American football coach and Notre Dame star end. In 1913, with Gus Dorais, Rockne practiced the new forward pass strategy and his team took advantage of their offensive success through five undefeated seasons. Later he appeared as an actor in movie short features about sports.
Rockne’s family immigrated from Norway when he was five years old. They lived in the tough Logan Square neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. He was expelled from high school for cutting classes. For more than three years, he worked as a postal clerk and saved his money to follow his pals to Notre Dame.
At age 22 he entered Notre Dame University, where he was both a football player and a track star. In 1913 Notre Dame upset the powerful Army (U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York) team and popularized the forward pass. Rockne graduated magna cum laude in 1914. He married Bonnie Skiles and started a family after graduating from Notre Dame. From 1914 he taught chemistry and served as the assistant football coach at Notre Dame.
In 1981, Rockne was named head coach and athletic director. He played for numerous professional teams during that period. By 1930 he had four assistant coaches, a full-time secretary, a ticket director, student managers, business managers, squad doctors, trainers, equipment managers and a publicity agent.
In 13 seasons, Rockne’s “Fighting Irish” of Notre Dame won 105 games, with only 12 lost and 5 tied. Notre Dame was undefeated in 1919, 1920, 1924, 1929 and 1930. The team was the national champion in 1924, 1929 and 1930. His famous players included George Gipp and the 1922-24 backfield men known as the “Four Horsemen.” In the 1920s, America truly went sports-crazy and Rockne’s Notre Dame became the team Americans most loved. His “shock troops” prefigured the modern “platoon system” by substituting full teams during games. Like most modern coaches, Rockne was almost scientific in his approach, requiring players to synchronize their moves down to a tenth of a second. But he was a supreme motivator as well. Off the field he was a public relations whiz, the ultimate salesman, tirelessly traveling the off-season banquet circuit to keep Notre Dame in the public eye.
In 1924, the school’s notoriety as the “Fighting Irish” Catholics made them a target for the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen and students battled on the streets. Sometime after the riot, Rockne decided to convert to Catholicism. To him, Notre Dame, Catholicism and football were inextricably intermeshed.
Inevitably, Hollywood beckoned, and he was recruited by RKO and Universal Pictures for films. He boarded a plane for California on 03/31/1931. The weather was stormy and the plane’s wings were covered with ice and broke away from the fuselage after take-off; it crashed in Chase County, near Bazaar, Kansas. There were no survivors. His death shocked the nation. After his death, films were made about Rockne’s life, biographies were published and monuments erected to his honor. He was transported by death into a larger-than-life character.
Link to Wikipedia biography