11

GIPP’S BREAKOUT SEASON

IN ADDITION TO being the year the United States welcomed home most of its war veterans, 1919 was momentous for a number of other reasons: jobs were scarce and thus thousands of returning vets decided to attend college; the U.S. Senate blocked President Woodrow Wilson’s effort to have the United States join the new League of Nations, which Wilson had helped establish; the Prohibition amendment was ratified, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages throughout the nation at a time when many veterans were looking forward to their first beer in a long while; women finally won the right to vote, starting in 1920; Jack Dempsey knocked out Jess Willard to win the world heavyweight championship; Sir Barton became the first thoroughbred to win racing’s Triple Crown; Babe Ruth, in his last season with the Boston Red Sox, hit more home runs than six of the other seven teams in the American League; and eight members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team were accused of conspiring to throw that year’s World Series to the Cincinnati Reds and were later banned from the major leagues for life.

It was also the year that Father Cavanaugh relinquished the presidency at Notre Dame, which he had held since 1905. That was not necessarily good news for Knute Rockne, since Cavanaugh encouraged the growth of the Notre Dame football program because of the publicity it gave the school, while his successor, Father James Burns, although a former Notre Dame baseball player, was wary about the expansion of the school’s varsity sports programs and more concerned about the university’s academic reputation.

Father Burns, who had attended Cornell, Harvard, and Catholic University, and was the first Notre Dame president with a doctorate, also was confronted with a monumental housing problem, largely owing to an influx of several hundred war veterans, which was so severe that the university sought through newspaper advertisements to place around 500 students in off-campus rooms, an effort that proved successful. For many veterans going to college was a logical option because of the paucity of jobs as the country’s economy soured. Unlike after World War II, there was no GI Bill, whereby the government paid for most if indeed not all of a veteran’s college tuition. But at Notre Dame, tuition, along with room and board, remained relatively cheap—$120 a year for tuition, $350 for meals in the campus dining room, and from thirty to fifty dollars for a shared room. For those needing financial assistance, there were usually ample campus jobs. For Gipp, after a very brief stint as a campus waiter during the beginning of his freshman year, he more than covered school expenses with his gambling earnings in downtown South Bend.

For returning lettermen, including those who had served in the military, and promising recruits, a plenitude of scholarships or financial aid were available, although players had to work during the off season for their room and board and other necessary expenses. From the military, Rockne welcomed back such monogram winners as Slip Madigan, Joe Brandy, Frank Coughlin, Walter Miller, Dave Hayes, Fritz Slackford, Grover Malone, and Cy Degree, most of whom would become starters. Among the newcomers was twenty-three-year-old George Trafton, an Army veteran and an outstanding center who would only last one season because of his refusal to heed Rockne’s order that he stop playing semi-pro football on Sundays. Trafton, nicknamed “the Beast” and once described by Red Grange as “the toughest, meanest, and most ornery critter alive,” went on to become a charter member of the Chicago Bears for whom he played ten years after two seasons with the Bears’ predecessor, the Decatur Staleys. Trafton was discovered by Rockne, who spent part of the war scouting service football teams.

Also discovered and then recruited by Rockne while playing for a service team was another lineman, Lawrence “Buck” Shaw, who after three years at Notre Dame later went on to be a head coach for four years in the All-America Football Conference and then eight years in the NFL. Others on the thirty-five-man squad were halfbacks Johnny Mohardt—a remarkable athlete and scholar who would later play five games for the Detroit Tigers of baseball’s American League and five years with the Chicago Bears of the National Football League before attending medical school and becoming a physician—and Cy Kasper. Like Rockne, Mohardt and Kapser were products of Notre Dame’s inter-hall football league, an intramural competition among the university’s six residence halls, some of which had squads of as many as forty players. Most of the hall teams, whose games were played on Sundays, were coached by varsity players, and both Mohardt and Kasper had been recommended to Rockne by members of the varsity—as Rockne had been recommended to Shorty Longman by the Brownson coach at the time, Joe Collins, a varsity end. Rockne knew from firsthand experience how good some of the inter-hall teams were. In addition to providing players for the varsity, some of the inter-hall squads played, and beat, some small university teams in Indiana and Michigan. Missing from the 1919 squad, though, was a key player, center Ojay Larson. Larson had dropped out of school for a year because of a family situation in Calumet, but would return in 1920.

