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.”

Savoldi, though he gained more than 100 yards rushing against Penn, blocked ferociously for Brill and Marchy Schwartz, who was on his way to becoming an All-American for the first of two consecutive seasons, as, apparently, was Savoldi. That is, until a story broke during the following week that the 22-year-old Savoldi had filed for divorce—in a South Bend court, no less. What made that news all the more stunning was that apparently no one connected with the team or the university in general knew that Savoldi had been married. That meant that Notre Dame had two reasons to expel him: for being married, which undergraduates were not allowed to be, and for getting a divorce, which was not permitted by the Catholic Church. Francis Wallace offered a third reason, writing that, “Joe hadn’t learned not to sue for divorce in the middle of a football season, especially at Notre Dame.” Unwilling to play favorites, even with a key member of perhaps Notre Dame’s best team ever, Father O’Donnell informed Rockne that Savoldi had to go. For Rockne, it was perhaps the hardest thing he ever had to tell a player.

“Don’t worry, Rock,” Savoldi told the coach, sympathetic to Rockne’s unpleasant chore, “I understand how it is.”

In bidding good-bye to Savoldi, a personal favorite who he thought could become another Jim Thorpe, Rockne gave him a check for $1,500. Savoldi promptly signed with the Chicago Bears and appeared in three NFL games, scoring one touchdown. After that, “Jumping Joe,” as he was billed, launched a successful wrestling career in an era when the sport included such legends as Jim Londos and Gus Sonnenberg, a former Dartmouth lineman, and was actually on the level. However, Savoldi never played football again.

For all of Savoldi’s talents, replacing him was no problem for Rockne, since he had more than an adequate candidate in Larry “Moon” Mullins, who performed well during the next two games before being injured in the second one, against Army. In Army’s first game in the Midwest, before a capacity crowd of 110,000 at Soldier Field on a cold, dank afternoon, Marchy Schwartz raced 56 yards for a touchdown and Frank Carideo kicked the extra point with four minutes remaining in the game to give Notre Dame a 7-0 lead. But then with less than a minute to play on Notre Dame’s next possession, a Carideo punt was blocked and recovered in the end zone by Army to bring the Cadets to within one point, at 7-6. Fortunately for the Irish, three Notre Dame linemen burst through to block a drop-kick extra point attempt by backup Army quarterback Chuck Broshus, which enabled Notre Dame to prevail, 7-6. The following Saturday, in Notre Dame’s last game of the season—and what would be Rockne’s final game as the head coach—the Fighting Irish crushed Southern California, 27-0, before a crowd of 74,000 in Los Angeles. Moon Mullins’s replacement at fullback, Paul “Bucky” O’Connor, a backup halfback from New Hampshire, was the star, running for three touchdowns while gaining more than 100 yards. The decisive road victory secured Notre Dame’s second consecutive unbeaten season and national championship. It was the fifth time a Rockne team had gone undefeated, and, as it turned out, a fitting coda to the Rockne legend. If the season marked the beginning of a new decade and a new stadium, it also was, undeniably, the end of an era in Notre Dame football.

Four players from the 1930 team were named consensus All-Americans—Carideo, Schwartz, the pint-sized Metzger, and end and captain Tom Conley—while Joe Savoldi, though he had missed Notre Dame’s last four games, was named to the Associated Press first team, a tribute to his brilliance as a runner and blocker during the season’s first six games.

Eight days later, Rockne would be on the sidelines again, this time at the Polo Grounds coaching the Notre Dame All Stars, a hastily arranged group of former Fighting Irish players, including the Four Horsemen and five of the Seven Mules who opened the holes for them to run through, along with playing defense. Others included Hunk Anderson, Jack Chevigny, and, from recent Notre Dame teams, Jack Elder and Jack Cannon, who, for this game, had the good sense to finally don a helmet. From the recently crowned national championship team came Frank Carideo, Tom Conley, and Bucky O’Connor, all who were in good shape yet worn out from the long ten-game season.

Their opponent was the New York Giants of the National Football League, still struggling to gain media and fan acceptance during their sixth year of existence. The game had come about when New York Mayor Jimmy Walker had asked Rockne, a longtime friend, if he could bring his Notre Dame team to New York to play the Giants at the end of the season to raise money for families made needy by the national depression that had just set in and which was taking a heavy toll on New Yorkers. Rockne agreed to come, but with a team of former players, feeling that his current squad had had enough football after ten hard-fought games. Save for the fact that the game did raise $100,000 for Walker’s committee for unemployment relief, the game was a mistake from the point of view of Rockne and his players, most of whom hadn’t touched a football in six years, as was the case with the Four Horsemen.

Nevertheless, the game attracted the second-biggest crowd the Giants had ever drawn, a capacity gathering of about 55,000 to the Polo Grounds, where Notre Dame had first played Army in New York City (the largest crowd was the 70,000 that jammed into the Polo Grounds to see the Giants play a Chicago Bears team that included the great Red Grange in 1925, the Giants’ first year in the NFL). From the outset, it was a mismatch, with the Giants, who had finished second in the NFL that year, dominating throughout and winning, 22-0, a margin that would have been even wider had not the professional team used substitutes through most of the second half, and, at Rockne’s request, taken it easy on his former players. The Notre Dame All Stars had spent four days practicing in South Bend before leaving for New York, but most of them were far from being in playing shape. In addition, their line was outweighed by more than twenty pounds a man, and they could not cope with the running and passing of the former Michigan star, and one of football’s first great passers, Benny Friedman, who scored two touchdowns.

Before the first play of the game, John Law, a 165-pound starting guard on the 1928 and 1929 Notre Dame teams, who was from nearby Yonkers, took one look across the scrimmage line at 245-pound Giants tackle and eventual coach, Steve Owen, and said, mock seriously, to referee Tom Thorp, “Can you tell me how much time is left in the game?” Both Owen and Thorp couldn’t help but laugh.

The first quarter was an omen as the All Stars gained only 5 yards rushing while losing 17. By game’s end, the Notre Dame All Stars had managed only one first down, gained only 34 yards rushing—12 on a run by Rex Enright, the team’s longest of the afternoon—and had failed to complete any of its seven passes.

In the locker room afterward, Rockne, who seemed to enjoy the game, said of the Giants, “That was the greatest football machine I ever saw. I’m glad none of you got hurt.” The first sentence was probably Rockne hyperbole, intended to make the Notre Dame football alums feel better, while the second sentence was not only true but sincere. It was also the last time Rockne would ever speak to a team of Notre Damers—in this case a group that included some of the best players he had ever coached. At a banquet that night, he would raise a toast to the Four Horsemen and the rest of the Notre Dame All Stars, many of whom he hadn’t seen in years and most of whom he would never see again.