Largely because of that scare, Rockne, at his doctors’ insistence, remained in South Bend during Notre Dame’s last two games. The Irish beat Northwestern 26-6 in Evanston, Illinois, then traveled to New York to face Army. With Tom Lieb at the helm for the fourth time, Notre Dame beat Army at Yankee Stadium, 7-0, on a 96-yard interception return by reserve halfback and track team sprinter Jack Elder, who picked off a pass from the Cadets’ Chris Cagle in the second quarter and streaked down the right sideline untouched into the end zone. As he did, Rockne, surrounded by some old South Bend friends and listening to Graham McNamee’s rousing radio call of Elder’s run at his home, yelled, “That’s it, he’ll go all the way.”
Highlighted by outstanding defensive play by both teams, the game was described, somewhat hyperbolically, by Robert Kelley of The New York Times as “one of the best football games of history.” Primarily, it was a very good defensive struggle, but hardly “one of the best” ever. Mainly because of the cold and windy weather, neither team was able to complete a pass, with Army missing all seven of its throws, and the Irish failing to connect on any of Frank Carideo’s passes. Despite the frigid conditions and the fierce hitting throughout by both sides, Army played the entire game without a substitute—not unusual at the time, but certainly hard on the eleven starters given the subfreezing weather—while Notre Dame used seven substitutes. Notre Dame’s All-American left guard Jack Cannon was particularly outstanding on defense, playing the entire sixty minutes, as he always did, without a helmet or even a cap to keep his head warm on that frigid afternoon.
Before the game, Rockne delivered a pep talk via telephone to his players from his home in South Bend, stressing once more how significant a victory over Army was to Notre Dame, its students, alumni, and its growing legion of fans. Whether it had a bearing on the outcome is difficult to judge, but it’s more than possible that the coach’s illness, and his long-distance pep talk, motivated the team. After the game, Rockne described the season as the toughest one his teams had ever endured and indicated that he might lighten Notre Dame’s schedule somewhat in the future. “My boys were splendid,” he said. “Not only today, but during the whole season.”
Even though the Black Friday stock market crash was only a month old, a standing-room-only crowd of an estimated 85,000 packed Yankee Stadium for the game, played on a frozen field with the temperature about five degrees above zero. In all, West Point officials said, more than 200,000 people had applied for tickets to the game. Among those in the celebrity-studded, albeit frozen, crowd were Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen (Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden, Harry Stuhldreher, and Don Miller); New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith; New York City’s flamboyant mayor, Jimmy Walker; Police Commissioner Grover Whalen; movie impresario Samuel Goldwyn; Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert and his star player, Babe Ruth; famed football coaches Pop Warner, Tad Jones, Bob Zuppke, Bill Roper, and Chick Meehan; congressman and eventual legendary New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia; and a half dozen Army generals, including the Chief of Staff Charles Summerall.
In a complete turnaround from the disappointing 1928 season, the 1929 Irish team had gone undefeated—the fourth time a Rockne team had done so—and had turned a profit of almost $545,000, the largest ever, most of which went into the school’s general fund. Still, not everyone at Notre Dame was happy with the success of the football team. Some administrators and faculty members still thought that the school’s growth and recognition had been entirely predicated on its football accomplishments—which was true—and worried that many, if not most, people continued to perceive Notre Dame as a football factory, and not as the strong educational institution it had become, attracting outstanding students of diverse ethnic backgrounds from throughout the country.
That Rockne had skirted the normal entrance process and academic admission standards to acquire some players was undeniable. His predecessor and close friend, Jesse Harper, was to say years later, “I don’t want to knock Rockne in any way, but he was a football man first and foremost, and he liked to win with the best possible squads.” Harper was a highly literate coach who kept a close eye on the academic progress of his players, including George Gipp in 1917, his first varsity season. “At times, Rockne was a little too eager. He’d recruit from other schools’ freshmen teams,” Harper said, “or he would let a player slough off on his studies just to be a better football player.”
Rockne never admitted he did so, though he kept George Gipp on the football team when he rarely went to class, but no doubt felt that he was justified in bending the rules since most of the greatest coaches of his era—Amos Alonzo Stagg, Fielding Yost, Pop Warner, and Bob Zuppke, among others—were doing the same, if not worse. Trying to rationalize his methods even further, Rockne felt he had to keep up with those coaching luminaries to achieve the success he had had over the last decade, not only in winning football games, but in focusing attention on Notre Dame to the point of making it a nationally known university.