While he was particularly fond of the war veterans, Rockne also found that his bombastic rah-rah pep talks did not go over well with most of them. “I could [see] how some of them would smile when I launched into halftime talk, and so I had to change my approach to a certain degree,” said Rockne, who realized that to many of the veterans on the team, football paled in significance to wartime experiences they had endured and that to try to equate a football game to action on a battlefield was absurd.

For the most part, there appeared to be no resentment generated by the war veterans toward players who, although of draft age, did not serve in the military. However, there was one unpleasant exchange that involved Gipp and Grover Malone, who had spent two years in the Army. It happened after a practice when Gipp picked up a towel that Malone insisted was his. When Gipp, claiming the towel actually belonged to him, refused to give it to Malone, Malone called Gipp a “slacker,” a term usually used to denote someone who had gone out of their way to avoid going into service or even serving in Notre Dame’s Student Army Training Corps. While Gipp somehow had avoided induction when called by his Michigan draft board during the summer of 1917, he subsequently was rejected by both his draft board and by the SATC. As a result of the towel incident, Gipp and Malone did not speak to one another for at least several weeks, if indeed not for the rest of the season.

For the second straight year, Gipp moved into Sorin Hall, this time to room with teammates George Fitzpatrick, a backup halfback just back from two years of military service, and Arthur “Dutch” Bergman, a swift 160-pound halfback whose brother, Alfred, was also a star halfback and Rockne’s teammate. As was the case at most colleges of the era, football players tended to room together, a practice that was not always academically beneficial and was discontinued by many universities in later years, although many continued to do it into the twenty-first century. As both of Gipp’s former roommates, Walter Miller and Elwin “Dope” Moore, had found out, he spent more nights in downtown South Bend than he did on campus. Of course that was also true of Moore, who introduced Gipp to Hullie and Mike’s and some of the other more popular pool and poker hangouts in South Bend, and who was perhaps the most pernicious influence Gipp was to encounter at Notre Dame.

By the fall of 1919 Gipp seemed to have become enamored with Notre Dame, its beautiful campus, the signature golden dome atop what is now the university’s administration building, the school’s struggle for recognition and respect, its growing sports traditions, its successful football program, and, of course, its head football coach, who tolerated, or rationalized, his nocturnal gambling in downtown South Bend, his haphazard academic record, and his chronic absences from classes and practices. Rockne was heartened, though, when, for the 1919-20 academic year, Gipp enrolled in Notre Dame’s school of law and signed up for eight courses, seven of them law courses, although he was not studying for a law degree, which was not uncommon at the time. Well aware of Gipp’s innate intelligence, his deep, soothing baritone voice, and his articulate way of expressing himself, Rockne said during the fall of 1919, “If he puts his mind to it, George could become one of the best lawyers in the country.” But once again, Gipp rarely showed up for classes and received only three grades for the first quarter, none for the second or third, and two for the fourth. Moreover, he would spend even more time downtown than he had during his first three years at Notre Dame, making himself something of a local legend at pool tables at Hullie and Mike’s, Goldie Mann’s, the Hotel Oliver, in nearby Elkhart, and as far away as Chicago.

Gipp’s skill as a billiards player was attracting him as much, if not more, attention among billiard fans in South Bend—especially those who bet on him to win a match—than his feats on the football field. Good looking, relatively clean-cut, and soft-spoken, Gipp did not project the image of a pool hustler, but, at times, he was, and won a lot of money in the process. He was more “Fast Eddie” Felson in the movie The Hustler than he was Minnesota Fats, his archrival in the film that starred Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. Gipp’s gambling routine, which included heavy smoking—about three packs a day, according to Hunk Anderson—and drinking and not much sleep, also was catching up with him, leaving him with sunken cheeks, an unhealthy looking pallor, and a hacking cough. Rockne must have noticed it, but if he ever brought it up with his transcendent star halfback, neither he nor Gipp ever said. And even if he did, given Gipp’s diffident attitude and rebellious nature, it’s unlikely that it would have prompted Gipp to change his lifestyle.

