An Irishman's Diary

IN THE EMPIRE of Irish emigrants, on which the sun never sets, one of the more important outposts is a place called South Bend, Indiana. Named after a curve of the St Joseph River, the city is best known – where it’s known at all – for the University of Notre Dame. Which in turn is probably best known for something other than education.

Great as its academic disciplines may be, the college’s fame rests more heavily on its sports teams, especially the football one. Indeed, so famous have the footballers made this Notre Dame in its own right that you’d have to be rude, or French – or both – to object to the way it pronounces its name, which sounds nothing like the cathedral in Paris.

The name is often superfluous anyway. Notre Dame’s teams are more often described as the “Fighting Irish”, or just “Irish”, for short. But ethnicity is a flexible concept, especially in the US. And as chance would have it, the man who did most to establish the college’s legend went by the very un-Irish name of Knute Rockne.

He was in fact Norwegian: born inland from Bergen in 1888, before his family moved to Chicago when he was five. He was already 22 by the time he went to Notre Dame to study pharmacy. From then on, however, he and it were inseparable. First he became a star player on the college’s football team. Later, as coach for more than a decade, he moulded it into the closest thing the sport has ever seen to an unbeatable force.

Rockne was still adding to the "Irish" legend when he died, prematurely, 80 years ago today. He was flying to Los Angeles at the time, to help make a film called The Spirit of Notre Dame. But shortly after take-off in Kansas City, his plane crashed in a wheat-field, with no survivors.

The altogether more Celtic-sounding Frank Leahy succeeded him. And Leahy in his turn became a coaching great, further embellishing Notre Dame’s fame. In fact, his winning percentage is the second greatest in the history of college football’s top division. Only Rockne’s was better.

Apart from his win statistics, the Norwegian is remembered for the “25 commandments” with which he enjoined players to conduct themselves, off the pitch and on. The first commandment stressed the preeminence of education. Others urged “morals”, “loyalty”, and “self-sacrifice”. And Commandment 22 advised players how to be a “hard but good loser”.

But this last one was not much needed back then. In his 13 years as coach, Irish won 105 games and lost only 12. They went unbeaten in five seasons and won six national championships, including his last year in charge, when their win-loss record was a perfect 10-0.

Rockne’s innovations were not confined to training and tactics. Knowing the importance of speed in the game, and drawing on his anatomical studies, he even designed his own equipment for players, reducing bulk and weight without sacrificing protection. He also pioneered the use of a silk and satin team strip, to minimise wind resistance.

But his tactical acumen did revolutionise the sport, most famously through the forward pass. Strange as it seems now, when the long-distance throw by the quarter-back is the game’s trademark move, American football used to have the same attitude to forward passes as its parent, rugby, still has today.

Even though a 1906 law change made it permissible, the forward pass was still underused until 1913 when Rockne and his colleagues identified it as a way in which a small team could beat a bigger one. Spending the holidays as lifeguards on a Lake Erie beach, he and his quarter-back prepared for what was to be their last playing season by practising the move obsessively. Puzzled onlookers “probably thought we were crazy,” he later joked.

Rockne’s renown among the Fighting Irish is only rivalled by one of the players he coached, George “The Gipper” Gipp, who also died too soon. In fact, Gipp was only 25 when pneumonia killed him. And one of the key events of Rockne’s life was to be on the receiving end of the young man’s death-bed speech.

As he remembered it, it went like this: “Sometime, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are going 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.”

Rockne did indeed tell them, in 1928, before they went out and beat the hitherto undefeated Army team. In time the words became immortalised in a Hollywood biopic. Having been born Norwegian and spent his life being called Irish, the great coach was posthumously elevated, in the film’s title, to “Knute Rockne, All American”.

But it must have been the demands of Hibernian imperialism that ensured the job of playing him went to Pat O’Brien. Nor was the role of George Gipp allowed to escape the diaspora. It went to a then little-known actor called Ronald Reagan, who thereby earned a nickname that stayed for life.

So identified was he with the part that almost 50 years later, as he neared the end of two terms as president, he urged his would-be successor, George Bush Snr, to “win one for the Gipper”.

* fmcnally@irishtimes.com