In the fall of 1910, a twenty-two-year-old Norwegian immigrant caught the train from Chicago to South Bend, Indiana. And there at the University of Notre Dame he would stay for the rest of his life, studying and teaching and, more important, playing and coaching football until his name and that of Notre Dame were synonyms. Only twenty-one years elapsed from his arrival on campus to his death in a plane crash in 1931, on his way to Hollywood for negotiations about a film on Notre Dame, but he remains the symbol of American Catholic success in athletics.
Knute Rockne graduated magna cum laude in 1914, but he remained on campus to act as an instructor in chemistry and assistant football coach. He took over as head coach when Jesse Harper resigned in 1918, and the rest is history — and mythology. For good and ill, Rockne made the entire sport of college football what it has become.
Fall is more than just the season of Notre Dame football. It’s also the season of books about Notre Dame football. Ray Robinson’s Rockne of Notre Dame: The Making of a Football Legend is the latest in a vast library about Knute Rockne and his school, and Robinson’s book is indicative of how the genre has evolved. From adulation and hagiography, writers have moved through skepticism to debunking. But even today — with the Fighting Irish off to the start of what promises to be their worst football season in living memory — the underlying fascination for the man continues to swamp the surface criticism.
He was an indefatigable player, a wily coach, a tireless entrepreneur, and his own publicity department. He endorsed products (a model of the Studebaker automobile was called the Rockne), he ran summer camps, he became a national celebrity, he wrote books on coaching, and — something that is almost universally ignored by his biographers — he wrote a novel, The Four Winners: The Hands, the Feet, the Head, and the Ball, published in 1925.
It’s sometimes alleged that Catholic colleges began to field football teams in order to achieve parity with other private colleges. The logic of this claim leaves much to be desired, needless to say, and it is conjectural in any case. Still, it suggests something about the evolution of Catholic colleges that seems to reflect a desire to ape their sectarian counterparts. Knute Rockne’s career at Notre Dame may have provided the occasion for the secularization of Catholic education — where secularization means something like the willingness to weaken or even betray the ideals of a Catholic college in the hope of being accepted by those who do not share those ideals.
At the time of Rockne’s arrival at Notre Dame, Catholics were still the objects of deep-seated prejudice and bigotry in America. Maryland and Louisiana, the Franciscans in the Southwest, and the Jesuits and Franciscans who explored and traded, naming the lakes and rivers and preaching the gospel, had been eclipsed by the Puritan ascendancy in the telling of our national story.
But Catholics arrived in droves from the mid-nineteenth century on, lots of them Irish fleeing the famine. The University of Notre Dame was founded by a young Frenchman, Father Sorin, in 1842, but within a few years, the Irish began to dominate his school. It’s telling that a new history of Notre Dame, Being Catholic, Being American: The Notre Dame Story, 1842-1934, is written by a man named Robert Burns, and the biography of Father Sorin is being prepared by a man named Marvin O’Connell.
Burns gives an agnostic account of the beginnings of Notre Dame football, leaving it to the reader to realize that something far more substantial than football was involved. G. K. Chesterton, a 1931 visitor to the campus, captured the spirit in his poem “The Arena.” Rufus Rauch called it “probably the most mystical celebration of football ever written.” The poem places the contest in the shadow of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose figure tops Notre Dame’s famous golden dome: Our Lady of Victories, “The Mother of the Master of the Masterers of the World.”
Queen of Death and deadly weeping Those about to live salute thee, Youth untroubled; youth untortured; harmless war and harmless mirth. And the New Lord’s larger largesse Holier bread and happier circus, Since the Queen of Sevenfold Sorrow has brought joy upon the earth.
Chesterton appreciated what a Catholic thing football was at Notre Dame, and he discerned its apocalyptic implications. On the field, a Catholic university was making a statement about its presence in this country. The hegemony of the Ivy League, fated to become effete and ineffectual, was eclipsed by the caliber of football played at Notre Dame. On the playing fields of the nation, as in law and politics, in the police, in boxing and journalism, the Catholic immigrant asserted his presence in a WASP environment.
Still, Notre Dame was always hospitable to non-Catholics. Knute Rockne came to the school a Lutheran, and he was by no means an oddity. Jesse Harper was not a Catholic, and the legendary George Gipp was received into the Church only on his deathbed (Burns’s account of this is skeptical). It wasn’t till after his arrival at Notre Dame that Rockne converted.
