Word: gipper
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...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...
What happened to those glorious days of yesteryear, when California produced Red-baiting Richard Nixon, tap-dancing George Murphy, and the diminutive, tam- o'-shanter-wearing S.I. Hayakawa, who said of the Panama Canal, "We should keep it; we stole it fair and square"? Or, for that matter, the Gipper? On the liberal side, there was Jerry Brown, promoter of Zen politics and Spaceship Earth. Bill Schneider, political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, blames Governor Moonbeam for starting the trend away from trendy. "Brown singlehandedly is responsible for the election of at least two of the most boring politicians...