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It had to be foreordained that Rockne would return as coach. And there he was in 1918, the son of a Norwegian carriage maker, carving his name as one of the game's enduring geniuses. He pioneered the platoon system, perfected the forward pass, lifted (so the famous story goes) the Notre Dame "box shift" from the routine of a dance-hall chorus line. His teams traveled from coast to coast and South to the Gulf, playing 122 games and winning 105 over 13 seasons. Five times they were unbeaten; three times they won the national championship.
They called themselves Irish, but only a healthy handful were. Poles, Germans, Italians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, everyone flocked to South Bend. One September, 90 high school captains turned out for the freshman team. No school in football history produced such stars: Frank Carideo, Marchy Schwartz, Johnny O'Brien and the incomparable George Gipp—Notre Dame's first All-America, who drop-kicked a 62-yd. field goal in his first college game, gained 332 yds. against Army, and died of pneumonia at 25. There was the "pony backfield" of 1924 that averaged 158 lbs. per man and won immortality on the typewriter of Grantland Rice: "Outlined against a blue-grey October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden."
Then there was Rockne himself, the master psychologist who once ran the Four Horsemen behind a third-string line and shouted from the sidelines, "Show 'em your clippings! Show 'em your clippings!" He was the sly pessimist who advised, "Never tell 'em how many lettermen you've got coming back. Tell 'em how many you've lost." He was the locker-room orator who called his team together before the 1928 Army game and talked about George Gipp—his perfection, his ability to come through in the clutch, and his deathbed request: "Sometime, when things are going wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go in there with all they've got and win one just for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock, but I'll know about it and I'll be happy." Notre Dame beat Army 12-6. But that was hardly surprising to Rockne: it had worked the first time he tried it-seven years before.