8

THE FIGHTING HIBERNIANS

GIVEN THAT NOTRE Dame was founded by seven Frenchspeaking priests, it is somewhat ironic that the university’s sports teams became known as the “Fighting Irish.” At that, credit for the nickname is hard to pin down, although it appears that it was first used by the Notre Dame Scholastic, a weekly campus newspaper, as early as 1917, George Gipp’s second season in South Bend. Regardless, the nickname stuck, supplanting Hoosiers, Ramblers, Westerners, Micks, Catholics, Hibernians, Harps, and Papists, even though the football team was rarely dominated by players of Irish descent. That was the case on Gipp’s teams, when, on average, about a third of the thirty or so players could have lived up to the name “Fighting Irish.”

Ever since 1909, when Notre Dame upset Michigan and beat Michigan Agricultural, Pittsburgh, and Miami of Ohio, while yielding only three points (to Michigan) in that span, Notre Dame had made its mark in football in the Midwest. But it wasn’t until 1913 that the school became nationally known, at least in the sports world.

Even though Dorais and Rockne had been involved in only one losing game since their freshman year, a span of twenty-four games, the Ramblers were a heavy underdog to a heavier and also undefeated Army team when they met on The Plain at West Point. Harper knew that his team could not beat Army with its ground game, even though in fullback Ray Eichenlaub it had an outstanding runner; the only path to victory lay with its passing attack against a team that rarely threw the ball and had never played against one that passed very often.

Remembering the success Amos Alonzo Stagg had enjoyed with the pass when Harper was a backup quarterback at Chicago, the new coach had used the pass often and effectively as Notre Dame scored 169 points during its first three games while yielding only one touchdown. Fortunately for Harper, Dorais and Rockne—while working at a resort hotel in Cedar Point, Ohio, on the bank of Lake Erie during the previous summer—had spent hours of their spare time throwing and catching passes on the beach and on a grass field near the resort’s main building.

They did so after Harper had told Rockne, the incoming captain, before the summer break that Notre Dame would be playing Army during the 1913 season. Harper welcomed their plan and gladly loaned Rockne and Dorais two footballs they had requested to take to Cedar Point. As he did, Harper suggested to Rockne, by no means an outstanding receiver, that he start catching the ball with his hands, rather than with his arms and chest, which was the conventional way to catch a forward pass at the time. “Jesse stressed catching the ball with what he called soft hands, and I worked on that at Cedar Point,” Rockne said. Even more important, Harper told Rockne and Dorais to work on pass patterns wherein Rockne caught passes on the run, rather than as a stationary target, as was the norm during the early days of the forward pass.

That summer, Rockne also worked on developing a relationship with a young waitress at the resort named Bonnie Gwendoline Skiles. The following July, a month after Rockne’s graduation, they were married at a nearby Catholic church in Sandusky, Ohio, shortly after Bonnie had converted to Catholicism (Rockne was still a Protestant). Dorais was the best man. Shortly after the wedding, Rockne and Dorais wound up as the two finalists for the head football coaching job at St. Joseph’s College in Dubuque, Iowa. Rather then both apply, the two friends decided to settle the issue with a coin toss, which Dorais won. He then got the job. Rockne, who had always harbored thoughts of becoming a doctor, enrolled in medical school at St. Louis University while taking a job coaching football at a high school in order to cover some of his expenses. However, when medical school administrators got wind of Rockne’s off-campus job, they told him it wouldn’t be feasible for him to attend classes and coach football, prompting Rockne to drop out of school and return to South Bend, where Harper hired him as an assistant and he was made a chemistry instructor in the prep school.

Although he was an early exponent of the forward pass, Harper had used it sparingly while coaching at Alma College in Michigan and at Wabash College in Indiana after it was legalized in 1906. The legalization of the pass—which had been used occasionally, albeit illegally—came about after President Theodore Roosevelt had summoned representatives from Yale, Harvard, and Princeton to the White House in October 1905 because of his concern over an increase in football-related deaths. It was an era when football was, in effect, a no-holdsbarred, anything-goes sport in which linemen faced each other only inches apart, holding and even punching were condoned, and many players played without helmets. Glenn “Pop” Warner, the legendary coach for whom Pop Warner youth football is named, was coaching at Cornell at the time and had invented shoulder and thigh pads that year, but while they were credited with reducing injuries at Cornell, they seemed to have had little bearing at some other schools, which also began to use the new safeguarding equipment.

A physical fitness buff himself, who liked to box and wrestle, President Roosevelt had been alarmed over how football, in trying to eliminate its rugby elements, had become more vicious and even brutal. In meeting with the representatives of the three Ivy League schools, which usually produced the nation’s best football teams, Roosevelt had let it be known that unless steps were taken to curb the violent play, he might call for the abolition of the game. By the end of 1905, as Roosevelt was well aware, eighteen football players had been killed and 159 seriously injured that year, according to the Chicago Tribune. Over a twenty-five-year period, from the virtual onset of college football in 1880 through 1905, 325 deaths had occurred along with more than 1,000 serious injuries. Roosevelt was hardly the only one concerned. Because of the growing violence in the sport and the increasing death toll, a number of schools abandoned their football programs by the end of 1905, among them Columbia, Stanford, the University of California, and Northwestern, although all of them eventually would reinstate the sport.

