How Notre Dame's Four Horsemen became college football legends

"Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again.

In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below."

IT WAS A century ago today, in the early evening of Oct. 18, that Grantland Rice, the greatest sportswriter of his time or perhaps any time, rat-a-tat-tatted those words out from his typewriter high above the Polo Grounds. Barely one week earlier, the old ballpark had hosted the World Series between the New York Giants and the visiting Washington Senators. That's why the red, white and blue bunting was still hanging from the rafters, flapping in the autumn breeze as the 44-year-old Rice pulled the final pages from the scroll of his instrument, having just authored what is still considered to be the greatest opening paragraph ever penned by an American sportswriter.

Even he, at the height of his powers, with a newspaper column that reached an astonishing 10 million readers per day, had no idea what he was about to unleash once those words began rolling off the printing presses of the New York Herald Tribune and beyond. The Tennessean-turned-New Yorker they called "Granny" was too preoccupied with processing what he had just witnessed, Knute Rockne's Notre Dame foursome of running backs unleashing a ballet of shifts, blocks, rushes and passes upon the era's golden college football standard, the Black Knights of West Point.

By morning, that quartet would be the United States' most famous college athletes, with an overnight popularity that went on to rival even the most recognized faces of the 1920s, the decade that birthed the very idea of American celebrity, from Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey to Charles Lindbergh and Rudolph Valentino, with a sizable accidental assist from that last guy.

"I have often wondered what would have happened, how would I have spent all these years, had those words not been written about us," confessed Four Horseman Elmer Layden during an interview in 1947, after retiring as the first commissioner of the NFL. "Do any of us become the coaches that we did? Do the four of us remain the great friends that we are? Does our beloved Notre Dame become the football team that it is and does Rock become the legend he was? I don't know. And I am thankful to not know. All because of those words."

Before they were Horsemen

OUTLINED AGAINST A very dark, aurora borealis-tinted sky, those who love the Four Horsemen rode again, in SUVs and Ubers to the Brown County Library in downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin. There, in an auditorium packed with, well, Packers, on Tuesday night, Oct. 8, 2024, the people of Titletown were learning about one of their own.

"Before he was Sleepy Joe Crowley, as Knute Rockne called him in jest, or a Four Horseman of Notre Dame, he was just Jimmy from Green Bay," writer Jim Lefebvre, author of "Loyal Sons," a book with a cover adorned with the famous Four Horsemen photograph, told the theater full of enthusiasts. Like Lefebvre himself, the room was mostly town natives. "Crowley learned the game of football in a city park that we all know, only a few blocks from where we are sitting right now."

Crowley -- he of the good looks, sharp wit and 162-pound frame -- starred in every sport but was indoctrinated into the finer points of carrying the pigskin out of the T formation by his coach at Green Bay East High, Curly Lambeau. Yes, that Curly Lambeau, who in the early 1920s was holding down the dual head-coaching jobs at East and for a city-based semipro team he'd founded in 1919 and persuaded his meat-packing boss to sponsor. He called them the Green Bay Packers.

Lambeau learned the ways of the shifty Notre Dame Box offense from its originator, having played one season in the Fighting Irish backfield in 1918, Rockne's first year at the helm in South Bend. Curly shared that backfield with George Gipp before health issues and homesickness sent Lambeau back home to Green Bay. When it was time for Crowley, a good Wisconsin Catholic boy, to attend college, Lambeau called his former coach and told him to give the kid a chance.

A similar call had come in from Davenport, Iowa. Walter Halas, brother of Chicago Bears godfather George, was Rockne's top talent scout, joining the Notre Dame staff from Davenport Central High, and he told Rockne they had to bring in his star fullback, Elmer Layden. Layden stayed on at Notre Dame despite homesickness so awful that when Rockne said, "Don't worry. I've never had a freshman quit," teenage Layden replied, "Then I'm about to help you break another football record."

He was joined by another bulldog of a back, but one who required no convincing to matriculate into northern Indiana. Don Miller's three older brothers had already played for the Irish, including Harry "Red" Miller, Notre Dame's first All-American. "I didn't even know there were other places to go to college," Miller joked years later.

The final future Horseman was also their anchor, athletically and spiritually. Harry Stuhldreher wasn't big physically. During a Rockne-demanded weigh-in, Stuhldreher said of the smallish four-man backfield, "I don't know who is more embarrassed, us or the scales." He hailed from the only corner of the nation more football-crazy than Green Bay, having grown up watching and then playing on the vicious football field-turned-fighting rings of northeastern Ohio. That's where the town teams of Canton and Stuhldreher's hometown of Massillon held contests so infamously violent that Rice himself came from New York to cover them, writing: "But no fight ever fought before beneath the shining sun, will be like that when Canton's team lines up with Massillon."

In 1915, Rockne, fresh out of Notre Dame as a player, signed with the Massillon Tigers as an end. Over the next two seasons he went head to head with Jim Thorpe and his Canton Bulldogs. A local teenager took to Rockne and helped him carry his gear to and from the stadium. It was Harry Stuhldreher. A few years later, he was Rockne's QB at Notre Dame.

As freshmen in 1921, the foursome never played together. As sophomores in 1922, Miller broke into the lineup, but the other three had to wait another year to become regulars. As juniors, they became a shape-shifting yardage machine. They lined up in the T formation, and, when the signal was given, they moved into the Notre Dame Shift. To the right, Crowley was left half (tailback), Miller was right (wingback), Stuhldreher would tuck in behind the guard and tackle, while Layden lined up behind the tackle. To the left, they'd do the same but to the other side. The snap could go directly to any of them, and they might run, pitch or pass, all while blocking to perfection.