For all of his nightlife gambling, smoking, and drinking, and, some say, womanizing, Gipp somehow did not seem to let any or all of his vices affect his performance as a football player. Nor did the fact that Rockne indulged Gipp’s frequent absences from both classes and practices have any effect on the team’s morale, mainly because Gipp was well-liked by his teammates who knew from experience that he would perform and demonstrate leadership during Notre Dame’s games. Even though he seemed to gamble more and sleep less during the 1919-20 academic year, Gipp had his best season yet in 1919, when Notre Dame won all nine of its games.

The opening game, at home against Kalamazoo, was a portent of things to come from Gipp. Generally low-key in his demeanor, Gipp surprised the standing-room crowd of more than 5,000 at Cartier Field by walking to midfield before the game with two footballs. He then turned to face one goal post and booted a 50-yard dropkick through the uprights as the crowd cheered. Gipp then turned around and sent another dropkick between the opposing goalposts. As he walked off the field toward the Notre Dame bench, the crowd gave him a thunderous ovation. They would cheer him even louder during the game. Despite his 62-yard field goal as a freshman, Gipp had attempted few field goals since joining the Notre Dame varsity in 1917, mainly, no doubt, because both Harper and Rockne eschewed field goal attempts and always went for touchdowns once Notre Dame was within 25 yards of an opponent’s goal line.

Deciding to scout Nebraska, which would be Notre Dame’s third opponent in 1919 and was favored to beat the “Fighting Irish,” Rockne left the coaching to Gus Dorais, who had become his old teammate’s assistant coach—the first one Rockne had—and also the head basketball and baseball coaches, after having been the head football coach at St. Joseph’s College in Iowa. The game was hardly the cakewalk that Notre Dame expected it to be. Kalamazoo, a prohibitive underdog who had been crushed, 55-0, in a previous meeting two years earlier, battled the home team to a scoreless first half. Gipp appeared to have scored twice that half on runs of 75 and 68 yards, but both scores were nullified by penalties. After the second touchdown was nullified, an uncharacteristically agitated Gipp walked over to referee Walter Eckersall and said, “Listen, from now on, please whistle once for me to stop and whistle twice for me to keep going.” Fortunately for Notre Dame, Gipp still managed to legitimately gain 148 yards on 11 carries—an astonishing average of more than 13 yards a carry—to lead Notre Dame to a 14-0 victory.

One of the Kalamazoo linemen victimized by Gipp was a friend from Calumet, Joe Mishica. After the game, Mishica recalled their boyhood together. “George was friendly, kind, and very personable to everybody,” Kalamazoo’s left tackle said. “While we were in high school, George would occasionally show up before practices, and, in his street shoes, both punt and drop-kick. I remember once I saw him drop-kick a football 100 yards. One reason why he never played football for Calumet High was because he headed right for the poolroom after school.” That explanation conflicted with the reason offered by school officials—that Gipp was always ineligible because of his numerous absences.

After the game, several Kalamazoo players charged that Eckersall and some other officials had favored Notre Dame throughout the game, contending that they constantly overlooked penalties by the Irish. That was plausible since Eckersall, a former All-American quarterback at Chicago and by 1919 a sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune, was a friend of Rockne’s and was frequently invited to referee Notre Dame home games that he was covering. While this may seem strange by today’s standards, at the time it was not at all uncommon for sportswriters like Eckersall to supplement their newspaper incomes by officiating college football games, including the ones they were covering. That, of course, raises the question of how such writers managed to write game stories without taking notes, which would seem to be impossible while officiating. As it was, the bigger a writer’s name, the more big games he would be asked to officiate. In Eckersall’s case, it meant a lot of Notre Dame games. When a writer found himself invited to cover quite a few of a popular team’s games—and get paid by the team’s school—he was likely, at least on some occasions, to penalize that team a lot less than its opponents, not to mention write glowingly of the team. Still, the fact that two long touchdown runs by Gipp were nullified by Notre Dame penalties seems to defuse the charges that the officials, including Eckersall, were favoring Notre Dame.

