Tracing How Knute Rockne Changed College Football

You know, I have the honor of talking to a lot of folks that have some great football items in their collections.

But this next guest that we have today has something that really blew me away and still blows me away months later after I already know about it.

His name is Andy Nichol.

He is a Notre Dame and Newt Rockne collector.

Andy, welcome to the pig pen.

Darren, I'm happy to be here and I obviously welcome the opportunity to talk a little college football history.

Yeah, this is one that's very special to you and I.

We're both Notre Dame fans.

You are a Notre Dame alum, you know, so hats off to you.

And you grew up in South Bend even, right?

South Bend.

I went away to undergraduate school.

I came back and graduated, not in law school.

And then I stayed in South Bend.

And we still have a place there these many years later.

Amazing, amazing stuff.

Now you have a very special collection of Notre Dame items and especially from one particular coach.

And maybe you could just share a little bit that about that with us.

Well, as I started getting into collecting Notre Dame memorabilia, football memorabilia, you just gravitate naturally to a guy named Knut Rockney.

And I say Knut because that's how his family and friends pronounced his name, Knut.

He's just a very special person.

And the more I'm still into him years later and I keep learning more things.

And he changed a lot of things in college football.

He changed everything at Notre Dame.

He still got the highest winning percentage in college football for any coach that coached more than 100 games.

He left a legacy that is literally continuing today.

He's just an amazing guy.

Can I just zoom through a little quick history of him?

Yeah, please do.

Working class family.

He ultimately had three sisters.

It was he and his parents.

He did well in high school, he did well in athletics.

He was a good track and field guy.

But for some reasons, which we probably don't want to take time right now, he did not finish high school.

He left high school during his senior year, worked a couple odd jobs, and then he got a job in the post office in Chicago as an entry level postal clerk for $50 a month.

And so he was a high school dropout, literally working in the post office, saved some money.

He was hoping to get into University of Illinois when two of his buddies from the track and field group he'd competed with for years convinced him to come to Notre Dame.

They were going to Notre Dame and they said he'd love it.

He'd never been to South Bend.

He was a Lutheran.

Notre Dame was a Catholic school.

They convinced him and he came.

He got on the train with a bag and $1,000.

He'd saved up over three years.

He had to take like a proficiency exam when he got there to show he had, he was at least literate.

Getting into the school with no high school degree.

And four years later, he graduates with honors cum laude at the top of his class, majoring in chemistry and in pharmacy.

He would been captain of the football team.

He succeeded there and in track and field and other activities on campus.

He was, he was a center of attention.

And when he graduated Notre Dame, he thought he was going to go into the sciences.

He was very dedicated to it.

Notre Dame offer him a position of instructor of chemistry for their high school students.

And they had high school students there, pre college students and assistant football coach.

That was like a win win for him.

They were playing small Midwestern schools, basically.

That was their deal.

And they had wood bleachers that sat probably 5,000 people.

So that is six years after he takes over this fledgling type program, struggling Midwest school that was letting kids in without college degrees.

He has them on top of the world.

And tragically, March of 31, he dies in a plane crash at the age of 43.

He just turned 43 that month.

He was a young man, but everything came to an end.

But the legacy he left.

He changed college football by the innovations he brought to it.

He changed Notre Dame.

He put them on the map.

He literally put them on the map.

They were like a small, struggling midwestern Catholic school.

And by the time he died, they were right up there with the New York Yankees.

That if you go through national papers over the time, you had major league baseball and you had college football, there was no pro basketball or all these other sports.

And it was Notre Dame and Rockne and it was the Yankees and Ruth and Garrick and it's just.

He's an amazing story of what he did.

Yeah, it's pretty incredible.

If you ask anybody to maybe name, you know, five college football coaches right now, probably Rockne's name is going to get mentioned, you know, 100 some years almost since he's been gone from the game.

You know, that's, that's really a legacy that's hard to deny.

Well, Darren, he changed the game.

He.

He did not.

He despised the game that he grew up watching, which was just a big bunch of hulky guys almost playing rugby, you know, just pushing each other around in a mush pit.

And when he started coaching, he brought in the forward pass like it never been brought in.

He innovated that.

He spread things out.

He had the shift, he called, he had his, his backfield, four guys kind of bouncing around back there getting set.

They all shifted together.

And his thing was, we want to bring brains to this, speed to this, finesse to this.

And he became so innovative that he was a big draw for coaching schools and clinics all across the country.

There were a couple of summers, he left in June and didn't get back until September.

He was on the circuit.

So he saw him on the national championship.

