Notre Dame-Army helped bring college football into the big time

That hokey "Win One for the Gipper" fable surely helps wake up a few echoes in the long-dormant Notre Dame-Army rivalry's return to Yankee Stadium Saturday. But what really resonates about one of history's significant sporting developments - non-fiction department - is the whole bread and circus aspect.

Saturday's full house for a neutral-site college football game in a celebrated arena, the proceedings rhapsodized (and maybe embellished) by wordsmiths, with entrepreneurs of every stripe assured of financial benefits, is firmly rooted in the Notre Dame-Army-Yankee Stadium trinity of the 1920s.

It's all there in Murray Sperber's 1993 book, "Shake Down the Thunder," one of several books the Indiana University professor emeritus has written on the excesses of college sports: The wiles of Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne. ("When he wanted something badly enough, he would stretch facts to their breaking point and beyond," Sperber wrote.) The business sense of Yankee general manager Ed Barrow. The "Gee-whiz" sportswriting boosterism that magnified gridiron exploits. The national passion generated for two teams that translated into a ticket-scalping, gambling bonanza.

Sperber wrote that Rockne was a central character in starting the athletic arms race that has led to the multi-million dollar athletic budgets of the 21st Century. "College football, as spectacle, certainly began in that era," Sperber said in a telephone interview, "when the three most important sporting events of the year were the Kentucky Derby, a heavyweight title fight - usually once a year - and Notre Dame-Army at Yankee Stadium.

Given access to Notre Dame's financial records in researching his book, Sperber discovered that "It really was the receipts from that game that kept the school in the black in the 1930s, during the Depression."

Forbes Magazine, three years ago, named Notre Dame the most valuable college football team, with a worth of $101 million, while ramped up competition caused Notre Dame, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Education's Equity in Athletics report, to be ranked a mere 20th in football spending during the 2008-09 school year. (Ohio State was first.)

Sperber's exhaustive research, which included sifting through 14,500 items of Rockne's daily correspondence, explodes all sorts of myths - most obviously, the fairytale of George Gipp's deathbed plea to Rockne. But it also details the confluence of factors in the Notre Dame-Army series played out at Yankee Stadium from 1925 through 1946, except for a one-year stop in Chicago in 1930.

Among the firsts at work, Sperber said, was Rockne's associate Christy Walsh - "the first sports agent" - and the "era when sportswriters first began to promote sports; writers like Grantland Rice sort of invented modern sports writing;" and Ed Barrow, "who sort of invented the baseball executive" and extended that to booking Yankee Stadium events beyond baseball.

"Up to the 1920s," Sperber said, "the fans of most college teams were students and alums and people who lived in the immediate area of the school. One of Rockne's great innovations was breaking out of that, understanding the media in New York City - there were 11 daily papers at the time, with multiple editions.

"Notre Dame started getting the so-called Subway Alumni, and for the first time, working-class people who never dreamed of sending a kid off to college - colleges were far away and sort of for gentlement - started rooting for Notre Dame. And not just Catholics. Rockne very consciously had Jewish and Italian players and, of course, was Norwegian.

"So Notre Dame kind of invented that thing and, of course, winning was crucial. And Army was the other 'national team,' more of a middle-class team. If you were a Protestant and interested in college football, and didn't have a local team, you rooted for Army. One of the things Army did was take all-Americans from other schools after they had played four years. In 1928, Army's star was from LSU, so LSU fans pulled for Army."

That 1928 game, all were reminded this week, was the setting for the Gipp speech, a motivational ploy almost certainly based on Rockne's imagination. Sperber presented these facts:

There was no record of Rockne ever mentioning Gipp, Notre Dame's star player a decade earlier, in the eight years since Gipp's death. But, two days before the 1928 Army game, with Rockne expressing to friends his concern about his team's chances, Notre Dame alum Francis Wallace, the New York Daily News columnist who long had been beating the drum for Notre Dame's football team (and who first used the "Fighting Irish" nickname), wrote of having witnessed Gipp play, calling him the "greatest" he ever had seen.

The next day, W.O. McGeehan of the Herald-Tribune added to the suddenly revived Gipp glory, illogically comparing Gipp - who had been known as a womanizer, drinker and occasional student - to Hobey Baker, the versatile Princeton star and symbol of clean-cut manhood who was killed during pilot training for World War I.

Thus reminded of his former charge, Rockne presented his urging to the team, apparently at halftime with the game scoreless, to fulfill Gipp's dying request that Notre Dame, in some future difficult moment, should rouse itself in his name. Counter to a later report, that Notre Dame immediately pounced on Army and that Jack Cheigny cried, "That's one for the Gipper," upon scoring the winning touchdown, Notre Dame actually proceeded to fall behind Army, 6-0. And Chevigny scored a touchdown to tie, not to win. And a seldom used played who came to be known as Johnny "One Play" O'Brien scored the winning touchdown, the only one of his career.

The Gipp story "only became legend," Sperber said, "because of the movie" - "Knute Rockne, All American," made in 1940 and starring future president Ronald Reagan as Gipp. That was nine years after Rockne died in a plane crash, and the only version of what Gipp supposedly had said to Rockne appeared in Rockne's 1929 autobiography, which actually was written, Sperber said, by a man named John B. Kennedy.

In 1946, after top-ranked Army and No. 2 Notre Dame played to a scoreless tie, the scale of gambling and ticket-scalping had become so colossal that officials from both schools chose to pull the plug on the series. But there was no stopping the momentum of big-time college football. And it is quite likely there will be gambling and ticket-scalping at Yankee Stadium Saturday.