Quote of the Day (Knute Rockne)

"Sometime, Rock, when the team is 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 one for the Gipper." – George Gipp, as quoted by Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, at halftime of the team’s game against Army, November 10, 1928

(I attribute this quotation to Rockne rather than George Gipp in the headline. Here’s my reason:

Heck, how can I put this gently? A master locker-room motivator, Rockne was liable to say anything to get his team fired up before or during a game. Over the years, not all of these things accorded with reality. To wit:

* His six-year-old son, he said, was hospitalized and was pleading for a victory. Didn’t happen!

* He told his team that a possible Rose Bowl bid awaited them if they won. ‘Fraid not!

* Even in the case of George Gipp, he told the Fighting Irish that their opponents one year, Indiana, might have contributed to the death of the All-American with their bruising tackling style. Only trouble was, Gipp died of pneumonia!

Okay. So now it’s eight years after Gipp’s death, at halftime in the middle of one of Notre Dame’s worst seasons under Rockne. (Many teams would regard 5-4 as a winning season, but it counted as a shipwreck at Notre Dame.) They’re playing Army and things aren’t going so good.

So Rockne comes up with this tearjerker of a story about the guy he regarded as the greatest player ever to put on a Notre Dame uniform.

He didn’t mention that Gipp was pretty carefree about discipline and all the other matters his coach regarded as important—missing curfews, playing cards and pool, and betting, even on Notre Dame games (always to win—maybe that’s why he always made sure to get into every game, no matter how ill he felt.) (In fact, when you hear just HOW blithe the first All-American at Notre Dame was about these things, he makes Plaxico Burress of the New York Giants look like the second coming of Alfred P. Sloan.)

All of this was beside the point that Rockne wanted to make. The coach might have been of Scandinavian descent, but hanging around all those Irish Catholics left him with an important lesson in life: never let a little thing like a fact get in the way of a good story. Especially if that fact was that you had been nowhere near Gipp’s bedside as he entered his last days.

Oh, did I mention that Notre Dame proceeded to pull out a 12-6 win that day? Oh, maybe you knew that story, because it became the centerpiece of Knute Rockne, All-American, starring Pat O’Brien and Ronald Reagan, in a signature role that gave him his nickname: “The Gipper.”

For a fascinating discussion of how Reagan landed this role, please see this marvelous post from “The Strange Death of Liberal America.” My progressive readers should relax – the author is liberal. I think he came up with this title when he was on the brink of suicidal despair a few years ago.

I thought that this was also his Secret Service codename, but I was wrong. Actually, it was “Rawhide,” which makes sense of a sort, given his Western roles. Jimmy Carter’s might have been even more appropriate—“Deacon.” The one I like best, though, was JFK’s: “Lancer.” It reminds me of the TV Western of the Sixties. No, Kennedy is the last guy I can imagine in a saddle, but there was something about him—dashing and unafraid of danger—that has some of the quality of the West.

Anyway, you can see why I tend to regard this little anecdote about the Gipper as a stretch of the imagination, right? But in a way, it’s appropriate that Reagan should latch onto it. Literal fact was less important to him than symbolic truth.

Sometimes politicians, like coaches, have to get people to believe in things that contradict reality, to find something inside themselves they never knew existed. If you’re lucky, as Reagan turned out to be so often, people forgive you. If not, they blame you for deceiving them.

That’s why Al Davis of pro football’s Raiders keeps saying, “Just win, baby.” So did Rockne. So did The Gipper—the real-life player and the actor who portrayed him.

Oh, did I mention that my alma mater, Columbia University, almost hired Rockne away from Notre Dame, at a salary $15,000 more than he was making—a lot in those days? News of the agreement caused such a stink, however, that the coach eventually backed out of it.

After hearing about this, I’ve tried hard not to think about how the tradition of football at my school—which might best be summed up as “first in war, first in peace, last in the Ivy League”—could have all been different if this signing had taken place.)