Death
Gipp died December 14, 1920, two weeks after being elected Notre Dame's first All-American by Walter Camp and second consensus All-American overall. A frequently told but probably apocryphal story of Gipp's death begins when he returned to Notre Dame's campus after curfew from a night out. Unable to gain entrance to his residence, Gipp went to the rear door of Washington Hall, the campus' theatre building. He was a steward for the building and knew the rear door was often unlocked. He usually spent such nights in the hall. On that night, however, the door was locked, and Gipp was forced to sleep outside. By the morning, he had contracted pneumonia and eventually died from a related infection.
It is more likely that Gipp contracted strep throat and pneumonia while giving punting lessons after his final game, November 20 against Northwestern University. Since antibiotics were not yet available in the 1920s, treatment options for such infections were limited and they could be fatal even to young, healthy individuals.
Gipp's hometown, Laurium, built a memorial in his honor; he is buried in nearby Lake View Cemetery in Calumet, Michigan.
Read more about this topic: George Gipp
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay:
The worst is death, and death will have his day.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“You listen to artists fighting with each other, competing to the death like gladiators, in order to see who is going to get into a show, who is going to make it, who isn’t: who is going to get a full-page ad and who is going to get a half-page. Then I think, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go off somewhere and just do your work?””
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“hung up like a pig on exhibit,
the delicate wrists,
the beard drooling blood and vinegar;
hooked to your own weight,
jolting toward death under your nameplate.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)