Word: gipper
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ronald Reagan is generally regarded as the most popular President in recent history. But according to Washington photographers who sell pictures of people posing with life-size cardboard cutouts of the Presidents, George Bush has surpassed the Gipper. One day last week, for every 25 people who asked to pose with the Bush cutout, four opted for the cardboard Reagan...
...soon will be revealed that then-Vice President Bush was the one making Reagan drowsy by secretly slipping sleeping pills in the president's jelly bean jar. With the Gipper snoozing away, Bush was able to sneak into the Oval Office, say the pledge of allegiance and sing Yale fight songs while rolling around on the carpet...
Since the celluloid Gipper has repaired to California and the call to win things for him has happily left the language, maybe it is not too impolite now to remember that the real George Gipp of Notre Dame was a low-life gambler who openly bet on his own football games and everything else from cards and craps to flies landing on sugar cubes. Gipp seldom attended class and only occasionally graced football practice. The sentimental writer Red Smith, a Notre Dame man himself, used to refer to the great dead hero as "the patron saint of eight-ball pool...
While it is possible that on his deathbed young George beseeched coach Knute Rockne to win one someday for the Gipper, it would have been more in character for Gipp to want to get $500 down on the streptococci. Myths, legends and lies are the beams and girders of games, but isn't it a bit much the way the country has been getting ready to be appalled by Pete Rose? O.K., he's a plunger. Everyone knows gambling pervades sports. It pervades life...
...Maybe he should get back in the movies to show them how? "I think that would look like trying to cash in on the presidency," he says. "Besides, if they did a remake of a Knute Rockne picture, this time I would have to play Rockne instead of the Gipper...