15

GIPP’S FIGHT FOR LIFE

SICK AS HE was, Gipp walked into St. Joseph Hospital unaided and was brought to a private room, where his temperature was immediately taken. It was 104 degrees, nearly six degrees above normal. A prominent South Bend doctor who certainly knew who Gipp was quickly diagnosed his condition as tonsillitis, hardly, it would seem, a cause for alarm and something which he had been warned about only three months earlier. The doctor, James McMeel, was the president of the Indiana State Medical Association and later became head of the American Medical Association, so Gipp appeared to be in good hands. As a precaution, however, Doctor McMeel called in an associate, Doctor Thomas Olney, for a second opinion and Olney concurred with McMeel on the tonsillitis diagnosis.

An initial concern of both doctors was streptococcus, an infection of the throat commonly known as strep throat, which is more serious. It then became apparent to the doctors that George Gipp had been a sick man when he played, even though briefly, against Northwestern on a bitterly cold and raw day in Evanston three days earlier. The question probably rose in their minds as to why Gipp, coughing constantly and with an elevated temperature, had not been checked out by a doctor before the game. As it was, the football team had no team doctor. Indeed, Rockne, despite his limited medical knowledge, also acted as the team trainer, which was not unusual at the time.

Gipp was immediately put on a liquid diet and prescribed aspirin to keep his temperature down; a mixture of borax, glycerin, and honey was used to swab his inflamed sore throat. Neither penicillin nor antibiotics were options, since they had not yet been devised.

That Tuesday afternoon, Rockne and Anderson visited Gipp at the hospital and found him in good spirits but looking haggard and frail. Doctors assured them, however, that Gipp was merely suffering from tonsillitis, and that his prognosis was good. Both Rockne and Anderson were further encouraged when they returned to see Gipp on Wednesday and were told that his temperature had lowered to a point where it was almost normal and that he seemed to be doing all right. Following the brief visit, Rockne, Anderson, and the rest of the Notre Dame football team left by train for East Lansing to face Michigan Agricultural College on Thanksgiving Day in the final game of the season. Gipp was much on the minds of the players, who were encouraged, though, when Rockne told them that Gipp appeared to be doing well and that he was on his way to a complete recovery. Ironically, in a story that appeared in the South Bend Tribune on the day Gipp was taken to the hospital, Arch Ward wrote that Gipp would play against the Michigan Aggies “should the going get too tough for his mates.” Ward, of course, did not know that Gipp’s Notre Dame career had ended the previous Saturday when he threw two touchdown passes while playing with a separated shoulder, a broken collarbone, and severe sore throat.

By game time on Thanksgiving, Gipp’s hospitalization had made it onto the Associated Press wire and into newspapers across the country. Even without Notre Dame’s greatest runner, the Fighting Irish easily beat the Michigan Aggies, as they were called, 25-0, to complete their second straight unbeaten season. Gipp’s replacement at left halfback, Dan Coughlin, gave a good imitation of Gipp when he ran back the opening kickoff 80 yards for a touchdown, and Rockne played his second unit more than half of the game.

Gipp’s condition remained stable through the Thanksgiving weekend. His fever had lowered, raising hopes that he was out of the woods. But then on November 29, six days after he had been admitted to the hospital, pneumonia set in, and doctors said that the next forty-eight hours would be critical. At that point, his parents were notified, and his mother, his brother Matthew, and his sister Dorothy arrived in South Bend to be at Gipp’s bedside. Rockne also hurried to the hospital, both to see Gipp and to tell Mrs. Gipp that he had made arrangements for her to stay with George Hull, the co-owner of Hullie and Mike’s, and for the two children to stay at his own home. Hunk Anderson was to say that Mrs. Gipp, who was a Methodist, told her son that she preferred having him moved to another hospital because the nuns who worked at St. Joseph and the priests who visited him made her nervous. However, still according to Anderson, Gipp told her he felt that he was getting very good care and did not want to be moved, whereupon, apparently, she did not press for him to be transferred.

