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THE RELUCTANT DROPKICKER

THE YEAR WAS 1916, and much of Europe was already engulfed in The Great War. (Decades later, when another worldwide conflict broke out, it would be retroactively renamed World War I.) To hundreds of young American men, the closest thing to warfare at the time was the country’s most popular team sport after major league baseball—college football. Typifying the growing popularity of the game, crowds of up to seventy thousand were common at the two-year-old Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut, home of the perennial national powerhouse Yale Bulldogs, among the first schools to start playing football (or at least an early, much rougher, version of the game) in the 1870s. Professional football offered virtually no opposition at the time, with the formation of the National Football League six years away, and the pro game relegated for the most part to relatively small cities in Ohio and Indiana where teams of part-time players performed before paltry crowds for around twenty-five dollars a game. Thus, college football had a virtual monopoly on the sport on the national level in the fall. Although the nation’s best teams were primarily in the Northeast, the sport was beginning to gain strength elsewhere, particularly in the Midwest and the South.

Baseball, though, remained the so-called “national pastime.” Among the college athletes who preferred the game was George Gipp, who in September 1916 enrolled at a small school in northwestern Indiana, the University of Notre Dame, to play baseball and not football, which he had not played in high school and had scant interest. Yet on November 11, 1916, Gipp stood in a huddle wearing the uniform of the Notre Dame freshman football team on a snowy and cold day in Kalamazoo, Michigan, having been convinced by the varsity team’s assistant coach, Knute Rockne, one month earlier to go out for a game he had never played on an organized level. Like the twenty-one-year-old Gipp, Rockne had been a late bloomer in the sport, having played very little football in high school—in his case because he was too small and too light—and had not enrolled at Notre Dame until he was twenty-two years old. But Rockne had gone on to become a star end and helped popularize the forward pass as a result of his play during a stunning upset of a powerful Army team at West Point in 1913, in the first game between the two schools.

By late in the 1916 season, amid a group of scholarship players who had been football stars in high school, the tall and slender Gipp had in a month’s time established himself as the best player on the freshman team in scrimmages with the varsity. Though he’d come out for the team late and lacked experience, Gipp’s leadership qualities soon manifested themselves and endeared him to his teammates, who elected him captain. He did not disappoint while establishing a reputation as a free spirit, unimpressed with his own talents and those of his opponents. A triple-threat halfback, he could run, pass, and kick as well as anyone on the Notre Dame varsity, with whom he was prohibited from playing because the rules of the day restricted freshmen to playing with other first-year student athletes.

With about two minutes remaining in the freshman team’s second game against Western State Normal (now Western Michigan University) and the score tied 7-7, Notre Dame was positioned on its own 38-yard line facing a fourth down with about 15 yards to go for a first down. The situation obviously called for a punt.

“Punt it, George,” quarterback Frank Thomas barked, relaying an order from the team’s head coach, Freeman Fitzgerald, who stood like a sentry on the sidelines in front of the Notre Dame bench.

“Why settle for a tie, Frank?” Gipp asked a bemused Thomas in the huddle. “Let me try a dropkick. I’m sure I can make it.”

Gipp’s teammates smiled at their star halfback’s suggestion, but Thomas did not.

“Just punt the ball, that’s it,” he said firmly, whereupon Notre Dame went into its punt formation.

Taking the subsequent high snap from center at his own 38-yard line, Gipp dropped the ball to the ground and then, with a powerful thrust of his right leg, sent a dropkick straight down the middle of the field to the astonishment of his teammates, their opponents, the coaches of both teams, the officials and the crowd of around 1,000 spectators. Onward the ball sailed, low and end over end until, finally, it cleared the crossbar 62 yards from the scrimmage line to make it the second longest field goal ever kicked in a college football game1. Since Gipp was positioned seven yards behind the scrimmage line, on the Notre Dame 31, the ball actually had traveled sixty-nine yards, which is how it would be recorded today when field goals are measured from the point at which they were kicked.

“I had caught a couple of 50-yard punts by Gipp during the game, so I was plenty far back,” said Walter Olsen, a safety who ran back punts for Western State Normal. “But this time, to my surprise, the ball sailed over my head and then over the crossbar for three points. I couldn’t believe it.”