In failing to score, Kalamazoo became the first of three teams held scoreless by Notre Dame in 1919, when the Irish outscored its opponents, 229-47, with only one team, Purdue, able to score two touchdowns. In that game, because of Purdue’s big and staunch line, Rockne had Gipp pass more than he ran. Though he only carried the ball 10 times, Gipp gained 52 yards on the ground. But he dazzled the Purdue crowd with the way he threw the stubby ball, completing 11 of 15 passes for a remarkable 217 yards and setting up most of the Fighting Irish touchdowns.

That 33-13 victory, along with triumphs over Nebraska, Indiana, and Army, all on the road, represented a significant achievement. Whereas only a few fans cheered Notre Dame on when Gus Dorais and Rockne led the visitors to a stunning 35-13 victory in 1913, the crowd of more than 5,000 at the 1919 game at West Point included hundreds—700, according to the Notre Dame Scholastic, the weekly student publication—of Notre Dame supporters, many of them former players, alumni, and current students, but including spectators from the New York area who would ultimately become the core of what would be called Notre Dame’s “subway alumni” and whose ranks eventually would spread throughout the country.

Gipp’s quick presence of mind accounted for the first of Notre Dame’s two touchdowns against Army. With time running out in the first half and Notre Dame trailing, 9-0, while lined up at the Army one-yard line, Gipp, seeing the field judge prepare to fire his pistol ending the half, did not wait for quarterback Joe Brandy to call signals at the line of scrimmage as teams did in the pre-huddle era. Instead he yelled at center Slip Madigan. “Give me the ball. Hurry,” he barked out to Madigan, and the talented center promptly did, whereupon Gipp bolted into the end zone as the field judge’s pistol went off. There were no official game clocks in those days and the field judge had to rely on his watch, so it was an especially heads-up play by Gipp. The touchdown made the difference as Notre Dame prevailed, 12-9, after Walter Miller scored a touchdown in the third quarter after Gipp’s runs and passes had again taken the visitors to Army’s one-yard line.

Speaking of Gipp after the game, Army’s captain and left end Alexander George said, “If you stop him on the ground, he goes to the air, and when you think he’s going to pass he runs the ball down your gullet with a determination that eventually ends in a score. I’ve never played against anyone as good as he is.”

The victory was literally profitable to the Notre Dame players who, collectively, had raised around $2,000 of their own that they wagered against Army, whose players also put up the same amount, in a winner-take-all bet, not uncommon among big-time college teams of the era. “George put up the most, about $400,” Hunk Anderson recalled almost six decades later. “The student managers of both teams then gave the money to a shoemaker right outside the West Point grounds to hold on to ’til after the game. It was a lot of money in those days, and we went home with all of it.”

They returned with the cash, but not Gipp. With his share, Gipp, almost always a loner, apparently went out on the town in New York and maybe Chicago, too. If he returned to South Bend, none of his teammates saw him, not on campus or in any of his classes. After missing all of the team’s practices the following week, and, of course, all of his classes (which was hardly unusual), Gipp turned up on Friday, the day before a home game against Michigan Agricultural, without divulging where he had been. A furious Rockne said that night that Gipp would not play in Notre Dame’s last home game of the season. After a slow start, though, the pragmatic Rockne had second thoughts about punishing his star player and inserted Gipp into the game in the second quarter following a scoreless first period. Proving anew that he did not have to practice, Gipp played brilliantly, rushing for almost 100 yards and connecting on most of his 10 passes before a standing-room-only crowd of more than 5,000 at Cartier Field. The crowd was especially large for the time at a college game in the Midwest—if not the East—and it prompted an editorial in the Scholastic, which called for the erection of a football stadium on campus (which would not happen until eleven years later).

