‘Gipper’ Ball For Sale

The ball from one of the most storied games in college football history - the one Notre Dame won for “the Gipper” - is up for sale.

A Seattle sports memorabilia company, representing the owner of the ball, will auction it tonight. He is asking a minimum bid of $100,000.

“It’s an important piece of football history for every kid who grew up hearing stories about the legend of George Gipp,” said Mike Livingston, owner of U-Trading Cards of Seattle.

The ball was used during Notre Dame’s 12-6 victory over Army on Nov. 10, 1928.

The Irish, decimated by injuries that season, already had lost two games, and a desperate coach Knute Rockne huddled his players in the locker room and, in the most famous pep talk in college sports, recalled Gipp’s deathbed request eight years earlier: “When the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.”

Rockne told his players, “This is the day and you are the team.”

After the game, 45 members of the team and Rockne signed the ball.

Livingston, who expects to receive 20 percent of the final bid, was contacted early last fall by the ball’s owner, a former South Bend resident who now lives in the Pacific Northwest and wishes to remain anonymous. Livingston said the man received the ball as a gift in 1972 from his father, who received it in 1957 from his father-in-law, who had won it as part of a Notre Dame football banquet raffle.