Who was George Gipp of Notre Dame, and why does his legend live on when so many others have faded?
Gipp bet on football, as did many players—including some of his Notre Dame teammates—of that era. His former teammates testified that Gipp would wager as much as $500 a game on the Irish. There were times, said the old-timers, when he bet that he alone could outscore the opposition; on the field, he would make certain that he scored enough points to back his personal parlay. His former teammates emphasized that he was always on the up and up, never betting against himself or against the Irish. They said that if anything, Gipp’s bets spurred him to greater play. “He hung around plenty of gamblers,” said Anderson, who succeeded Knute Rockne as Notre Dame’s coach. “But he was honest, completely honest.” Gipp’s greatest performance may have taken place at Army on Oct. 30, 1920, and it may have had something to do with money. Notre Dame was en route to its second straight unbeaten season and was playing an Army team that was undefeated at 5-0. That day, Gipp gained 480 yards running, passin
Who was the man behind the legend? That’s a difficult, nearly impossible answer to get at. Gipp’s life is so shrouded in mythology, the facts are hard to come by, nothing is etched in stone. The Gipp story has become, largely, a folk legend—something created in part by Hollywood and in part by such chroniclers of the ’20s as the famous sportswriter Grantland Rice. But certain items are known, as I learned in conversations with several former Gipp teammates, all of them now dead. What, in fact, did I learn? Well, for one thing, I learned that Gipp was a fine pool player. Indeed, Gipp had a reputation as a hustler. “George played a lot of cards, and he shot a lot of pool—both for money, lots of money,” said former Gipp teammate Heartly (Hunk) Anderson. I talked with Anderson a good while ago, just before his death in Florida in 1978. “Every once in a while some of the hotshot pool players from Chicago would come to South Bend looking for action, and George would play them at $100 a game