In early December, two months after Roosevelt’s summit meeting on college football, the chancellor of New York University, which had what would develop into a big-time football program, assembled representatives from thirteen other football-playing schools to discuss ways to end the violence in the game. Two weeks later, representatives from sixty-two schools assembled in a follow-up meeting and formed the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, the first organization to oversee collegiate sports in the country. Then, in January 1906, the organization, the forerunner of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, established a rules committee. Among the new rules promulgated was the legalization of the forward pass, albeit it with rules that hardly encouraged its use. For one, before throwing a pass, a player had to run at least five yards to the left or right of center after taking a snap and could not throw the ball more than twenty yards. If throwing the stubby, oblong ball was difficult, catching it was not easy either, since a defender could hit and knock down a potential receiver before he could get his hands on the ball. One of the few advantages of throwing a pass was that, on last down, a pass thrown out of bounds gave the ball to the opposing team at that point, making a long sideline pass as effective as an out-of-bounds punt. Most college teams were slow to incorporate the pass into their offensive repertoire because of some of the aforementioned rules and because the ball—about three inches bigger in circumference than the ball in use today—was difficult to throw. Some players placed the ball on the palm of their passing hands and hurled it, often end-over-end, in a sort of shot-put fashion. Gipp, though, had long fingers that enabled him to get a better grip on the ball and throw a spiral, which was much easier to catch than an end-over-end pass.

Another change, in 1912, which would last far longer than some of the new rules on passing—gave teams four downs to make ten yards for a first down, replacing the old rule wherein teams had three downs to gain five yards in order to retain the ball. Furthermore, the size of the field was reduced from 110 yards to 100 yards and the time of games was shortened from seventy minutes to sixty, broken into two halves of thirty minutes each.

Forever innovative, Amos Alonzo Stagg, the head coach at Chicago, was among the first coaches to take advantage of the new rules by throwing the ball more often. In Stagg’s case, he had his quarterback or a halfback take the pass from center, then turn and fake a handoff to another back, and throw a pass to an end or another back who had been split wide, a maneuver that became known as a play-action pass. Eddie Cochems, the coach at St. Louis University, used the pass even more than Stagg, and it paid off handsomely. Throwing the ball as often as ten times a game, the Billikens went unbeaten in eleven games in 1906, the first year that a team could legally throw the football, albeit for no more than ten yards.

Even Yale coach Walter Camp began to use the pass in 1906, often having a player in punt formation throw the ball. As it was, Yale’s ground game was so good that the Bulldogs rarely had to pass as they went unbeaten in ten games while giving up only six points and scoring 144.

Some coaches remained reluctant to throw the ball, mainly on the grounds that only three things can happen when you pass and two of them are negative—the pass can be incomplete and, worse, it can be intercepted. Most of those coaches eventually came around, though, realizing that in long-yardage situations, the pass usually could be more effective than a running play. At any rate, 1906 clearly proved that the forward pass not only was here to stay, but would probably revolutionize college football. But it would take several more years for that to happen, given the reluctance of Eastern powers such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, and Army to throw the ball, which their coaches thought was an unnecessary, and dangerous, affectation that they could succeed without. One of the main reasons for that reluctance was that the ball was not designed to throw, but to kick. It was far more rounded than the modern-day ball, and at least an inch-and-a-half thicker.

The pass would continue to evolve as a weapon thanks to further rules changes. In 1910 the rules were changed so that a back no longer had to run at least five yards sideways behind the line of scrimmage before throwing a pass, though he still had to be at least five yards behind that scrimmage line. Even more dramatic changes occurred in 1912, when backs were permitted to throw anywhere behind the line of scrimmage without any distance limitations. Under other rules changes that year, an end zone of ten yards was established beyond the goal line, and a pass caught in the end zone was a touchdown and not a touchback. In addition, the value of a touchdown rose from five to six points, the field was shortened from 110 yards to 100 yards, and teams now had four downs to gain ten yards and a first down rather than three downs. All of those new rules remain in effect today, almost 100 years later.

That same year, Pop Warner, then the head coach at Carlisle, unveiled the single-wing formation, which made the halfback receiving the snap from center a triple-threat who could run, pass, or punt. That fitted his star back, Jim Thorpe, perfectly, since he could do all three very well. Warner’s single-wing was used for the first time in 1912 against Army and flummoxed a Cadet team that was beaten, 27-6. By the start of the following season, in 1913, almost every major football power in the country was using a variation of Warner’s single-wing, which remained the primary offensive formation until the introduction of the T-formation and its ensuing popularity starting in the late 1930s.

More than the T-formation, the 1913 game at West Point between Army and little-known Notre Dame became not only significant and momentous but changed football forever—in large measure because of the stage on which the Army-Notre Dame game was played—because of the mighty-mite passing tandem of Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne and their novel system of executing a successful pass play.