Olsen wasn’t the only disbeliever. Sprinting down the field to cover what he believed would be a punt, Notre Dame end Dave Hayes thought Olsen was trying to fake him out when the Kalamazoo safety turned his head. Olsen was even more confused when he heard a sudden and collective crowd cheer.

“What happened?” Hayes asked.

“The son-of-a-gun kicked a field goal,” replied an incredulous Olsen.

Upfield, Gipp was engulfed by his teammates for his improbable field goal, which would turn out to be decisive in a 10-7 Notre Dame victory, its second in a row.

Even though the field goal occurred in a freshman game, the Associated Press put an account of Gipp’s kick on its wires throughout the country. Hearing about Gipp’s dazzling kick—and how it was accomplished in defiance of his coach and quarterback—Knute Rockne, the chemistry assistant and assistant varsity football coach who had strongly suggested that a reluctant Gipp suit up for football, felt more than a sense of satisfaction when told about it by varsity coach Jesse Harper that night. Though he had barely gotten to know Gipp, Rockne, who at twenty-eight was only seven years older than his protégé, also felt that it very likely would not be the first act of disobedience on a football field, or elsewhere, by the unlikely halfback from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Relatively tall for the era at six feet and weighing around 175 pounds, about normal for a running back at the time, Gipp, as a runner, had already showed Rockne, in the freshman team’s scrimmages against the varsity, that he was a marvel of speed, balance, and grace, who could slither through a defensive line with ease or streak around end. Rockne marveled at how the raw but talented running back utilized his blockers masterfully.

“Take 50 to the inside!” he would call out to a blocker in front of him. Or to another blocker he would bark out, “Get 62!” Then, once in the open field and on his own, he became almost impossible to get a hand on as he dodged, twisted, and cut. He was able to outrun almost every defensive back on the varsity, a team that would go undefeated in nine games in 1916. Rockne also marveled at Gipp’s prudent tendency to run out of bounds when he knew he had no chance of making additional yardage, a rare technique at the time, feeling, correctly, that it was not worth risking injury.

Turning to Harper after one particularly dazzling run by Gipp, Rockne said, “Jesse, he’s going to be something special.”

A week after the dramatic victory over Western State Normal, the Notre Dame freshman team closed out its three-game season by losing to Kalamazoo College, 34-7, with Gipp accounting for the visitors’ only touchdown on a 65-yard run.

Even by the standards of tramp athletes who often moved from school to school to play football before, during, and after World War I, George Gipp was in a class of his own as a freshman student at Notre Dame. For most of the football gypsies of the era, the sole reason for being at a university was to play football; they usually dropped out of school after the last game of the season, having attended few, if any, classes. Gipp, by contrast, was bright and capable of doing his course work at the small Catholic school eighty-five miles east of Chicago and actually did attend classes, albeit somewhat erratically. Like many college football players, Gipp was about three or four years older than most freshmen at Notre Dame, whose collegiate student body of about five hundred was predominantly made up of young Catholic men from families of modest means who were able to come up with the yearly tuition of $120. Notre Dame tried to help by offering jobs to needy students, but could offer little more, since the school had virtually no endowment. “We here at Notre Dame have a living endowment,” the school’s president, John W. Cavanaugh, often said, meaning that the university relied heavily on donations from some of its alumni. In addition to the college students, Notre Dame, from the time of its founding, included male elementary students from grades one through eight, and a four-year preparatory school. If they didn’t share the same classrooms, all of the students—from, roughly, the ages of six (the so-called “minims”) into the twenties—did share the same sprawling campus, an egalitarian concept that George Gipp and many other collegians did not particularly appreciate any more than that Notre Dame was an exclusively male province.

It was not uncommon in those days for outstanding football players to work for several years after leaving high school while playing amateur or semi-professional football until—bigger, stronger, and invariably better—they were lured to play on the college level, even though not many were cut out to be college students. Gipp’s situation, though, was different, since he had not played football in high school and had played it only rarely with some Calumet area semi-pro teams. Possessing great speed, uncanny balance, natural athleticism, and the supreme confidence he seemed to have in any athletic endeavor he stood out as a running back, passer, and kicker nonetheless.