And coaches from 20 states and over 100 coaches came to it for three weeks.

School in South Bend, I mean, they were traveling.

And they came to just hear Rock and the Deal when they promoted this thing.

You're going to hear Rockne tell us what he, how he does it.

Nothing's going to be held back.

He's going to talk to you about his keys to success.

And it was big focus on the forward pass.

But I've got his lecture notes from that three week program and it's unbelievable.

He goes into diet, he goes into conditioning, he goes into equipment, he goes into strategy, he goes into plays.

The guy was very organized, very focused, and he was very innovative.

He left a tree of coaches.

That's unbelievable.

I think it's like 60 of his players and things became head coaches.

And there's hundreds of his former players who became high school coaches.

And then you have all these people who came to his schools and clinics.

He influenced football tremendously.

Yeah, he was a pretty good player too, in his own right when he played.

And he was an end.

He was small.

He was only like 5, 8, you know, 150, 160 pounds.

But he was very good.

And he and Gus Durai.

Gus arrived, was a quarterback, and they're the two that first really brought in the forward pass in college football.

Before that, some guys would run down the field and then just wave their hands, maybe, throw me the ball.

They practice it and they hit.

Rockne was on the move.

He was the end.

And they stunned the football world and stunned New York and the people who covered that game when they beat army, the vaunted army team, because it was this offense nobody had ever seen.

And it was Gus Durai and Rockne putting the forward pass right to move the ball down the field.

This is a year later after all that.

Well, his.

Notes are interesting because he.

The basics are so basic, they're so rudimentary.

It's like you.

He tells them how to catch the ball.

You know, you put your hands kind of close together, but not overlapping.

Things that we see elementary school kids doing.

Nobody had done this.

In fact, originally, when the pass was started, they were throwing like a discus.

When people first started throwing, the forward pass was first legalized.

They would throw like a discus.

And so people were anxious to hear, how do we do this?

How do we teach people to catch, to throw?

And then on the move, and he describes how to do things.

He told the quarterback, there's a thing.

Crouch down so that you're behind the line and they can't see you've got the ball and where you might throw it.

I mean, it sounds so silly almost now, but at the time, it was cutting edge.

He was changing the way the game of football was playing.

He basically created much of the fundamentals, what you're saying of today.

Wow, that is incredible.

Now, he.

You talk about, you know, on your website, and I guess before we go too far, let's mention where your website is and where people can get connected to some of your items.

Well, this website came about because, again, people were interested in some of the items I'd collected.

And it's built around.

That is built largely initially around the collection.

And then we've added.

I've added other things to it.

But it's www.rockney and more a N D then more m o r e.com and on there you'll see pieces in the collection with brief descriptions of them.

You'll see there's a.

You can access a nine episode podcast series on the life and legacy of Rockne.

And you can't really find it in places.

They're out there.

But a guy came to me with a big reel, 16 millimeter reel of film and we had to get it done.

And it's like 25 minute documentary, but it has great clips of Rockne in there.

And this is Rockne.

Rockne was a promoter.

He promoted himself, he promoted the school, he promoted football.

Everything you see of these clips in this, he orchestrated it all.

I mean, we're talking about the beginning of talking movies.

The cameras made so much noise they had motors running them.

They had to be put behind booths.

And so when you see this, he staged everything.

You see practices, talking to the team.

He'd staged it all.

And guys like Pop Warner one no part of doing anything.

Alonzo Stag won.

Nothing to do with that.

Rockne, his chips were all in.

Hey, nobody had ever seen a coach run a practice.

Nobody outside South Bend really ever heard Rockne's voice.

Okay, this guy who was this national figure now and let alone showing how he spoke, his mannerisms, he marketed himself.

But if anybody watches it, everything in there, he directed and he staged.

It was marketing Notre Dame football and marketing college football and marketing Rock Me.

And most of it would be good coaching.

Points to the modern game too.

If players are watching it.

It's amazing how.

You're a fan thinking you could watch him talk to players.

And he of course points out Frank Leahy, who's playing offensive line, is a Leahy.

And he talks to people.

And it was all orchestrated.

But the point was, to a fascinated world who could only see these things on newspaper pictures, still photos in newspapers.

At the time there was no television.

There was really no.

There was no national radio network at the time doing anything.

So this was like.

It opened up the eyes of people and they could see Rockney himself.

And he had this distinctive staccato voice.

And so suddenly, what do you like Rockne?

I mean, he sold himself.

Yeah.

When.

He died, the world came to a stop.

Literally.

I don't exaggerate it, but it came to a stop.