The year 1919 also appeared to have marked the first time that the Notre Dame football team was called the “Fighting Irish,” as it was in the Scholastic account of the Notre Dame-Army game and the campus newspaper’s accounts of several other games during the 1919 season, although some sportswriters insisted the nickname had been used earlier. Indeed even the Scholastic said the name, as applied to Notre Dame teams, had been around for “more than a score of years.” At any rate, it was during Rockne’s early years as the Notre Dame head coach that the name began to show up in newspaper reports across the country. Before long, it became one of the most famous nicknames in all of sports, even though some alumni contended that it was unrealistic to refer to the team as the Fighting Irish when the coach and star player were not only not Irish, but Protestant.

A number of Notre Dame players, using aliases, played in semi-pro games on some Sundays, which earned them as much as several hundred dollars a game, the equivalent of several thousand dollars today. Rockne, of course, had done the same and it is hard to believe that he did not know some of his charges were playing for money the day after Notre Dame games and thus risking injury. If he did, he was keeping quiet about it. So far as can be determined, Gipp only played in one such game, along with seven other Notre Dame starters, the day after the November 22 Purdue game, which had been a bruising encounter.

Along with the other seven players, including his three backfield teammates, Gipp was recruited to play in a game for the Rockford, Illinois, city championship by center Slip Madigan, who had been contacted by one of the team’s coaches and general manager and told the Notre Damers each would be paid $400, a huge amount of money at the time. So after the train returning the Notre Dame team from Purdue arrived in South Bend, the eight players, carrying their football gear and apparently unnoticed by Rockne, slipped away and boarded a train for Chicago, and then, after midnight, another train for Rockford.

Wearing the uniforms of the players whose places they had taken and given aliases—Gipp’s game name was “Baker”—the eight Notre Damers, using Notre Dame plays, led a team called the Grands to a 19-7 victory over the Rockford Amateur Athletic Club. That name was misleading since the Rockford AAC players, including a number of ringers from the University of Illinois, also were paid for playing in a heavily wagered-on game before a crowd of about 5,000. Since the Notre Dame ringers were not familiar to the Rockford fans, it’s not hard to imagine that there were complaints from fans who had bet on the Rockford AAC team to win.

Suspicion was aroused in a story about the game in the next day’s Rockford Register Gazette, which noted, “Local football fandom has been wandering through a maze of speculation concerning the identity of Grands football players who put over a victory on the AAC. It was no ordinary bunch of gridiron talent that had been imported for the fray. That much was evident after the smooth working Grands backfield had been in operation for two plays. The backs played too well not to have been in operation all season.” The story went on to say that not more than three of the Grands’ players were from Rockford and that “AAC men insist that a regular (college) varsity backfield, the regular center and right end, was used.” Not to mention two other Notre Damers. By then, the eight Notre Dame ringers were back in South Bend in time for their Monday morning classes—which Gipp quite likely missed—each richer by at least $400 (the equivalent of about $4,000 today), and as much as $800 if they had accepted the Grands’ general manager’s offer to double the winnings of those players who had bet on the Grands to win. Even for Gipp, who was accustomed to winning a lot of money at pool and poker tables and who undoubtedly had bet on the game’s outcome, earning $800 was special. Certainly some good investigative reporting would have determined that the Grands team included one of the country’s best halfbacks in George Gipp, along with seven other Notre Damers. But then maybe the fans and the local paper didn’t want to cause too much of a fuss in fear that they’d never see good college football talent come through Rockford again.

In mid-December 1919, the Notre Dame squad, along with Rockne, Dorais, and the university band, gathered in the dining room of the Hotel Oliver to celebrate the team’s unbeaten season. The squad would also elect a captain for the 1920 season to succeed Pete Bahan, who had skippered the last two teams. Despite his missed practices and late arrivals for practice sessions, Gipp was elected by a margin of one vote over tackle Frank Coughlin. Gipp’s election demonstrated the respect his teammates had for him, especially for his leadership on the field of play. Gipp may have been irresponsible in many ways, but, as Hunk Anderson was to say years later, “the guys loved him.”

Something ever more special than being elected captain was about to happen to George Gipp before the 1919-20 academic year was over.