Rockne, Knute K.
Football
b. March 4, 1888, Voss, Norway
d. March 31, 1931
Rockne's family came to the U. S. when he was five years old and settled in Chicago. After graduating from high school, he went to work for several years and then entered Notre Dame in 1910, "a lone Norse Protestant on the Irish Catholic campus," as he once put it.
Though only 5-foot-8 and 145 pounds, he became a starting end on the football team and was a third-team All-American as a senior in 1913, mainly because he was the chief receiver when Notre Dame used the pass as a major offensive weapon to upset Army 35-13.
Rockne became a chemistry instructor and assistant football coach after graduating. When head coach and athletic director Jess Harper left to enter military service in 1918, Rockne replaced him.
Notre Dame had a 3-1-2 record in his first season, then went undefeated for two years. From 1921 through 1923, Rockne's teams were 27-3-1. Led by the famous Four Horsemen in the backfield and the lesser-known Seven Mules in the line, the 1924 team won all 9 of its regular season games and beat Stanford 27-10 in the Rose Bowl.
During the next three seasons, the Fighting Irish lost 4 of 29 games, tying 2. Rockne had his worst year in 1928, when it took a 12-6 victory over Army to salvage a 5-4-0 season. The Army game lives on in football mythology. With the team trailing 6-0 at the half, Rockne told his players that George Gipp, dying of pneumonia in 1920, had said, "Rock, someday when the going is real tough, ask the boys to go out and beat Army for me."
After that revelation, the inspired Notre Dame "won one for the Gipper." Although Gipp's deathbed request has been dismissed as a fairy tale, Rockne always insisted it was true.
Rockne's last two teams were undefeated, going 9-0-0 in 1929 and 10-0-0 in 1930. He was one of six passengers flying from Kansas City to Los Angeles on March 31, 1931, when the plane crashed in Kansas, killing everyone aboard.
When a train brought his casket back to South Bend for burial, an estimated 10,000 people jammed into a Chicago station to see it.
One of the most famous people in the country at his death, Rockne had many money-making sidelines. He gave motivational talks to Studebaker salesmen, appeared in movie short subjects, and wrote magazine articles and books. Shortly before he died, Rockne had had offers of $75,000 from the Hearst newspapers to write a column and $50,000 from RKO Pictures to play a football coach in a movie musical.
Rockne was well known for his ability to motivate players. He once said, "A team in an ordinary frame of mind will do only ordinary things. In the proper emotional state, a team will do extraordinary things. To reach this state, a team must have a motive that has an extraordinary appeal to them."
That well-deserved reputation has obscured his skill as a football strategist. He inherited the Notre Dame shift from Jess Harper, but he turned it into a versatile offense. His use of deception, line spacing, and split ends anticipated many of the ideas behind the T formation.
When Rockne died, twenty-three of his former players were college head coaches, and many more were assistants. Among his most successful pupils were Eddie Anderson, Jim Crowley, Frank Leahy, Buck Shaw, and Frank Thomas.