One thing Rockne said that he never did, however, was visit a prospective player at his home while he was in high school. Rockne felt that if he recruited a player, the player would expect to play, even though he might not eventually cut it and be as good as Rockne thought he was and thus not play much, if at all. “I wouldn’t ever want to find myself in that situation,” he said, “so I primarily rely on my former players and other alumni to recommend good players, and the system has always worked.” That was remarkable if indeed Rockne, once again, wasn’t stretching the truth.
By the mid-1920s some coaches and sportswriters began to suggest that Rockne had lured some players to Notre Dame who either hadn’t graduated from high school—which, of course, neither he nor George Gipp had—or had already played at other colleges before enrolling at Notre Dame. In some cases the latter charges turned out to be true, and the Notre Dame faculty board, which theoretically controlled the athletic department, if not Rockne, saw to it that a number of such players were forced to leave school. As to allegations of overemphasis of football by Notre Dame and some other schools, Rockne once said, “Has anyone ever defined overemphasis? They talk about football and its evils, yet they don’t offer any clear-cut analysis of their charges. They do it to get publicity, and you can’t blame them for that, but let’s stop this scramble for the front page and hiding behind the skirts of fighting for football purity.” It was a mantra Rockne would repeat often in his criticism of what he called misguided “reformers.”
19
EVEN BETTER THAN THE HORSEMEN
AS GOOD AS 1929 had been, with nine victories, all on the road, 1930 portended to be even better for Knute Rockne and a team that returned virtually intact from the previous unbeaten season. Notre Dame would play its toughest schedule ever, and four of the ten games would be played on campus in the new 54,400-seat concrete stadium on whose every detail Rockne had been consulted. New opponents would include Southern Methodist and Pennsylvania, and for the first time the Irish would play Army outside of New York state—at Soldier Field in Chicago.
In the eyes of many students and players, past and present, the stadium, still standing today although expanded in 1997 to seat slightly over 80,000 spectators, would be a monument to Rockne. Largely because of his zealousness as a coach and fervent apostle of Notre Dame football, he had watched home game crowds grow from around 3,000 when he was a player from 1911 through 1913 to more than 25,000 at Cartier Field, and had lobbied steadfastly for a new stadium in recent years.
Both because Rockne had become the face of Notre Dame football and the endearment with which he was held by students and alumni, groups representing both of those factions had pushed to have the stadium named for the man whose teams had made a little-known, small, Catholic university in the Midwest famous throughout the land and even abroad. Rockne resisted those efforts, however, insisting that it be named Notre Dame Stadium, largely, it is believed, because he thought that naming the stadium for him would raise the specter of overemphasis
on football and glorify, if indeed not sanctify, Rockne, to the chagrin of the school’s administration. Remarkably, the stadium had been built in less than a year for $750,000, far less than the approximately $2 million that had been spent to build new stadiums at both Ohio State and Pittsburgh. By contrast, the addition of about 21,000 seats in 1997 cost $50 million. Making the stadium’s construction all the more remarkable was that the stadium was built in just four months, with virtually all of the work done by a crew of 500 following the Wall Street collapse the previous October. Remarkable, too, was the fact that the stadium had been financed by selling premium seats in advance and also selling all of the leased boxes for ten-year periods, along with giving those buyers first shot at premium seats at Notre Dame road games over the next ten years.
Though still troubled by phlebitis, Rockne’s condition was much improved by the time spring practice began in March 1930. Rockne and his wife had spent a quiescent six weeks in Miami, most of it on the beach, but Rockne, rather than enjoy his time in the sun, became depressed over his phlebitis, which was painful at times and limited his mobility. A brief relapse while he was in Florida depressed him all the more and convinced his doctors to send him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he stayed for two weeks. By then swelling had also developed in Rockne’s left leg, and doctors told him that henceforth he would have to have both legs bound with rubber bandages. By summer his condition had improved considerably in time for his first football camp on the Notre Dame campus, from which the university, like Rockne, benefited financially.
