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The Biograohy of Notre Dame´s legendary football coach When Knute Rockne died in 1931 at the age of forty-three, the President of the United States described his passing as "a national loss." His funeral was broadcast live to Europe, South America and Asia. And, as one newspaper wrote, "the boys of the country were numbed. Their hero had been taken from them." With one eye on the scoreboard and the other focused clearly on the historical record, Knute Rockne and his Fighting Irish explores the entanglement of fact and myth that was Knute Rockne. A Lutheran by birth who became the symbol of Catholic pride in the 1920´s; a self-created super salesman who was one of the first media stars; a garrulous and funny p.r. man who obligingly recreated his legendary pep talks for the newsreel cameras, Knute Rockne was responsible for transforming the game of football from an obscure and innocent pastime into the colorful amalgam of passion, spectacle, and big business we know today. Along the way he turned the University of Notre Dame into the most famous Catholic school in the country, leading to confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan in 1924 and, in our own time, to multi-million dollar contracts, for football game broadcasts. Knute Rockne and his Fighting Irish evokes a post-World War I world in which optimism was rampant, a time when consumer culture was born and the media achieved a position of prominence. Offering illuminating insights on both the genesis of the forward pass and the nature of ethnic pride, it chronicles the rise of the sports industry in America, and the life and legend of the man who brought football into the modern world.