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1928
The setting: November 10, 1928, Yankee Stadium: undefeated Army, before about 78,000. Rockne's team was on its way to a 5–4 finish, his worst season. At halftime — Army ahead 6–0 in one account, the game still scoreless in another, and the accounts stand as they differ — Rockne told his players of a request he attributed to Gipp on his deathbed eight years before: that when the team was up against it, they should win just one for the Gipper.
The result: Notre Dame won 12–6. Jack Chevigny scored the tying touchdown — "that's one for the Gipper," in the record's phrase — and Johnny O'Brien caught the winning 32-yard pass from Johnny Niemiec. Chevigny was later killed at Iwo Jima.
The evidence: The deathbed words exist only as Rockne's attribution. Notre Dame Magazine, citing the historian Murray Sperber, records that there is no evidence Gipp ever made the request, and that Rockne never mentioned it in the eight years before that Saturday. The speech is therefore carried here as a documented event of November 10, 1928 — Rockne said it, and the team responded — and not as a documented saying of George Gipp.
The afterlife, as fact: Ronald Reagan played Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American, and carried "the Gipper" into politics as his nickname; at the 1988 Republican convention he told George H. W. Bush to "win one for the Gipper." The phrase's political life is a fact of the record in its own right, whatever its standing as a quotation.
Sources:
- Notre Dame Magazine — the speech's setting and result; the Sperber finding on the missing evidence; the halftime-score difference between accounts.
- The 1928 game record — the 12–6 score, Chevigny and O'Brien, the crowd.
- The Reagan record — the 1940 film role, the nickname, the 1988 convention line.