It’s not his personal relation to Catholicism, however, but his professional success that raises questions about the relation between athletic programs and the mission of a Catholic university. Once, men had come to the university as students and gone out for football. Scheduling was happenstance. In 1895, the future creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was arranging football for Michigan Military Academy, contacted Notre Dame and the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg in Chicago only a few weeks before proposed games. Such ad hoc arrangements would not last. Soon players were recruited for the university who had little interest in being students. The threat of parallel institutions — the athletic and the academic — loomed.
With the advent of radio, a school’s teams became the most prominent thing about it, and with television, enormous sums of money were in the offing. Once alumni had alerted coaches about prospects in their vicinity, but soon the recruiting of future players became an organized effort, aided by the national ranking of high school players and the creation of a pool of players for whom the colleges competed. Any connection between athletic ability and academic promise became increasingly tenuous. Colleges became the farm teams of the pros.
The case of George Gipp was a portent. The Gipper came to Notre Dame to play baseball but was induced by Rockne to try football. Gipp was one of the greatest college football players of all time. But it is fanciful to describe him as a college student. He might have registered for classes in some semesters, but his academic record is nearly non-existent. And yet, when he was expelled, local dignitaries and businessmen, motivated by the publicity and the influx of money Gipp’s play meant to the community, petitioned the university to reinstate him. They prevailed. A specious examination was given as a condition of reinstatement, and Gipp returned for another season.
One would be a purist indeed who suggested that universities should be governed solely by the disciplines in its curriculum. A host of practical and administrative decisions necessarily encompasses the pursuit of education. Sports too play an important role in educating young people. And then, as Chesterton saw, Notre Dame’s football team had an anagogic meaning for American Catholics. But college football has grown so professional that teams have become entities unto themselves, whose connection with their universities is merely an accident. Scandals that make George Gipp look like a choir boy multiply. Chesterton’s poem seems irrelevant to football Saturdays now.
But Chesterton’s poem seems irrelevant to more at Notre Dame than just football these days. The current president, along with his counterparts in other Catholic institutions, has recently declared the school’s independence from “Church control” and has embraced a concept of academic freedom which, if consistently applied, will make Catholicism itself an alien threat in the classrooms of Notre Dame. The fuss is over a papal document, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, whose title makes the solid historical claim that Catholic universities arose “out of the heart of the Church” and must thus take responsibility for their significance in the Catholic world. But for ten years now, America’s Catholic universities — with Notre Dame in the lead — have fought ferociously against the requirements of Ex Corde Ecclesiae in a desperate desire not to differ in any significant way from secular universities.
It’s difficult to imagine Notre Dame as other than a Catholic place. There is the famous grotto, the campus basilica, the chapel in every residence hall, the crucifix on the classroom walls. Worship will surely continue on campus. But religious services are no more central to the university than athletics. It is in the classroom that faith must make a difference, and the secularization of the mind and imagination is what is making Notre Dame indistinguishable from its secular counterparts.
In DuLac University, the thinly disguised Notre Dame of Rockne’s novel, there is no religion, no priests, no worship, no church or chapel. There is a reference to “muckerism” which, in Notre Dame lore, refers to the bigotry to which the team and school were sometimes subjected. But in the context of the novel, it is meaningless. Jipper Gite, Elmer Higgins, Hunk Hughes, Shorty Dunn, and dozens of other characters’ names evoke echoes of real players, and the book contains photographs of Rockne coaching and a Notre Dame team in action. But the atmosphere of the story is wholly WASP.
It is not simply in his novel that Rockne may have been a prophet about the future of the institution where he coached. The success of Notre Dame football is the story of athletics redefining the relation of sports to academics. The link is not completely broken, of course, but the notion of the “student athlete” has become ironic: For the athlete, the university is merely a necessary stop in a professional career, and classes are merely an expedient. Even the Gipper was ready to play elsewhere, like the other “tramp athletes” who went from campus to campus.
And if there remains at best an uneasy truce between the aims of athletic departments and the Catholic universities to which they belong, so too there remains at best an uneasy truce between those universities and the Church to which they in turn belong. It is a real question how long the truces between the body and the mind, and reason and faith, can be kept in these days of tension. Catholic doctrine holds that the tension is unnecessary. But in America — and especially in South Bend, Indiana — it’s real and getting worse.