The president, leaders of foreign countries, things shut down.

And his funeral was the first nationally broadcast funeral in the history of the country.

It was over cbs.

No funeral service had ever been broadcasted.

He was the first one.

And it was a dramatic moment.

It was the first time that much of the country could kind of mourn together.

They could share that experience of a funeral service.

There'd never been one before.

His was the first funeral ever nationally broadcast.

Amazing.

I did not know that.

I mean, who would ever think that you'd have an opportunity to do that and hear his messages instead of just the writings or a movie where he's portrayed by an actor?

So that's.

That's really incredible.

I'd encourage people to watch the Cronkite movie documentary.

And it's.

It was an infancy stage of doing television documentaries.

It's kind of crude itself.

It's not a.

But it's Walter Cronkite, who's the epitome of broadcasters, and it's all on Rockne.

But the clips of Rockne are just.

They show you the guy.

They use mannerisms of how he rubs his eye at a certain time and things that nobody else would see because he was only captured before then in still photos.

Unless you lived in South Bend.

Yeah, yeah.

It's an amazing piece.

So, yeah, I highly recommend it, too.

To watch, go to Andy's site, folks.

If you're driving and weren't able to write down the site, we have links to it in the show notes of both the YouTube channel and the podcast that gets you connected to Andy's site.

And some of these amazing things he's talking about about Coach Rockne.

Now, you had mentioned on your site, and I know we've had it in our conversations about Coach Rockne be, you know, the player, where he would go in the summertime to a place that I know very well of Cedar Point, which is probably about three hours from my home right on the shores of Lake Erie.

And it's kind of.

Kind of cool how, you know, him and Gus Dure came about with their passing game.

Maybe you could talk about that a little bit.

They both went There to work for the summer as lifeguards along the beach.

And they spent time working on the forward pass again with a moving end.

Gus was the quarterback, but before then, the end of.

On a football play, would run down the field and wave his hands like, throw the ball to me.

And they said, no, we're going to get.

So we hit you on the move.

And that was revolutionary at the time.

And so they perfected it then.

Yeah, chills down my spine just thinking about.

That's incredible stuff.

Now, he also met his wife there, Bonnie Skiles.

She was there at.

Working at the same time, and he met her there, and then ultimately he married her after he graduated from Notre Dame.

Bonnie's Bonnie Skiles.

Rock me.

Wow, that is incredible.

And that's.

That's a pretty good drive from South Bend.

It's probably what, four and a half hours,.

Right?

I mean, by modern times,.

On a toll road.

That's what it is.

It would be a.

Lot.

More.

That's probably a long train ride or something.

So he and.

Gus were.

He and Gus were roommates, best friends.

And interestingly, Gus did even other things for him.

Rockne would leave school when he was a student, sneak off campus to make money fighting in boxing matches and smokers in neighboring towns on the weekends.

And Gus was his cornerman.

According to Gus, Knut never lost.

He brought back money every time he brought back some money.

And he fought under alias names because Notre Dame wouldn't like him out there boxing on these smokers.

And so he had, like, one name was.

Kid Williams was his name.

But he went out.

He was.

Hey, he.

He came from very basic background of no economic security.

In fact, he almost left school his sophomore year when his father died.

And because he thought he had to go home, he had three sisters and he had a mother at home, and the sisters prevailed on him to go back to Notre Dame and stay there.

They said if you come home, you'll just be a postal clerk the rest of your life and you need to stay and get a degree.

Yeah.

Oh, that's pretty strong for a family to have that support to send him back into.

And we're certainly glad they did.

Right?

Yeah,.

He did other things, too, Darren.

While he was coaching Notre Dame, he was running the Parks department in South Bend summer parks.

He.

We found news reports of him umping a baseball game of the Industrial League Industrial leagues then were almost like the minor leagues for Major League Baseball.

And he.

Umpty championship, local industrial league with a guy named George Hallis.

Okay.

And those were the two ups.

Geez.

There's just.

He was doing.

He was involved in everything.

He.

He promoted.

He sold all the tickets to the Games.

He was walking around town selling tickets.

He.

He sold the stadium concept.

He raised the money to build the stadium.

He.

He was the.

He endorsed things from Barbasol to radios.

He had weekly columns in the newspaper.

He had books come out.

Yeah.

He was one of the first coaches to do endorsements.

Correct,.

Correct.

And he had a guy named Christy Walsh.

I don't know if you've come across Christy Walsh, but he was the first real sports agent.

And Walsh had Ruth, Gehrig, Rockne and Dempsey.

