THIS WAS A MAN

On the 31st of March 1931, a commercial airliner crashed into a Kansas wheat field, killing all its six passengers plus the two-man crew. Among the fatalities was Knute Kenneth Rockne, Notre Dame’s head football coach, whose team had reached championship heights the preceding autumn. The fact that said gentleman was cut down at the very pinnacle of his career tended to enhance a virtually unsurpassed public image for the time, not only in the sport arena, but others as well. Furthermore, through direct personal observation decades later, we found that the degree of glorification accorded by his peers hadn’t seemed to abate one bit.

While residing in Cleveland, Ohio during the mid-1950s, this writer had a business colleague who’d recently graduated from Notre Dame. Aware of our virtual immersion in football lore, for two consecutive years he extended invitations to be his guest at a particular annual alumni gathering, and both were eagerly accepted.

At the time, and quite possibly ever since, on the Sunday morning closest to March 31, an annual Rockne Memorial Mass and Breakfast affair would be held, at the Cleveland Diocese Cathedral and a major hotel ball room respectively, in honor of the school’s most renowned figure. Not being Catholic, we would forego the religious part of the program, but rendezvous with the host for the subsequent ceremonies.

We can say unequivocally that the sense of amazement experienced on these two consecutive occasions remains vivid to this day. Although a quarter century had already passed since Rockne’s tragic demise, the collective near-reverent feelings about the man showed no sign whatsoever of having dwindled. After the breakfast serving and the prime eulogical address delivery, ex-players and former cohorts of the great coach kept stepping up to the podium, one after the other, to express their own heartfelt sentiments.

By and large, these volunteer speakers were brawny, middle-aging, baldheaded, red-faced and broken-nosed Irishmen, all of whom looked ready to engage in fisticuff encounters at the slightest provocation and hold their own most adequately. In nearly every instance, however, before finishing their individual commentaries, the big fellows’ voices would begin to crack, making it somewhat difficult to carry on. A few of these hulking behemoths even came perilously close to breaking down into tears.

As previously indicated, we witnessed this same sequence of events two years in a row.

The degree of emotion displayed on behalf of a man twenty-five or so years following his death has never been forgotten. Did such beloved persons as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy ever receive comparable adulation that long afterward? The answer has to be not normally, or at least not to such an extent. Off hand, in fact, we can barely recall anyone short of Jesus Himself as having retained such ongoing esteem.

We mentioned earlier that having lost “Rock” when he’d reached his career apex may well have contributed significantly to his lasting memory. Even so, perhaps as in the play Julius Caesar, when Marc Antony gazed upon the body of his vanquished adversary Brutus and stated that nature might stand up and say to all the world “This was a man”, such words might also apply to Notre Dame’s most legendary person.