Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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to the bone. While in New York, Rockne met with James R. Knapp, an unpaid representative of the Columbia University athletic department. Since Percy Haughton's death a little over a year earlier, Columbia had hired as its head coach a Notre Dame man, Charlie Crowley, who played under Rockne on the 1918 and 1919 teams. Crowley had guided the Lions to a 6-3-1 record in 1925, but the opportunity to lure as big a name as Rockne to the Columbia campus was too much to pass up. To Rockne, New York meant the big-time just as surely as California would have. The chance to mix with his friends, from writers Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner to politicians such as Jimmy Walker and entertainers Will Rogers and Flo Ziegfield, held much appeal. As for Columbia football, Rockne saw it as a sleeping giant, able to challenge the Big Three of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard with some concentrated direction. Money was no object to Columbia. The school offered Rockne a threeyear contract for $20,000 and Rockne signed, asking only that the matter remain private until he returned to South Bend to obtain a release from his contract from Father Walsh. The similarity to the beginning of 1925 was unmistakable. This time, however, the conflict between school and administration was so strong that Rockne believed a release was probable. But Rockne had planned a stop in Philadelphia before returning to South Bend, and in the meantime, someone at Columbia leaked the story to the press. That set about several days of chaos and acrimony between the two universities and their representatives. … In one release, Columbia made the dubious claim that it never would have offered Rockne a contract if it knew he was still under contract to Notre Dame. Father Walsh made an equally incredulous statement, after he already had received assurances that the coach was staying, that the decision to stay or go was completely up to Rockne. In the end, Rockne again returned to the place that had been home since he arrived at Notre Dame "as a 22-yearold lone Norse Protestant" in the fall of 1910. He would continue to make his forays across the land, teaching the game and its values to literally thousands of aspiring coaches. But Notre Dame would remain his home till his last days. ✦ Note: Jim Lefebvre is an award-winning author, speaker and sports historian. His first book, Loyal Sons: The Story of The Four Horsemen and Notre Dame Football's 1924 Champions, received three national honors for excellence. He operates the website Forever Irish (www.NDFootballHistory.com) and the e-newsletter Irish Echoes, and is the father of two ND alums. This fall, after years of research and writing, he released his newest book, the comprehensive biography Coach For A Nation: The Life and Times of Knute Rockne, from which this article is excerpted. For more info, visit www.CoachForANation.com.