To assist the South Bend doctors who had been tending to Gipp, Rockne and administration officials at Notre Dame arranged to have two eye, ear, and throat specialists from Chicago come to St. Joseph for consultations and to stay by his bedside around the clock. By now, fearful that Gipp’s heart may have been failing, doctors began to administer digitalis to stimulate the organ. A blood transfusion also was deemed necessary, and blood from Anderson, who had been determined to be a compatible donor for his boyhood friend, was transferred to Gipp in a direct transfusion.

“George Gipp’s condition was pronounced grave by attending physicians last night,” the South Bend Tribune reported in its editions the following morning, November 30. “A decided change for the better or worse is anticipated before another night has passed.”

The news cast a pall of gloom over the campus, where students and faculty had been led to believe that Gipp was merely suffering from tonsillitis. Students, faculty members, and others at the university converged on Sacred Heart Church (now Sacred Heart Basilica) on the Notre Dame campus to pray for the most famous athlete in the school’s history as they would do in subsequent days. The hospital’s announcement, carried throughout the country by the Associated Press, both stunned and saddened tens of thousands of Notre Dame alumni and football fans who had come to idolize the sensational halfback from the small, Midwestern Catholic school, which had been virtually unheard of a decade prior. By now, in an unprecedented vigil, scores of students gathered each day on the sprawling lawn of St. Joseph Hospital, directly outside of Gipp’s second-floor room, to pray for the school’s most famous, and most enigmatic, athlete.

In the next few days, Gipp’s condition improved. Gipp, who had lapsed into a coma, was conscious again by December 2, and doctors said he apparently had overcome his pneumonia. Though his condition was still listed as critical, they also said they expected Gipp to recover. By December 4 Gipp’s sixty-six-year-old father, Matthew, who had not been well himself, had arrived from Laurium to see his son. Told that his condition had improved, Matthew Gipp returned home the following day. Meanwhile, visitors from outside the family were allowed to see Gipp, who, though obviously having lost a considerable amount of weight, appeared alert and in good spirits. Among the visitors were Rockne, several of Gipp’s teammates, Father Patrick Haggerty (a priest at Notre Dame who had become a regular caller and seemed to have established a close relationship with Gipp), and Father James Burns, the Notre Dame president who had expelled Gipp nine months before for failing to attend classes, but then reinstated him a month later. Another visitor was Johnny Evers, the second baseman in the legendary Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play combination for the Chicago Cubs, whom club president Bill Veeck had dispatched to sign Gipp for the 1921 season when Evers was to take over as manager of the Cubs. Gipp, who had received a contract from the Cubs the previous summer, was still too ill to consider such a proposal, but Evers’s visit heartened him, according to Anderson, a daily visitor to his best friend’s room. Gipp was even more heartened when Rockne told him he had been named to Walter Camp’s All-America team at fullback, becoming the first Notre Damer selected to a Camp first team by the legendary football pioneer.

“How does that make you feel being the first player from Notre Dame to make Camp’s first team?” Rockne asked Gipp with a smile.

“That’s jake with me,” Gipp replied.

In naming Gipp to his All-America team in Collier’s Weekly magazine, Camp wrote, “In the backfield, Gipp of Notre Dame gets the first place on account of his versatility and power, able as he is to punt, drop-kick, forward pass, run, tackle—in fact do anything that any backfield man could ever be required to do and do it in well-neigh superlative fashion.” Some Notre Damers and others thought that Camp was again showing a bias for Eastern players when he put Gipp at fullback, rather than at his normal position of left halfback, a spot that went to A. C. Way of Penn State. However, the prestigious Helms Athletic Foundation did pick Gipp as a first-team All-American at left halfback and also selected him as the College Football Player of the Year, the equivalent at the time of today’s Heisman Trophy, which was first awarded in 1935.

By the end of the first week of December, Gipp felt well enough to get out of bed for the first time to walk around. During one of Anderson’s visits, he told Notre Dame’s star guard that he was thinking of becoming a Catholic.

“What the hell do you want to do that for?” asked Anderson, a Protestant, as were both Gipp and Rockne (although Rockne would eventually convert to Catholicism, his wife’s religion).

