Reagan Repeats ‘Gipper’ Lines at South Bend

President Reagan made a sentimental journey to honor a football coach today and, repeating a famous tear-jerking line from his screen career, urged his audience to “win just one for the Gipper.”

The President visited Notre Dame University to help commemorate the 100th birthday of the late Knute Rockne, who coached the school’s powerhouse football teams in the 1920s, including those led by legendary star George Gipp.

Reagan also helped dedicate a postage stamp marking Rockne’s centennial.

In 1940, Reagan achieved Hollywood stardom with his supporting role as Gipp in an emotionally charged film about Rockne. Pat O’Brien played the coach, who was killed in a plane crash in 1931.

His Own Battle Cry

Legend has it that young Gipp, dying of pneumonia, told Rockne from his deathbed that whenever things were looking bad for the Notre Dame team, the coach should exhort the players to “go out there . . . and win just one for the Gipper.”

Reagan not only intoned that line on the screen in “Knute Rockne--All American” but has made it his own battle cry in a long career in politics and has adopted the nickname “the Gipper.”

Reagan was introduced as a film clip from the movie that made him a star played in the background and Ed (Moose) Krause, Notre Dame’s longtime athletic director and a veteran of Rockne teams, said, “Never in our wildest dreams had we ever thought that George Gipp would be President of the United States.”

Reagan replied: “When I was young and reading about George Gipp, I never thought that I’d come back as the Gipper.”

‘Right Out of the Opera’

He told the students he had desperately wanted to play the role of Gipp, calling it a young actor’s dream.

“It had a great entrance, an action middle and a death scene right out of the opera,” he said.

The 77-year-old President, now in his final year in office, relished the line and his association with the Gipp image in his speech to the Notre Dame students.

“As Americans, as free people, you must stand firm, even when it is uncomfortable for you to do so,” he said. “It won’t always be easy.

‘Joy ... Triumph ... Despair’

“There will be moments of joy, of triumph. There will also be times of despair. Times when all of those around you are ready to give up.

“It is then I want you to remember our meeting today,” Reagan said, adapting “the Gipper’s” lines to the occasion.

Bringing back the old lines, the President said: “Some time when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper.

“I don’t know where I’ll be then,” said Reagan, playing the scene to the hilt, “but I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.”