The Gipper Ever After
George Gipp Memorial in Laurium, Michigan.
On this day 100 years ago, George Gipp lost his mortal life.
The same day, Dec. 14, 1920, the Gipper’s immortality was born.
“George Gipp seemed indestructible on the football field,” Knute Rockne wrote, as depicted in “Rockne of Ages.”
“But on a damp, freezing afternoon he contracted an infected sore throat around the time of our game with Northwestern. The whole city of South Bend joined the university in anxiety over Gipp. His condition worsened and he had to be hospitalized.
“’It’s pretty tough to go,’ said someone at the bedside.
“’What’s tough about it?’ Gipp smiled up at us feebly. ‘I’ve no complaint.’
“He turned to me. A few minutes later he motioned me forward. I leaned over his bed and he said to me, ‘I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s alright. I’m not afraid.’
“His eyes brightened in a frame of pallor.
“’Some time, Rock,’ he said, ‘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. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.’
“It became national news when Gipp died, but that was only the measure of his athletic celebrity,” Rockne recalled. “What was never in the news was his utter gameness.”
George Gipp was an athletic phenomenon despite being a heavy smoker, a habit that caused Rockne to lament, “My fear for Gipp was that Nature had made him such a fine athlete that, over-gifted, he would not appreciate nor respect his talents.”
A deadly virus tackled Gipp on November 20, 1920. The country had already been writhing in a second wave from the 1918 Pandemic that had struck down hundreds of thousands of victims who went out coughing, racked by pain and high fever, gasping for oxygen.
“During the final hours of his fight for life, Gipp was rational and was said to show remarkable grit as he gradually grew weaker...” the Chicago Tribune reported.
Gipp was only 24 when he died. Medical experts say one marked difference between COVID-19 today that threatens older adults with compromised immune systems and the 1918 Pandemic... the most affected groups 100 years ago were otherwise healthy adults between the ages of 20 to 40.
Gipp’s death may be the most legendary case of life being cut way too short. All things considering today, the Gipper’s legend takes on new immortality.
Football... is an afterthought.
Excerpts taken from “Rockne of Ages”
Photo 1 via Bobak Ha’Eri, Photo 2 via Public Domain