“Look, Hunk, my problems aren’t over, and I want to make sure when I die I go to the right place,” Gipp responded, according to Anderson’s recollection of their conversation. “I think the odds are better if I hold the right cards.”

“George was barely able to talk,” Anderson told the author more than a half century later. “He said to me, ‘Hunk, I don’t think I’m going to make it.’ I tried to encourage him, and told him he’d been in tougher battles, which was probably not true. But he said to me, ‘Not as tough as this one, Hunk. I think I’ve kicked my last dropkick.’”

It is more than likely that, although Gipp was not religious, he probably had heard at Notre Dame that salvation was not an option outside the Catholic church, a contention that the church had promulgated at the time. Though his father was a deacon in the Baptist church in Laurium, Gipp had drifted away from the family’s religion in his late teens and had adopted a fatalist attitude toward life, to the point of telling friends that he did not expect to live long. To which friends like Hunk Anderson would respond, partially in jest, by saying that if he continued his lifestyle of smoking, drinking, eating irregularly, and getting very little rest, he probably would not.

According to Victoria Adams Phair, the granddaughter of Iris Trippeer, Knute Rockne—apparently unaware that Trippeer had been married recently and thus had ended her intense relationship with Gipp—sent Trippeer a telegram in early December telling her about Gipp’s dire condition and saying that Gipp wanted to see her. Even though Trippeer had married another man, she quickly took a train from Indianapolis to South Bend to see Gipp at the hospital, according to Phair. “She told me years later that she did go to see George Gipp,” Phair said in 2010. During the visit, Phair said, Gipp gave Trippeer the miniature gold football that Rockne had given all of the players on the 1919 team, who had finished the season undefeated. Phair said Trippeer then wore the gold football on a charm bracelet every day until she died of cancer in 1973, when she was seventy-three years old.

“She told me George Gipp was the only man she ever loved,” Phair said during one of our 2010 conversations. Phair, the daughter of one of Trippeer’s two sons, said Trippeer divorced her husband, Jack Adams, in the 1940s and became a successful interior decorator. “My sister and I took care of her the last two years of her life, and she was gorgeous till the end,” Phair said.

However, no one else seemed to recall Trippeer visiting Gipp at St. Joseph Hospital. Also, her granddaughter’s version of Gipp giving Trippeer the gold football is at variance with the account by Hunk Anderson’s wife, Marie, who said she had seen Trippeer wearing the pendant when she and Hunk were on a double-date with Gipp and Trippeer earlier in 1920.

One woman did definitely turn up frequently outside the door of Gipp’s room, but apparently was not allowed to see him, even though she claimed to be a former sweetheart. Hunk Anderson recognized the woman and said he thought she was the manicurist at the Hotel Oliver whom Gipp had dated before falling in love with Trippeer, and may have dated her again after their breakup.

By December 7 calls went out on the Notre Dame campus for blood donors. Hunk Anderson immediately offered to donate again, but was turned down since he had given blood the week before. In the next two days, around 150 Notre Dame students offered to donate blood to their stricken campus hero, and ten were placed on standby in the event another transfusion was deemed necessary. Then on December 10, the South Bend Tribune reported that Gipp had “regained the strength lost yesterday. His condition was improved, and he once more showed signs of recovery. However, the following day, Anderson said, he was visiting Gipp along with Gipp’s mother and two of her children when Gipp told him, “Hunk, I don’t think I’m going to make it. But thanks for everything.”

His boyhood friend and Notre Dame teammate was stunned, even though Gipp had lost considerable weight—perhaps as much as forty pounds—and was extremely pale. “Up until then, I thought George was going to pull through,” Anderson said years later, “but after hearing what he said, I began to think the end might be near.”