Many of the tramp athletes were lured to other universities by unscrupulous coaches and well-heeled boosters, in some cases even after they already had played four years of college football and then were paid to play football. The United States Military Academy was one of the worse offenders in its recruiting, often bringing in outstanding players who already had played football for up to four years at other schools. In an era when there was no central watchdog organization like the National Collegiate Athletic Association, it was usually difficult to track the provenance of school-jumping football players, a few of whom, some coaches claimed, wound up at Notre Dame, although that was never determined. Many of the tramp athletes, along with more than a few legitimate college players who confined themselves to one school, also played with professional or semi-pro teams on Sundays, the day after college games, under assumed names (as Gipp would do on at least one occasion) and often with the knowledge of their coaches. Rockne had not only done so as a player but he had also coached several professional teams in the South Bend area. Though, like Gipp, he had never graduated from high school, Rockne still found the time—and had the inclination—to be an exemplary college student, graduating with an A average in 1914 after starring in Notre Dame’s upset of Army the previous fall. By then, because of Notre Dame’s propensity to schedule teams from as far off as Army, Penn State, and Syracuse in the East, South Dakota and Nebraska in the Northwest, and Texas and Rice in the Southwest, many sportswriters called the team the Ramblers, Hoosiers, Catholics, Westerners (when they ventured East), and even the Harps, Micks, Hibernians, and Papists—though not yet the Fighting Irish.

Largely because of the age discrepancy and a maturity that belied his twenty-one years, Gipp, as a freshman, felt out of place and uncomfortable on the Notre Dame campus. From the time he arrived, he was bored and pretty much a loner who did not go out of his way to make friends at Brownson Hall, where freshmen were housed and which was one of the two wings on the administration building renowned for the golden dome atop it. During his first year, he took a full load of courses—English, biology, history, political science, and German—and earned his room and board waiting tables, a task that, according to students he served, he performed well and in a friendly fashion. But boredom soon set in, as Gipp recounted in a letter to a friend in his hometown of Laurium, Michigan. “I got here alright and got away with a pretty good start,” he wrote, “but I’m in a mood tonight where I’d like to go straight up. I want to come and go as I please. Sometimes I wonder what I’m here for.” The reference to go “straight up” apparently was an allusion to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Gipp went on to say, “I’d like to give up and quit right now, chuck everything and go anywhere.”

Gipp’s letter reflected his difficulty in adjusting to a structured way of living, especially among much younger, and less mature, college students. Subsequent letters also manifested his discomfort, even though by then he had established himself as a burgeoning football star. This seemed to have given him little satisfaction. “Becoming in his freshman year a hero of campus talk is enough to inflate any youngster’s head,” Rockne was to write years later, “but this boy Gipp had the superb personal policy of being indifferent to everything.” At twenty-one years of age, Gipp, of course, was hardly a “boy,” but rather a street-smart and somewhat cynical young man who, having spent much of his last five years associating with men older than him playing cards and pocket billiards for money, was, not surprisingly, uncomfortable amid much younger freshmen both in his dormitory and during his classes. Making him all the more uncomfortable was the composition of the Notre Dame’s unusual student body, which ranged from five-year-old first graders to twenty-five-yearold—and even older—college students, all of whom shared the same campus, if not the same classrooms and dormitories.

Gipp’s first roommate, Elwin Moore, was hardly one to help Gipp assimilate to college life or convince him to savor his success as a football star. Nicknamed “Dope” because of his encyclopedic knowledge of sports statistics (and not because he was short on intelligence), Moore also enjoyed the nightlife in South Bend more than he did his studies. A polished three-cushion billiards player, he taught Gipp the finer points of the game. Because of his skill in straight pool, an easier game that he had mastered as a boy and young man in the Calumet area, Gipp soon became accomplished at three-cushion billiards, which does not require players to deposit balls in the six pockets of a conventional pool table. By late in the first semester in 1916, Gipp, already tired of campus life and with few friends, was spending much of his time around pool tables in downtown South Bend, then one of the major manufacturing centers in the Midwest, where bars, restaurants, cigar stores, and even pharmacies often served as hosts for high-stakes billiard and poker games and, in later years, speakeasies in the rear. Though South Bend, like much of Indiana, had gone dry well before the Prohibition amendment was ratified in 1919, Gipp, who enjoyed a drink and the convivial atmosphere of a pool hall or a poker table far more than that of a campus dormitory, soon realized it was his kind of town.