Did The Gipper’s Ghost Foretell a Storybook Ending for Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish?

Jan. 3, 2013 - PRLog -- Notre Dame defeats an SEC team to win the national championship.  

That’s the storybook ending of THE GIPPER’S GHOST, a novel about Notre Dame football that is now available as an eBook on Amazon.com.  Amazingly, in the book, the name of Notre Dame’s head football coach who -- in his third season at Notre Dame, with the help of divine intervention -- leads the Irish to a national championship is COACH KELLY!  Amazing, because THE GIPPER’S GHOST was written 27 years ago!

Written by Robert A. Quakenbush, a Notre Dame alumnus and former sports editor of Notre Dame’s school yearbook, The Dome, THE GIPPER’S GHOST introduced the Ten Commandments of Notre Dame.  In the book, the most important is the Tenth Commandment of Notre Dame: Thou shalt never lose to USC.  

Interestingly enough, after the book was originally published in 1985, and while it remained in print, Notre Dame didn’t lose to USC for more than a decade!  And after THE GIPPER’S GHOST was reissued in an Amazon Kindle edition a few weeks ago (on November 18, 2012), Notre Dame beat USC the following Saturday to finish a perfect 12-0 season!

THE GIPPER’S GHOST is clearly a work of football fiction (in the book, God assigns the souls of Knute Rockne and George Gipp – the greatest coach and the greatest player in the school’s history – the awesome task of resurrecting a winning tradition at Notre Dame).  But fiction or not, it is true: in the book, the fictional Coach Kelly and the fictional Fighting Irish win the national championship by defeating a team from the SEC in a bowl game…perhaps foretelling a storybook ending for this year’s undefeated Notre Dame football team.

Here’s hoping that on Monday night, the real Coach Kelly and the real Fighting Irish of Notre Dame will turn fiction into fact by beating Alabama in the BCS national championship game!

Go Irish!

Learn more about THE GIPPER’S GHOST at http://www.gippersghost.com