Rockne had his entire starting backfield from the 1929 team returning, along with a solid line that included the remarkably talented 148-pound guard Bert Metzger, who would emerge as an All-American in 1930. Among those who had graduated was Jack Cannon, the bareheaded guard who had eschewed a helmet for three seasons without any serious consequences and who had been named an All-American (along with tackle Ted Twomey and quarterback Frank Carideo). Meanwhile, the shuttle involving former Notre Dame teammates Hunk Anderson and Tom Lieb continued. Anderson, who had left after the 1928 season to become head coach at St. Louis University, returned as an assistant coach after St. Louis decided to deemphasize football, while Lieb left again to become the head coach at Loyola of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount). Rockne also added three other assistants, including Jack Chevigny, one of the heroes of the 1928 “win one for the Gipper” Army game. That gave Rockne four assistant coaches, three more than he had when he became head coach in 1918, and the same number as that of most teams in the Big Ten. In addition, by 1930, the football team had a doctor accompany it on all road trips, and a full-time trainer in Eugene “Scrap Iron” Young. Young’s route to becoming a trainer was serendipitous. As a 130-pound football prospect in 1924, Young had been badly hurt, and, as a reward for his enthusiasm and grit, Rockne offered to have him stick around as a part-time trainer. Until then, and even most of the time thereafter, Rockne also served as the team trainer, applying his own concoction of liniment, taping and bandaging players, and examining them for injuries, at which he was, according to his players, remarkably accurate in his diagnoses.
“Rock read a lot of medical books and really knew what he was doing,” said Young. “He could feel a player’s injured knee and tell right away whether he had torn or otherwise injured a ligament or cartilage. Even doctors were amazed at how much he knew. One doctor, after spending quite a bit of time with Rock, later asked me what medical school he had gone to. He couldn’t believe it when I told him he hadn’t gone to any medical school.”
By the fall of 1930, Rockne was the father of four children—the oldest fifteen and the youngest four—and had a salary of $10,000 a year, $6,500 more than when he became the head coach in 1918. He also was doing well financially as a motivational speaker, who, during the off season, when healthy, delivered as many as three talks a week, a few for as much as $500. He also received about $3,000 a year for his syndicated newspaper column, which he wrote, or, more correctly had ghost-written by Christy Walsh, during the football season. Additional income came from his summer football camps and for his work, mostly speaking engagements for Studebaker. It’s unlikely that any other football coach was doing as well financially or, for that matter, as a coach.
During the last week of preseason practice, Rockne lost both his starting tackles—eventual Irish coach Elmer Layden and Dick Donoghue—for the season as a result of injuries, but because of his great depth was able to replace them with players capable of starting for almost any other college team. But then, by 1930, Notre Dame had a varsity squad of 110 players, most of whom would never play so much as a down. That was a testament to the allure of Notre Dame for high school football players.
Despite good weather, the opening game at Notre Dame Stadium on October 4 attracted just under 15,000 spectators, who could have all fit comfortably in the wooden grandstand at thirty-five-year-old Cartier Field, whose sod had been transported to the new stadium. On its opening drive, Southern Methodist needed only four plays, all passes, to score. But Joe Savoldi ran back the ensuing kickoff 98 yards to tie the score. Frank Carideo later returned a punt 48 yards for another Irish touchdown, only to have SMU respond with four straight completed passes, the last one good for a touchdown that drew the Mustangs even at halftime. Notre Dame finally pulled ahead for good in the third period on a touchdown pass from Carideo to end Ed Kosty. During that second half, Carideo, one of Notre Dame’s greatest punters, repeatedly kept SMU bottled up deep in its own territory on “coffin-corner” punts, which invariably went out of bounds inside the Mustangs’ 10-yard line. Carideo’s finely angled punts became a lost art in later years when most punters—and their coaches—became satisfied to kick into the end zone, which gives an opponent the ball on the 20-yard line, or have a punter boot the ball high, but not into the end zone, in the hope that the receiver would call for a fair catch or that a defensive player would get downfield fast enough to tackle the kicker or down the punt somewhere inside the 20-yard-line.
