It's Friday, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be inspiring or enlightening. Today's lines come from two popular world leaders, now gone to their reward, who both loved sports. My inspiration came from a new exhibit opening today at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Titled "All American: The Power of Sports," the display contains curated artifacts ranging from Jim Thorpe's (replacement) Olympic medals and heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson's handwritten autobiography to the New York Fire Department jacket President George W. Bush wore (over his bulletproof vest) while tossing out the first pitch in a World Series game at Yankee Stadium weeks after the 9/11 attacks.
Ostensibly, the exhibit is divided into four sections: "The Power to Unite," "The Power to Teach," "The Power to Break Barriers," and "The Power to Promote." For the viewing public, however, it may feel like two dueling narratives. The first is, indeed, "the power to unite." That's where Bush and the other presidents come in. The second part is basically, if unofficially, "how women and minorities brought this racist and sexist nation to its senses."
In our woke times, that kind of thing is to be expected, but I had an early preview of this exhibit I can this: There's something uplifting in it for everyone. Yes, even MAGA devotees, provided they can temporarily forget that the National Archives is currently locked in a death struggle with Donald Trump.
Conservatives will appreciate that among the U.S. presidents mentioned favorably is Ronald Reagan, who in his Hollywood days played Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander and doomed Notre Dame football star George Gipp on the big screen.
Seven years ago today, the large and unruly Republican presidential field squared off for a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Four aspirants were on the undercard. Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, and Lindsey Graham were relegated to an earlier time slot dubbed the "Happy Hour" debate.
They were followed by a lineup of 11 candidates who were doing better in polling and fundraising: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and Scott Walker. Am I forgetting anyone? Oh yes, Mr. Trump. The moderators were Jake Tapper and Dana Bash of CNN, the network sponsoring the debate, along with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Reagan was there, too, at least in spirit: All the GOP candidates dutifully paid their respects to the 40th U.S. president. But as the 2016 campaign season unfolded, it became clear that neither the contemporaneous crop of GOP presidential aspirants, nor Republican primary voters themselves, had sustained the optimism Reagan showed while carrying 49 states during his 1984 "Morning Again in America" reelection campaign. This was an angrier electorate in a political environment that had grown, if not meaner, then certainly more petty. Reagan had always been underestimated by Democrats, but by 2015 the essence of his appeal was also undervalued by the very Republicans who espoused fealty to his vision. Or maybe the country had changed.
Reagan had first run for office in California as a "citizen politician" against two-term incumbent governor Pat Brown. A San Francisco Democrat, Brown made the mistake of attacking Reagan for being an actor. It was a curious strategy in a state where Hollywood, not Sacramento, was the cultural capital, and it backfired. Voters remembered Reagan as the dependable B-movie hero who almost always portrayed the good guy -- and seemed as though he was playing to type.
In the Warner Bros. sanitized 1952 biopic of Grover Cleveland Alexander, Reagan teamed up with Doris Day, who played the pitcher's wife. Here's how well things went for him on that set. Bob Lemon, a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians and a future Hall of Famer himself, served as Reagan's stand-in. At one point the script called for Alexander to hit a catcher's mitt nailed to the side of a barn. "Piece of cake," Lemon said. Maybe it was nerves, but as the cameras rolled, Lemon proceeded to hit everything except the glove.
"Mind if I try it?" Reagan asked in an affable voice. "One pitch, smack in the middle of that mitt," Lemon later told sportswriter Ron Fimrite. "I've never been so embarrassed in all my life." He shouldn't have been. That kind of thing happened to Reagan all his life, as it often does for people who look for the best in others -- and in any given situation.
But real life can deal bad cards, too, the kind no script doctor or sunny leading man can fix. That was the case with George Gipp, a gifted Notre Dame football and baseball player who died in 1920 from a strep infection in a pre-penicillin era.
Twenty years after his death, George Gipp would be immortalized by another Warner Bros. picture, "Knute Rockne, All American," with Pat O'Brien in the title role. Gipp, played by Reagan, tells Rockne from his deathbed, "Rock, some day when the team's up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, ask ‘em to go in there with all they've got, win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, but I'll know about it. I'll be happy."
Did it really happen that way? Maybe. In 1928, Rockne invoked Gipp's dying exhortation in an emotional halftime speech against Army, which was undefeated. It worked. Notre Dame scored two second-half touchdowns to win the game. One of them was by a Fighting Irish senior named Jack Chevigny, the son of a World War I veteran. Returning to the sideline, Chevigny told Rockne, "That's one for the Gipper!"
Ronald Reagan would later use the line occasionally in his political career. Although some Reaganites affectionately refer to him as "the Gipper," the entire saga is infused by tragedy.
Gipp, Rockne, and Chevigny all died while they still had much to give. The Norwegian-born Rockne perished in a 1931 plane crash that prompted sad condolences from President Herbert Hoover and the King of Norway. Jack Chevigny also became a football coach, but after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. He was commissioned as a liaison officer -- coaching the Marine Corps football team at Camp Lejeune. Feeling obliged to do more, Chevigny asked for a commission in a combat unit "to be there with the boys" and was granted his request. He was killed on Iwo Jima just months later at age 38.
Lt. Chevigny was last seen in a crater created during Japanese shelling, huddled with several other Marines. A day later, a Marine captain named Sonny Franck who had also played football at Notre Dame and knew Chevigny, asked what had happened to him.
"He and some other guys got hit in a shell hole," Franck was told. "He's gone. They're all gone."
Gone, too, are those who knew the real George Gipp. None of the boys who played for Knute Rockne are still with us and only a handful of the thousands of Marines who survived Iwo Jima remain in this earthly vale. Reagan is gone, too, as are most of the world leaders he served with: Gorby, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II. We mourn them all, especially those who died young.
"Nothing that can be said can begin to take away the anguish and the pain of these moments," Queen Elizabeth said after the deadly attacks of 9/11. "Grief," she added, "is the price we pay for love."
And that's our quote of the week.