And he was the sports agent.

And.

And he.

He marketed Rockne, and Rockne did great things with it.

It was the first Olympic or shooting, first cruise tour to ever leave the United States of an organized tour package.

And they made other stops in Europe, but it was all billed the Knut Rockne Olympic Tour.

And it had over 200 people went on it.

And while he was there, what'd he do?

Under his byline came newspaper reports of the track and field events, the Olympics.

He sent them back to be published in the United States newspapers.

Wow.

So, anyway, I don't mean to keep rambling on this, but this guy.

There's no end to what this guy was doing in this short life.

He ended up in Mayo Clinic after the football season in December.

And actually his family was in Mayo and Rochester over Christmas with him.

And they told him, then you need to cut back what you're doing or you're not gonna.

You're gonna have a total breakdown.

He was there for exhaustion because he just.

He was doing so many things, and everything was hard then.

I mean, travel was hard.

Everything was hard.

But it turned out.

Then it was just three months later, he died in a plane crash.

Yeah.

I can only imagine what would've happened if he would have led, like, a normal life and, you know, well into his 60s or 70s and coached, you know, like a career, like Stag or something.

Can't imagine what could happen.

But.

If you look at pictures of him.

He looks like he's 65.

Yeah, I. I was gonna just mention that he lived a hard life.

You could tell.

Everybody's stunned when they realized he just turned 43 the month he died.

Yeah, it's almost like Lombardi.

You know, Lombardi died at a young age in his early 50s.

And you would thought by the pictures he was much older than.

Than he actually was when he passed.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very, very incredible.

Now, you know, so where did.

Okay, so we.

We know he was part of a passing game and innovation as a player.

He was the coach that brought a lot of those concepts and even some of the route trees and stuff that.

That we currently know in today's football game.

And some of the strategy with the Notre Dame box, you know, that adaptations of the single wing and double wing.

And so where.

Where did he.

Where did he come up with some of these concepts?

Just, you know,.

He may have picked up pieces from people, but ultimately it was.

It was himself implementing these things and I think creating them.

Like that box and the shift.

I've never seen that attributed to anybody else.

And he speaks, you'll even see in this Cronkite documentary he talks about the game was.

He didn't like the game just being a bunch of bulls in the center pushing each other back and forth.

He wanted to create a game that was fun to watch and it had finesse and it had speed and brains, and it wasn't just a bunch of big oxes pushing each other around in the mud.

And he felt very strongly that the game had a different future in front of it, but it needed to change.

All right, so you have some really amazing pieces of the heritage and a legacy of Coach Rockne.

Maybe you could talk to some of those and maybe some interesting facts about some of them.

Well, there's one piece you brought up to me before that I'll mention.

It doesn't seem connected to Rockne, but in some ways it is.

It was just a little hand pass out.

They played Michigan, and it was just meant to tell people the players names and the rules of the games because most people never seen the game was being played in South Bend and never played it before.

So even the students didn't know it.

He was born the month before and so you talk about an arc of history.

And so that program's special for a lot of reasons of Rockney side the pieces.

I've worked very hard to try and get one of a kind pieces of his.

So I've things include.

That was for 10 years.

And he was going to get $10,000 a year.

And that's.

And that's the year right before the year that the Four Horsemen really came.

To the spring before they won the national championship.

Yeah.

So then I've got his.

His passport that he used for that tour trip.

I've got the watch he was wearing when he died in a plane crash.

I've got the telegram he sent to his wife Bonnie, just before he boarded that flight of which he says, you know, leaving now, staying at the Biltmore.

Love and kisses, Canute.

It's very short.

The last known words of Rockne.

I've got some other telegrams related that.

But these are most of these items.

The family saved them.

They had a treasure trove of things.

And it's rare because there's virtually nothing of Rockne before Notre Dame.

And this was 12 pages of application he filled out.

But also exams he took in geography in math, spelling, and I mean, most college kids couldn't do as well as he did in some of like the geography and things like that.

But it gave his personal details and his history, his size.

He did fib, though.

They asked his place of birth and he put Chicago.

Federal Fence,.

Norway.

But we also find his great granddaughter, who I changed history notes with back and forth.

Also discovered and came across.

He put Chicago also on his draft registration as his place of birth and on his marriage license.

Wow.

We talked about it.

We don't think he was trying to necessarily deceive.

I think at the time he was probably told if you put, you were born in Norway.

We got a lot of other paperwork to fill out.

And I literally think, because he made it clear his whole life he was born in Norway.

