For
the first three quarters the coach and the bookies had their way.
On the cold November afternoon in Evanston, Illinois, Notre
Dame’s first All-American sat shivering under a blanket
on the bench as his teammates controlled Northwestern. His complexion
was sickly, he ached all over, he had a bad cough. The coach wanted
him to rest for the big game the following week against Michigan
State to crown the “Champions of the West” for 1920.
According to a teammate, the star player had fallen behind in
his gambling debts, but his bookies had promised to give him a
clean slate if he just sat out the Northwestern game.
For whatever reason, the star halfback ignored his respiratory
problems and common sense and came off the bench in the fourth
quarter, completing five of six passes for two meaningless touchdowns
in a 33-7 win. In a few days he would be hospitalized. In less
than a month he would be dead of strep throat and pneumonia, a
fatal combination in those pre-antibiotic days.
During the last visit from his coach, Knute Rockne, the dying
George Gipp famously reassured him, “I’ve got to go
Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid.” Gipp,
who was 25 and whose team record for career rushing yards would
stand for more than half a century, then peered into the future.
“Sometime, Rock, when the team is up against it, when
things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys — tell
them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one
for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock.
But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.”
Rockne would tell the story to his Notre Dame team eight years
later in a speech in the Yankee Stadium locker room before a game
against heavily favored Army. The Irish, injury-depleted but suffused
with Gipp ghost power, triumphed 12-6. Over the years many writers
have suggested that the story was a fabrication of a shrewd motivator,
but Rockne, who would die tragically himself three years later
in a plane crash, always insisted it was true.
The “Gipper Speech” is without doubt the most famous
dying-wish story associated with Notre Dame. But over the years
many people facing life-threatening illnesses have longed for
a Notre Dame encounter of one kind or another. To watch one last
game in Notre Dame Stadium. Make one last visit to the Grotto.
Even to be admitted as a student.
What all the wishers have shared is a belief in the Notre Dame
mystique, a desire to connect with it, to get there somehow, be
it for the thousandth time or the first. In at least some instances,
happily, the visit turns out not to be their last.
Kurt Weiss first came to Notre Dame in 1983 from Pittsburgh
when he was 9. He helped his sister Gretchen move into Walsh Hall
as a freshman. When the job was done the family had some quiet
time to look around, watch the squirrels play, hang out at the
Grotto. He felt an instant connection.
“I knew it was a place I wanted to spend as much of my
life as I could.” As he grew older Weiss became determined
to follow in his sister’s footsteps, which included playing
with the marching band. But as a high school freshman he was diagnosed
with bone cancer in his leg. The disease later spread to his lungs.
“I was a pretty sick kid,” he recalls, quickly adding
that he never thought he was going to die. Which made it all the
more unnerving when the Make-A-Wish Foundation contacted him.
Like most people, the teen thought the charitable organization
only granted dying wishes. Actually it seeks to enrich the lives
of children facing life-threatening illnesses and their families.
Many wish-makers recover.
When illness forced Weiss to give up playing football and other
sports, he focused on music. He thus made his wish a two-parter:
a new silver tenor saxophone, and the right to play with the Band
of the Fighting Irish at whatever bowl game Notre Dame would be
invited to following the 1989 season (it turned out to be the
Orange Bowl). Although his leg condition prevented him from marching,
he was able to practice with the band for several days and play
from the stands. He thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
After returning home he underwent two total knee replacements
and, later, experimental chemotherapy, but he says he was more
determined than ever to achieve his college goal. “During
my treatments, I focused on getting into Notre Dame instead of
feeling sorry for myself.”
The chemotherapy worked, and Weiss eventually was admitted to
Notre Dame. Despite continuing leg problems that forced doctors
to amputate part of one leg in 1996, he marched with the band
and was elected band president his senior year. He graduated in
1997.
Today he and his wife, Laura Michelle Weiss ’99, have
a son, and Weiss is in his fourth year of medical school. He plans
to specialize, appropriately, in orthopedics or pediatrics with
a subspecialty in oncology.
Five years after Weiss’s trip to the Orange Bowl, Joe Collins
of Placentia, California, near Los Angeles, enjoyed a similar
Make-A-Wish experience when the foundation brought him and his
family to campus the weekend of a home game against Air Force.
Like Weiss, Collins had been diagnosed with bone cancer in his
leg as a high school freshman. Like Weiss, he dreamed of returning
as a student. And like Weiss, he got in and is now cancer free.
The Californian graduated last May with a degree in marketing
and film and television and is looking for a job in advertising.