By Monday, December 13, the doctors and nurses at St. Joseph Hospital thought so, too, as Gipp lapsed into and out of a coma. Anderson cut classes to be at the hospital all that day. Gipp’s mother and other members of the family who were in South Bend were summoned to the hospital early in the evening and, a short while later, Rockne arrived at the hospital and was led into Gipp’s room, where the family had gathered. Regaining consciousness for a short while, Gipp apparently spotted Rockne and said something to Doctor McMeel, who by now had spent most of every day of the last three weeks at Gipp’s side. Doctor McMeel thereupon waved to Rockne, indicating that Gipp wanted to see him. Rockne then walked to Gipp’s side and bent down to talk to him. The scene was dramatized in Knute Rockne: All American, in which Gipp is portrayed by eventual President Ronald Reagan and Rockne by Pat O’Brien. In the film, Rockne is alone with Gipp at the time, but recounting what he was to say years later, Rockne indicated someone else was with him at Gipp’s bedside.

“It’s pretty tough to go,” Rockne quoted either someone else or himself saying at Gipp’s bedside. “What’s tough about it?” Gipp replied with a smile while looking “up at us,” according to Rockne’s account in the series he—or a ghostwriter—wrote for Collier’s magazine. Rockne said that Gipp then turned to him and said, softly, “I’ve no complaint. I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid.” It was then, according to Rockne, that Gipp, in what would become the most famous rallying cry in sports history, whispered, “Sometimes when things are going wrong, when the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out and win one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock, but I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.”

The only problem with that account is that no one seems to recall anyone being with Rockne when he saw Gipp for the last time. Nor did anyone recall Gipp ever having been called the “Gipper.” However, Hunk Anderson did say years later that he and his fellow Calumet High School pals and Notre Dame teammates Ojay Larson and Perce Wilcox, occasionally called their fellow Calumet alumnus Gipper. “Rock occasionally called George that, too,” Anderson said. Anderson said the nickname was first used by Joe Swetish, who managed a baseball team that Gipp and Anderson played on back in Laurium. Recounting a particularly good game Gipp had had, Swetish, referring to his star outfielder, told an acquaintance, “The Gipper had a round-tripper,” employing baseball slang for a home run. “After that a lot of the guys on the team started calling George ‘Gipper,’” Anderson recalled while conceding that apart from him, Rockne, Larson, and Wilcox, he didn’t recall anyone else ever using “Gipper.”

After putting a hand on Gipp’s forehead and saying good-bye, an ashen-faced Rockne left Gipp’s room. Family members, having been told that the end was near, then gathered around Gipp and remained for the rest of the evening as Gipp continued to lapse in and out of a coma. During the evening, Father Pat Haggerty made his fifth visit of the day to Gipp’s bedside, and, with Gipp conscious again, prayed over him.

In the early hours of the next morning, Tuesday, December 14, with Gipp now in a deep coma, Father Haggerty—at Gipp’s prior request, he was to say later—gave Gipp conditional baptism and conditional absolution, which in effect converted him to Catholicism. A few minutes later, Father John O’Hara, Notre Dame’s prefect of religion (who would become president of the university in 1934 and later the archbishop of Philadelphia) administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church to the fallen football star. At approximately 3:30 A.M., Doctor McMeel felt for Gipp’s pulse once more, then turned to Gipp’s mother, his brother Matthew, and his sister Dorothy, put his head down, and then announced softly that Gipp was dead. The date was December 14, 1920. Coincidentally, and almost hauntingly, eighty-nine years later St. Joseph Hospital—by then known as the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center—would close on the same date, December 14, that its most famous patient had died.

George Gipp, who had come to Notre Dame as an unknown in the fall of 1916 and by the fall of 1920 had become one of the best-known athletes in the United States, was twenty-five years and ten months old when he died. Shortly after Doctor McMeel’s announcement, a nurse at St. Joseph, by pre-arrangement with the Hotel Oliver, called the hotel and told the night clerk that Gipp was dead. The clerk then pulled a master switch on and off three times to let the staff know that Gipp, the hotel’s best-known resident, had died.

No other Notre Damer had ever been, or ever would be, so honored in death.

In what could have been a fitting epitaph for Gipp, Father Charles O’Donnell, who would become president of Notre Dame in 1928, said shortly after Gipp died, “He was an enigma that we never solved.”