6

FOOTBALL’S ODD COUPLE

ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1913, high school dropout George Gipp, then eighteen, read about Notre Dame’s stunning victory over Army in the Daily Mining Gazette. Living a carefree life as a taxi and truck driver, amateur baseball and basketball star, and skilled poker and pool player, Gipp had no particular interest in Notre Dame—still, like tens of thousands, if not millions, of newspaper readers he was surprised at the outcome. He also was delighted to read how the relatively new forward pass was the key to Notre Dame’s victory, since he himself enjoyed throwing forward passes to friends, who marveled at how Gipp could fling the stubby football of the time up to 50 yards.

Because of his passing ability, his speed, and his all-around athleticism, Gipp was in demand by Calumet area semi-pro football teams, and occasionally played both halfback and as a lineman against much older players, some of whom had played on the college level. Gipp more than held his own in such games, as both Hunk Anderson and Ojay Larson were to recall, especially as a swift and elusive hard-to-bring-down runner. Quite often teammates suggested to Gipp that he pursue a football scholarship at Michigan, Notre Dame, or some other big-time football-playing college in the Midwest, where, they felt, he would be more than welcome. Gipp’s automatic response was that, first, he hadn’t graduated from high school, and, second, he had no interest in playing college football.

Like Rockne, his lack of organized football experience and years of work prior to entering Notre Dame was no deterrent to Gipp when he agreed, at Rockne’s suggestion, to go out for football. By the 1918 season, Rockne’s first as head coach, Gipp had established himself as the team’s star player.

Gipp’s dual personality as a football star and a carefree, seemingly fatalistic, hedonist, coupled with his disdain of authority, both in sports and in academic life, begs the question of whether his behavior was a facade or an inexplicable character trait stemming from an early-life trauma. Yet despite his carefree and cavalier attitude at Notre Dame, Gipp never displayed any arrogance or hostility of the type often manifested by many latter-day sports stars, apart from an occasional outburst at a player who he felt had gone out of his way to rough him up. If anything, as a college football player, he was something of a charming rogue—liked and respected by his teammates and by his opponents on the field (as well as those at both the pool and card tables in South Bend and elsewhere), idolized by his fellow students and most of the faculty and staff at Notre Dame, and highly but grudgingly esteemed by Rockne despite his unconventional, even aggravating, off-the-field behavior, which often drove the coach to distraction.

From the beginning, when he was still an assistant, Rockne felt Gipp would be difficult to deal with as a player, and a challenge to him as a coach—which proved to be the case. Even in the quintessential tramp athlete era, many, if indeed not most, coaches would not have tolerated Gipp’s off-campus gambling and his chronic absenteeism from classes, and often practices. Nor would many top administrative officials at most universities. But Rockne feigned ignorance of Gipp’s off-campus activities and allowed him a huge amount of leeway, both because of his great talent as a player and because of the growing bond that had formed between them despite their disparate personalities. He was not about to try to transmogrify Gipp into a more conventional college student, realizing that it would be impossible. Also, Rockne obviously had a vested interest in Gipp, having recognized his greatness from the start, as he was to say some years later. “I felt the thrill that comes to every coach when he knows it is his fate and his responsibility to handle unusual greatness—the perfect performer who comes rarely more than once in a generation.”

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.