I think when he's filling out these government forms Even when he's doing for the post office, the lady or minister he was working with probably said, if you put down Norway, I got a lot more we got to do.

Just put down your Born in Chicago.

And I think it just happened.

But it's a.

Great.

Because it's 12 pages in his handwriting.

He's filled all this stuff out, and they took this exam with all these answers of questions, and it offers real insight to the guy when he was really 18 years old.

And there's nothing else like that.

So I keep picking up things.

I mean, I thought I was kind of done with some major items.

Then this past summer, I picked up a Victrola.

And so that's just a classic.

It's just.

It's kind of him.

I mean, it's a piece of his furniture right there.

And I've also acquired then the only known surviving hat.

He had a signature style hat he wore.

And I didn't know one even existed, but I was able to get one this summer.

So the hunt never.

If you're a collector, the hunt never really ends.

Even though you think you've kind of gotten where you want to be, there's still stuff that surfaces.

Now, the Victrola, you have kind of an interesting story because you.

You thought you knew what you had, but you weren't 100 sure.

Maybe you could tell that tale.

Well, the Victrola was with a family called the Hickey family after Bonnie Rockne died.

And it made sense because a Hickey family bought the Rockne house that she was living in.

And they were close to the Rockne family, they knew each other very well.

And they said, hey, this was left in the house and this is it.

I thought, well, it sounds right.

I thought it was 90% certain when I acquired it, but it needed work on it.

The motor wasn't working and things.

And so I had a.

A friend, a fellow I knew named Ron Wenger, who, interestingly, his wife is the artist who created the play.

Like a champion today.

Sign for Notre Dame.

Oh, really?

The one that players slap on the way out?

Yeah.

And so he said, hey, can I look at this and help you?

I work on Victrolis.

And he came over and he said, let's look at this motor.

And so he unscrews this thing and opens his motor box.

And he literally said something Written down there.

And we looked down, and in pencil, faded pencil, on the lubricant lubrication instructions is written Rockne, 10 6St.

Vincent St. And that's where he lived for eight years in South Bend.

And it was like, boom.

That just made it really special.

We just cemented it.

This clearly was the Victrola he had.

And he.

Lightning bolt struck and the clouds parted.

Exactly.

So it's very special for a collector.

That's really something special when you find something like that.

So it sits in my den in South Bend.

And so when I watch a Notre Dame football game, I kind of think, okay, Rock, here we go.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Now, folks, we're putting.

Been putting up on the screen here an image that Andy shared with us that has the Victrola, it has the hat, and it has that.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So amazing.

You can find more of that on Andy's site.

Like we told you on the show, notes to go and check that out and some of the other great, amazing pieces.

Now, Andy, you also, you shared a book that you put together some time ago on Coach Rockne.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.

Well, the book actually is a little bit more than Rockne and I did.

This started during COVID I needed a project and people were asking me to send pictures of certain artifacts and things I had.

And I said, I'm just going to do a book.

And I did it as a very limited thought production for people that are really dedicated collectors or real Notre Dame fanatics, I'll call it.

And so I did this book that was called Men Moments and Myths about Notre Dame Football History.

Much of it is Rocky, Rocky material.

And there's.

There's over 100 images of pieces from the collection and anecdotal history.

It puts them in context of those pieces.

And again, I didn't get into the book production business, but I did it for a limited market.

But I do have some books that people are interested.

They go to my website and reach out to the contact page, let me know what they want.

I did a second edition because people said, okay, can I get more copies?

They were giving them as gifts to people or fellow alums or friends.

And so I've taken some, I guess, satisfaction to some other people, have some interest or passion in some of the same obsession I've had for many years with early Notre Dame football history.

It's an amazing book.

It's an amazing collection.

And you're an amazing person for putting it all together and for doing and being unselfish and sharing it with the world through, through your site, through the book.

Coming on podcasts like this and talking about it just helps preserve that history and we really appreciate you doing that.

It's a thrill for me to share it.

A lot of people say, why are you sharing this?

They want to protect it more.

I go, look, I'm a temporary custodian of these items.

That's what I am.

And my mission is to help understand and share the history of a very special guy in particular Rockne.

He is very special of which now that history gets lost over time and so it's even beyond football.

He was a special individual that is worth studying or understanding and I think anything I can do shared I really enjoy.

Well, we really enjoy you doing it.

We appreciate you even giving us the correct pronunciation of his first name, which we've, you know, people have been calling him wrong for, for years.

So we appreciate that and really appreciate you coming on here today and sharing the story and your story with us,.

Darren.

It's been a pleasure.

Enjoyed it very much.

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