The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1920
The last game and the death: George Gipp — February 18, 1895, to December 14, 1920 — played his final game on November 20, 1920, against Northwestern, and missed the season finale at Michigan Agricultural. Three weeks after that last game he died, at 3:23 in the morning of December 14, at St. Joseph Hospital in South Bend, aged 25, of a streptococcal throat infection and pneumonia. He had just been named Notre Dame's first Walter Camp All-American — the program's second consensus All-American, after Dorais.
The story told about it: The popular account — that Gipp caught his death sleeping outside after breaking curfew — is carried in the sources themselves as popular but apocryphal. The likelier account in the record is that he contracted the infection giving punting lessons after the Northwestern game. The distinction matters to this section, because the deathbed story built on the death is the subject of the 1928 entry below, and it stands or falls on its own evidence, not on this one.
Sources:
- Gipp biographical record — the dates, the final game, the missed finale, the hour, place and cause of death, the Walter Camp selection.
- Notre Dame Magazine — the apocryphal status of the curfew account; the punting-lessons account.