The official dedication of the new stadium occurred the following Saturday when more than 40,000 spectators, including hundreds of former players, some of them Rockne’s teammates, along with Rockne’s predecessor, Jesse Harper, were on hand for Notre Dame’s game against Navy. The night before, an estimated crowd of almost 20,000 people, including students, alumni, and South Benders, had turned out at the stadium for the dedication ceremony, which followed a torchlight parade from downtown South Bend. The ceremony included fireworks and the repeated playing by the university band of the “Notre Dame Victory March,” which by the 1940s would rank with the “Star Spangled Banner,” “God Bless America,” and “White Christmas” as the country’s best-known songs. Speakers included an emotional Rockne, who, in his talk, expressed his love for Notre Dame, his admiration and affection for his players over the years, and his gratitude to university administrators for agreeing to build the concrete oval. University President Charles O’Donnell, an accomplished poet and writer and perhaps the school’s most intellectual administrator, devoted much of his talk to George Gipp, extolling the enigmatic Gipp by calling him Notre Dame’s “spiritual guardian” and in effect the one mainly responsible for the stadium. That was a stretch, to say the least, and, much as he cared about Gipp, it must have bothered Rockne, who more than anyone else had pushed for a new stadium for years. Not surprisingly, Father O’Donnell also refrained from so much as alluding to Gipp’s egregious academic performance, his poor class attendance, his expulsion when he was a junior, and his dubious off-campus lifestyle. The university president also read a panegyric poem by a Notre Dame student that referred to Gipp’s putative deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Indeed, the tribute to “The Gipper” was so effusive that, at times, it seemed that the ghost of Gipp would emerge in a nimbus at midfield and proceed to dropkick several footballs over both goalposts.
Unlike the opening game against Southern Methodist, which ended 20-14, the contest against Navy was one-sided, with
the Irish winning, 26-2, as Joe Savoldi scored three touchdowns. By now, after a successful season in 1929, Savoldi appeared on his way to an All-American berth. A bruising runner who had been born in Milan, Italy, the five-foot ten-inch Savoldi was hardly a quick study and had a tendency to forget signals and plays. Fortunately, in Carideo he had a quarterback who could speak Italian, in which Savoldi was fluent. In the game against Pittsburgh in 1930, Savoldi repeatedly was hit hard by a Panther tackle before he could get past the line of scrimmage, even after Carideo began to repeat signals to Savoldi in Italian. Finally, approaching the line of scrimmage, Carideo called out to the Pittsburgh linemen, “Any good Italianos here?” Whereupon the tackle who had been plaguing Savoldi raised his hand. “Thanks,” replied Carideo who went back to calling signals to Savoldi in English. It hardly mattered. Pittsburgh had finished undefeated in 1929 and was expected to be in contention for the national championship again in 1930, but Notre Dame overwhelmed the Panthers by scoring 35 unanswered points in the first half, and then after Rockne had used reserves throughout the second half, gave up 19 points in winning, 35-19, before a capacity crowd of 70,000 in Pitt’s new stadium The next three home games, easy victories over Carnegie Tech, Indiana, and Drake, drew disappointingly small crowds of 30,000, 11,000, and 10,000. A few Notre Dame economics professors and some sportswriters attributed the small Indiana crowd, in particular, to the first full year of what became the Great Depression, which had a severe impact on industrial South Bend. But three of the final four road games drew huge crowds. The first, after Pittsburgh, was played at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, where a capacity gathering of 73,000 turned out for Notre Dame’s first ever game against Penn. For Marty Brill, the right halfback who had transferred to Notre Dame after his sophomore year because of a lack of playing time with the Quakers, it was a homecoming, and he made the most of it. Used primarily as a blocking backup until the Penn game, Brill, the son of a prominent Philadelphia industrialist (who was in attendance along with other family members), scored three touchdowns on runs of 66, 36, and 25 yards as the Irish romped, 60-20. As Grantland Rice put it in his account of the game, “Notre Dame’s first team actually beat Penn 43-0 in 30 minutes of play.” That was an allusion to Rockne pulling almost all of his starters after taking an insurmountable first-half lead. Rice, seeming to acknowledge the superiority of that Notre Dame backfield to the group that he had immortalized six years before, went on to write, “Rockne and Notre Dame passed on far beyond the Four Horsemen. With Carideo, Brill, Savoldi, and Schwartz, they put on a combination of four antelopes, four charging buffaloes, and four eels.”
The Gipper Page 21