It Was Upon This Rock

KNUTE KENNETH ROCKNE was a multifaceted genius of the sort that defies easy cataloging. He was worldly yet homespun. He was a rah-rah team man who felt at home with screwballs and loners. As both football coach and chemistry instructor, he was a fundamentalist with a revolutionary flair. He was a brainy, nit-picking perfectionist with the broad appeal of a circus clown. He was quite a man, but not quite the man legend would have him. Then again, in the 48 years since he died, the Rockne legend has been so heavily laced with fiction and exaggeration that at this point to adhere strictly to the facts might seem to dishonor him.

Rockne was born in Voss, Norway, on March 4, 1888. He died 43 years later in a plane crash near Bazaar, Kans. The last 21 years of his short life were devoted in large part to football and his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame du Lac. Before completing his secondary education in Chicago, he worked as a clerk and dispatcher for the Chicago post office. Convinced after four years that the "temple of loafing" (as he described the post office) was a dead end where merit meant nothing, in 1910 Rockne, who did not have a high school diploma, took exams for admission to Notre Dame.

In his undergraduate years, 1910-14, Rockne was an all-arounder. He wrote for the college weekly, The Notre Dame Scholastic, and was an editor of the annual, The Dome. He played the flute in concerts. In a boyhood free-for-all in Chicago, he was once swatted so solidly across the face with a baseball bat that when he entered Notre Dame as a balding 22-year-old, he looked like a club fighter. Despite his features, in campus theatricals he occasionally played the parts of femmes who were almost fatales. He was a very good student and a versatile athlete. On the way to a degree in chemistry, he averaged 92.4% in 31 courses.

In the winter and spring Rockne won points for Notre Dame as a sprinter, quarter-miler, long jumper, shot-putter and pole vaulter, setting university records in the vault that lasted 15 years. During his football-playing days, Notre Dame drubbed inferior rivals by scores as lopsided as 116-7 and toppled such giants as Pitt and Army while winning 24 games, losing one and tying three. In the next four seasons, during which Rockne assisted coach Jesse Harper, Notre Dame's record was 27 wins, five losses, one tie. In Rockne's 13 years as head coach--1918-30--his teams won 105, lost 12 and tied five, for a won-lost percentage of .881, which is still the major-college record.

Upon graduating, in 1914, Rockne had intended to study medicine at St. Louis University while coaching on the side to pay his way. When St. Louis insisted that the football job would not be compatible with a med student's workload, Rockne returned to Notre Dame. He could easily have gotten a position exclusively as a chemistry instructor, but Rockne elected instead to go several ways at once. While teaching, he also served as track coach and assisted Harper in football.

Had he gone into medicine or stayed with chemistry and never again set foot on an athletic field, Rockne would still be remembered for his role in one football game. On the afternoon of Nov. 1, 1913, little-known Notre Dame, a denominational institution with 470 undergraduates, whomped Army, an Eastern power, 35-13 on the Plains of West Point. It was more than a lopsided upset, more than a portent that dominance of the sport was moving west; it was the first game of modern football. The mastermind was Harper, a dry-looking Midwesterner who, despite his professorial air, had more winning ways than a snake-oil salesman. The star on the field that day was the quarterback, Gus Dorais. He was supported by four other heroes: fullback Ray Eichenlaub, right halfback Joe Pliska and the ends, Rockne and Fred Gushurst. Seventeen times Dorais dropped back and spiraled the ball 10, 20, 30 yards and more to his receivers. With each pass he was, in effect, propelling the game further into the 20th century.

College quarterbacks now average 20 passes a game and complete 48% of them for 128 yards. Dorais completed 13 of his 17 attempts for 243 yards. Such a performance was unheard of. Harry Cross of The New York Times reported, "The yellow leather egg was in the air half the time, with the Notre Dame team spread out in all directions over the field waiting for it. The Army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before Notre Dame's great playing, and their style of old-fashioned, close, line-smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the Indiana collegians."

Though Rockne's contribution to the afternoon was considerable, it was his coaching, not playing, that led to the erection of monuments to him in widely scattered places. There is one in the Norwegian town where he was born and two near the spot where he died in Kansas. There is a Knute Rockne Memorial athletic building at Notre Dame. There is a plaque in his honor in Cedar Point, Ohio, hard by the Lake Erie beach where in the summer of 1913 he and Dorais developed the passing and catching skills that would beat Army. In 1932 the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend produced a motor car called the Rockne. The Liberty ship Knute Rockne served in World War II.

He was a much-loved storybook hero, and for love and/or money, a lot of people had a lot to say about him. Within a year of his death, in 1931, five Rockne biographies were published. Now there are 11. Two movies were made about his life as player and coach and about the players he coached. Because the films were Hollywood products, the scenarists took liberties in depicting Rockne's life--but then so did just about everyone else.

Who's to blame? Rockne more than anyone. For all his precision when it came to coaching football, he was at heart theatrical and romantic--and inaccurate. Many of his admirers emulated him, at times even disregarding logic if it happened to get in the way of romance.