The Myth of the Gipper

A protracted legend from the era before sportswriters got nasty.

By Jonathan Freedman

Open up any sports page and every columnist is screaming about how the world of sports has turned into a cesspool. Each athlete is depicted as a semi-literate greedhead with one hand on a crack pipe and the other hand down the pants of his teammate's wife. Sportswriters now hide in locker rooms, crouched in a confrontational stance and ready to strike against any perceived moral infraction, like a born-again minister barging in on a circle jerk. The irony is that today's players are no worse than their gambling, drunkard athletic forefathers who were protected and mythologized by sportswriters. The disgruntled nature of modern sports journalism is inexplicable. Why are these writers so angry?

After all, the press box booze is still free.

While writers chop down modern heros, the old ones remain unscathed, as if there's a statute of limitations on being an asshole athlete. The sports media would have you believe that in the era before players' strikes and sneaker contracts, sports was somehow "different" — as if there were some quaint pre-modern era in which every player wore an aw-shucks grin and carried a pure love of the game in his heart, right next to the picture of his mother. Old-time players posed in front of picket fences, and both were always white. There were no games, only "events" that were inevitably played under a "granite-gray sky." Fans didn't cheer, they reacted with "tumult and shouting," whatever that means. But just like misconceptions of the prevalence of the "traditional" American family in the 1950s — which in reality only existed on T.V. and in some parts of Connecticut — the image of a chaste era of American sports is pure myth.

Take, for example, the legend of George Gipp, former Notre Dame star halfback. His image is mythologized in the American psyche as a running, blocking Norman Rockwell painting. We've all heard of the movie that created the "Win One for the Gipper" myth, which forty years later turned an aging actor into a political icon. Pat O'Brien, playing the lead as the Notre Dame coach in Knute Rockne, All American, leans over to a pre-Alzheimer's Ronald Reagan as Gipp on his deathbed. Reagan/Gipp, explaining to his coach that he's not afraid to die: "Some time, Rock, when the team's up against it; when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys — tell them to go in there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper." A few years later, Rockne turns this deathbed story into a locker-room tear-jerker during halftime of a game against Army. The Notre Dame team responds and bursts out of the locker room, fire shooting out of their nostrils. Notre Dame wins. Reagan wins the presidency. America wins the Cold War. USA! USA!

The Gipp story is mostly myth, pure Hollywood, with all of Gipp's rough spots smoothed over like the political campaign that the myth eventually became.

George Gipp's beginnings were humble. He grew up in the rough mining area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, spending most of his time shooting pool and playing semi-pro baseball. On weekends he drove a taxi, shuttling drunken copper miners to the local whorehouse. Three years after he dropped out of high school, Gipp was offered a baseball scholarship to Notre Dame and was accepted as a "conditional freshman." Gipp's exceptional athletic abilities became immediately apparent as he starred in both baseball and football, eventually becoming Notre Dame's first football All-American.

Gipp, who languished near the bottom of the bell curve, was somewhat less talented in the classroom than he was on the gridiron. In two of his four years at Notre Dame (Gipp died during his fifth year), Gipp received no grades whatsoever. During his sophomore year, Gipp didn't arrive on campus until mid-October and only stayed a month, dropping out in November after breaking his leg.

In 1920, school president Father Burns expelled Gipp for cutting too many classes. This expulsion was like dropping chum in the ocean, as the sharks from other football powers tried to nab the star halfback. At least six schools tried to land Gipp for their programs. The recruiting battle ended when Father Burns, due to pressure from Notre Dame boosters and a petition signed by eighty prominent citizens, relented and allowed Gipp back in.

As part of his scholarship, Gipp waited tables in Bronson Hall. This job, however, merely covered room and board. To meet his other expenses, Gipp earned money shooting pool in downtown South Bend. Pool became so lucrative that Gipp quit his piddling waiter's job after one semester. Eventually, he moved off campus to South Bend's Oliver Hotel, a luxury palace known for its high stakes gambling. He would periodically travel to Elkhart, Indiana to relieve railroad workers of their paychecks through either pool or poker. Keep in perspective that these hustling trips occurred in the middle of a glamorous headline-grabbing college career, which is analogous to Rasheed Wallace setting up a three-card monte table in Rittenhouse Square.

Gipp's gambling wasn't limited to cards and billiards: He also bet on his own football games, which was then customary in college football. (Funny how you don't hear sportscasters lamenting the loss of this tradition.) In 1920 Gipp organized a $2,100 pool of his and his teammates money to bet against the players from Army. At halftime of this game, coach Rockne was berating his players, who were losing. When Rockne sarcastically asked Gipp if he had any interest in the game, Gipp responded, "Look, Rock, I got $400 bet on this game and I'm not about to blow it."This locker room scene must have been edited out of the movie. Instead, the movie shows Rockne throwing gamblers out of the locker room. If Rockne had thrown the real gamblers out, he wouldn't have had a team. In case you're wondering, Gipp played tremendously in the second half of the Army game and Notre Dame won the game and its $2,100.

Even the circumstances of Gipp's early death have been glossed over. The story, according to most South Bend locals, was that Gipp got so drunk one night that he passed out in the snow and wasn't found until the following day. Hardly a glorious ending.

Gipp's deathbed was where the real mythmaking began. First off, Gipp was never called "the Gipper." The movie could have called him the "Gippmeister" and been just as accurate. Second, although Rockne had visited Gipp at the hospital, Rockne was not at the deathbed. Most importantly, "to win one for the Gipper" wasn't the type of request that Gipp was likely to make; it would have been more in character for Gipp to ask Rockne to place a twenty on the daily double at Saratoga.

Rockne never even mentioned Gipp's supposed deathbed request until eight years later in 1928 during the Army game. Two days before the game, an article had appeared in the New York Daily News reliving Gipp's exploits in the 1919 and 1920 Army games. Rockne saw this article and it was probably the inspiration for his halftime speech, which was more likely than not a creative attempt by Rockne to motivate his lethargic players (maybe they didn't have any cash bet on this game). Despite popular perception, the speech failed to yield immediate results. Army scored first after halftime to take a 6-0 lead. Although Notre Dame won the contest 12-6, the game had a controversial finish. It ended with Army, poised to score, on Notre Dame's one-foot line. Many spectators and sportswriters felt that the referee had ended the game too soon and that Army was entitled to another play.

The Gipper speech didn't enter mainstream American culture until the 1940 Warner Brothers film. Ronald Reagan campaigned heavily for the George Gipp role and the "Win One for the Gipper" line eventually became his successful political battle-cry.

Interestingly, in a 1940 speech to Notre Dame alumni in Los Angeles, Reagan provided a glimpse of his talents at dramatically re-creating events that did not happen. He bragged to the alumni group that he had the occasion to talk to Gipp when Reagan was a radio sports announcer. Problem is that Reagan was nine years old when Gipp died.

Reagan had learned early that legends play better than reality. And in that era, before the sports journalism pendulum swung to the nasty side, there were no angry sportswriters to confront the future emperor and de-myth the Gipp.