Free Republic

Some newspapers in the Midwest in 1920 referred to the Notre Dame football team not as the Fighting Irish but as "the Catholics." Notre Dame's star player, however, was not one. George Gipp grew up in a small northern Michigan town, where he did not play high school football and his father was a Baptist pastor. He arrived in South Bend in 1916 as a baseball prospect. Joseph Meyer -- who later became the football coach at Xavier -- was a senior baseball player at Notre Dame when Gipp was a freshman. In 1920, he recalled how Knute Rockne discovered...

Gipp, George Football b. Feb. 18, 1895, Laurium, MI d. Dec. 14, 1920 Notre Dame sports historian Francis Wallace called Gipp "a most peculiar kind of saint" and sportswriter George Trevor compared him to a meteor because of his brilliant football career and short life. After graduating from high school, Gipp played sandlot baseball and drove a taxi for three years, then accepted a baseball scholarship to Notre Dame in 1916. He was casually kicking a football on a practice field that fall when Knute Rockne, then an assistant coach, spotted him and talked him into playing for the freshman...