramped transport ships, and in their close living quarters. Described by medical experts as the worst medical holocaust in modern history, the pandemic—which began to wane in late 1918—killed more than fifty million people, including more than a half million in the United States while infecting another half million.
As a result of the pandemic, Notre Dame played only five of nine scheduled games during the 1918 football season and just one at home, a contest against a team from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, which was arranged after the season began. For Rockne, the shortness of the season was welcomed since most of the 1917 starting team was gone, either graduated or inducted into the armed forces, including virtually all of the defense, which had allowed only one touchdown the season prior. Fortunately for Rockne, freshmen had been made eligible to play varsity football in 1918, mainly because the military draft had depleted rosters, and the incoming group of freshmen was one of the best Notre Dame had ever had. Seven freshmen would become starters in 1918, including Anderson and Larson; ends Eddie Anderson and Bernie Kirk; tackle Charlie Crowley; quarterback Bill Mohn; and fullback Earl “Curly” Lambeau, who would drop out of Notre Dame before his sophomore year because of a severe case of tonsillitis and in 1919 become a co-founder, player, and coach of the Green Bay Packers.
At Gipp’s suggestion, Larson roomed with him at Sorin Hall—at least occasionally, as Larson was to recall years later. “When we roomed together, George would often come in during the middle of the night, or later, usually after playing cards or shooting pool downtown,” Larson said while working in the Cook County Assessor’s Office in Chicago while he was in his eighties. “Of course I knew he did a lot of gambling, and I’d played cards with him myself. He was an uncanny poker player, the kind who never gave you the slightest hint of what he had. George wasn’t the type who would volunteer personal information, but I once asked him how he was doing at poker and pool, and he told me he had made at least $5,000 the previous year (the equivalent of $50,000 in 2010), and from the looks of things, would top that amount that year we roomed together.”
“He was a helluva card player, one who could deal them off the top, the middle, or the bottom,” Anderson recalled. “He’d win four or five hundred a night playing cards, but sometimes, instead of settling for that, he’d try to double it in craps. Unfortunately, he was a lousy crap shooter—probably the only thing he couldn’t do well. He would make eight or nine passes, but then blow it all on one throw of the dice. But then George always said he preferred poker or pool because you had control over what you were doing. With dice, as he said, it’s all luck. But one thing’s for sure: George made everything he made on his own” In saying that, Anderson no doubt was alluding to his knowledge of some star football players accepting payments from well-to-do alumni. Whether it happened at Notre Dame was never proven. The practice was still prevalent in the twenty-first century.
Gipp’s old schoolmate also remembered Gipp’s talent with a pool cue. “He was the best shooter around Calumet before he even came to Notre Dame, where, even as a kid, he was winning lots of money,” Anderson said. “And he became the best around South Bend, too. He was the classic hustler—although
he didn’t look like one—who would play a stranger for a dollar or two at straight pool and do real bad, but then raise the stakes and clean up at twenty-five or fifty dollars a game. Once in a while, some hotshot players from Chicago would come to South Bend looking for some fresh action, knowing it was a good gambling town. As I was to find out, George would take them on at a hundred dollars a game at places like Hullie and Mike’s. They were crackerjack players who made their living shooting pool, but George would take them almost every time. He’d also go to Elkhart, which is about fifteen miles from South Bend, to play cards on some Friday nights. Elkhart was a railroad town, and Friday was payday, and a lot of the railroad workers liked to play poker, and George knew it. George would go over to Elkhart and make the railroad workers’ paydays his paydays at the poker table,” Anderson said with a laugh.
As for Gipp’s usually pale and sallow complexion, “It was the smoking and the hours he kept,” Anderson said. “If you stayed out all night, night after night, chain-smoking, playing cards, and shooting pool, usually for a lot of money, and hardly getting any sleep, you’d be pale, too. Let’s face it—George didn’t take very good care of himself.”
The evidence also seems to indicate that Gipp liked to drink, sometimes a lot, while playing poker or shooting pool, although none of his teammates interviewed said they ever saw him drunk, contrary to some reports. “From what I saw, George carried his liquor very well,” said Chet Grant, who took the odd path of going from a sportswriter for the South Bend Tribune to a five-foot seven-inch 135-pound backup quarterback for Notre Dame in 1916, 1920, and 1921 (he was a lieutenant in the Army from 1917 until 1919), when he was twenty-nine years old. “He was a gentleman in every way and that included his drinking.”
The Gipper Page 6