Knute rockne religion in schools

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The plane he was traveling in flew into a storm and became covered in ice, before falling into a wheat field in Bazaar, Kansas.

Eyewitness accounts reported no explosion, just a loud crash and one farmer described five people chucked off the plane “just like rag dolls.” When Rockne’s body was identified, the coroner discovered a rosary still clutched in his hand.

There have been many great coaches in college football since Rockne’s day, but few lists are willing to oust the “All-American” from his spot at the top.

The team announced in the aftermath it would forgo any bowl appearance at all this season, which caused its own controversy.

All that news may be why the 1940 film, “Knute Rockne: All American,” can seemingly be found on every streaming service these days. “His Fighting Irish did much to revolutionize a great American sport, but the Notre Dame tradition is about more than stopping the wishbone offense or perfecting the forward pass,” Lu continued.

In 1994, two new books offered different views of Rockne, and indeed of the entire Notre Dame football tradition: Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football, by Murray Sperber, and Under the Tarnished Dome: How Notre Dame Football Betrayed Its Ideals for Football Glory, by Don Yaeger and Douglas S.

Looney. 

In a double review for America that year, Christopher Devron, S.J. (an alumnus of Notre Dame), noted that while Sperber gave Rockne credit for perfecting “the forward pass, the backfield shift and downfield blocking,” there was a lot else to the coach that “had little in common with the hagiographical character seen in the film ‘Knute Rockne—All American.’” Among the charges put forth by Sperber were that Rockne bet on games, gave sports writers jobs as game officials, recruited players with promises of summer jobs and used players who flouted N.C.A.A.

Leahy’s starting team was the best football team in America, and his practice squad was the second best. He did not begin college until he was 22, but starred for the University of Notre Dame in both football and track. 

Graduating in 1914 with a degree in pharmacy, Rockne played professional football for several years, helping popularize the forward pass, though the sport had little of the cachet of today’s National Football League.

He approached them with a level of respect which affected the whole team and in turn, they changed him.

In an essay titled, “Crossing The Goal Line,” reproduced by Catholicism.org, Rockne describes the circumstances around his conversion to the Catholic Church.

It all began when he decided to join the team at Mass.

I realized that it appeared more or less incongruous when we arrived in town for a game, for the general public to see my boys rushing off to church as soon as they got off the train, while their coach rode to the hotel and took his ease.

Judging from a letter from Rockne to the university president, Joseph Sullivan, S.J., in the school’s archives, Father Sullivan had asked if Rockne would be willing to trade snow for palm trees and take over Loyola’s program. For many of Notre Dame’s fans, baptismal water is thicker than blood and soil, or at least it is the most important part of their blood and soil.

Notre Dame used its football renown to build up its academic programs and become a famously rigorous educational institution, at some damage to its football team, which hasn’t won a national title since 1988.

and U.S.C. Among some of the legends Notre Dame produced under Rockne (who turned out to be a master promoter and a friend to many reporters) were George Gipp of the aforementioned movie fame; the “Four Horsemen” backfield of 1924, made famous by sportswriter Grantland Rice; and more than 30 players who would go on to become head coaches themselves, including one of Rockne’s successors, Frank Leahy.

“Rockne cultivated a nationwide fan base, in part based on his success; a century later he still holds the record for the highest winning percentage in the history of college football,” wrote Rachel Lu in America in 2019.

Over 100,000 mourners turned out for Rockne’s funeral procession before his funeral at the university’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart; headlines around the nation told the story of the crash; and U.S. President Herbert Hoover sent Rockne’s wife a public telegram saying “his passing is a national loss.”

To give a sense of Rockne’s importance to the American Catholic psyche at and after his death, consider this: America reviewed no less than five different books about Rockne between 1931 and 1932.

As a coach he was known as the “maker of men,” a nickname which described the way he treated his boys. …

Leahy’s spectacular success on the football field was definitive proof of how successful Rockne had been in making support for Notre Dame football a constitutive part of being an American Catholic.

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America’s reviewer couldn’t get enough in 1940, claiming that “Hollywood has filmed the lives of weightier historical characters than Knute Rockne, but it is to be doubted that it has ever before got closer to humanity in its nobler aspects.”

Well, maybe.

Knute Rockne was born in Norway and immigrated with his parents to Chicago …

Rockne was a coaching genius, of course, but he was even more brilliant as a marketer. So, the need for a Jewish Harvard declined.

Lacking a Jewish college football team to support, many rich, competitive Jews, the kind of guys who, if they lived in Alabama or Ohio, would be giving a prize linebacker recruit a new truck off their lot, became boosters of the Israel Defense Forces after Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War.