"We don't need big backs," the always-clever Rockne would say, "because we don't make big holes."

They lost only two games together in two years, both to Nebraska, as they ran into 1924.

The fifth Horseman

OUTLINED AGAINST A perfectly cloudless Southern California blue sky, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery seems to go on indeed forever. There's a statue of Johnny Ramone, a pyramid, a granite couch covered with bronze likenesses of the departed's beloved dogs, and headstones for Cecil B. DeMille and Mickey Rooney. Hidden deep within a mausoleum is the crypt -- No. 1,205 to be exact -- of Rudolph Valentino, one of the biggest stars of silent film.

On a flawless day this past August, a religious tract was stuffed into one of the flower holders. It is a story taken from the Book of Revelation, Chapter 6, and had been the inspiration behind the million-dollar film that turned Valentino into a megastar, 1921's "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

George Strickler, a devotee of that film, did not play football. He was also not raised in some Midwestern semipro-powered gridiron hotbed. He was from South Bend, having spent his entire life on the Notre Dame campus, where his father ran the college slaughterhouse. This feels like a good spot to illustrate exactly what that college was like at the time, and it wasn't much.

The school was founded in 1842 by a 28-year-old French priest who had come into 524 frozen acres in the middle of what was known as the Indiana mission fields. Eight decades later, as the soon-to-be Four Horsemen ran their drills ahead of the 1924 season, literally beneath the shadow of the Golden Dome, the student body was around 2,500 and the campus was little more than a handful of buildings surrounded by farms and bordered by 15,000-seat Cartier Field.

The school continued to grow despite a seething national resistance to all things Irish Catholic. That very spring, on May 17, 1924, thousands of white-hooded Ku Klux Klansman had marched on tiny South Bend with the intent of sending a streak of fear through the de facto geographic center of the American Catholic church, particularly the young men being educated as future leaders of government and industry.

Rockne and his boss, Notre Dame president Father Matthew Walsh, worked together to keep the campus and town from coming unglued. They knew their community and Catholics in America as a whole needed a rallying point, some sort of inspiration. And they both knew their 1924 football team could be great enough to step into that role.

Rockne's football mind was outmatched only by his promotional talents. And he realized early on that his little school with the little stadium in the little town in the Indiana wilderness would never have the press coverage of the big-city teams. So he took his players on the road to those big cities, and when they got there, he charmed those metropolitan writers and reporters, chief among them Grantland Rice.

As part of that push, Rockne invented what is now known as the sports information department. Each season he would hire a student publicist, a kid who would write for the local newspaper but also get stories and ideas about the Fighting Irish sent out over Western Union and Postal Telegraph lines. It was a sweet gig. It paid good money (but only per amazing story) and it included a coveted traveling spot with the team as it jumped on trains for Chicago; Pittsburgh; Princeton, New Jersey; Madison, Wisconsin; and New York.

In 1924, that job belonged to the 20-year-old Strickler. On Wednesday, Oct. 15, on the eve of a train ride to New York, where 2-0 Notre Dame would play 2-0 Army at the Polo Grounds, Strickler and a handful of Irish players slipped into Washington Hall, where the college would show second-run movies. On this night, the feature was Rudolph Valentino in "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

The 2-hour film concluded with a mourning father standing graveside and looking to the sky, where he witnessed famine, pestilence, destruction and death ride off into the heavens. As he sees this, a man speaks to him, "Peace has come. But the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity, stirring unrest in the world, until all hatred is dead and only love reigns in the heart of mankind."

Strickler was flabbergasted. The next day, the college student thought about the film nonstop, throughout the entire 21-hour, 700-mile train ride to New York.

The power of suggestion

OUTLINED AGAINST A sunburst orange sky as day breaks through the Polo Grounds Towers, all that remains of the ballpark that a century ago had just been expanded is a rusted plaque affixed to the northwestern corner of the apartment buildings that overlook the Harlem River. It is the location of the home plate that was trotted upon by Giants, Yankees and Mets. There is no mention of the Oct. 18, 1924, football game between Notre Dame and Army. Only baseball.

And yet it must be noted that during that week, Rice chose not to travel to Washington, D.C., for Game 7 of the World Series. He was too excited for the upcoming football game. So was the entire city of New York, egged on by Rice and his fellow press box hype experts, and coverage of the game on the still-new commercial radio, which was a couple of weeks shy of its fourth birthday. By game day, 55,000 tickets were sold, thanks to the thousands of New Yorker Notre Dame devotees known as the "Subway Alumni," Catholics who had latched onto the little college from Indiana as their flagship football team ... exactly as Rockne and Father Walsh had hoped.

On the Army sideline stood head coach Cap McEwan, who had played against Rockne when the Knights faced off with Notre Dame in 1913, the first of the schools' 51 meetings. Alongside McEwan was assistant coach Robert Neyland, aka the Legend Tennessee's Stadium is Named For.

The game was a brawl. Notre Dame center Adam Walsh broke both hands but kept playing. Army failed to gain a first down in the first half. The Irish managed only one touchdown, a 1-yard dive from Layden, but Stuhldreher missed the PAT. Though they led only 6-0 at halftime, the Fighting Irish had thrilled the crowd with their running precision, routinely breaking off long runs that seemed to launch the ball carrier spring-loaded from out of a rugby scrum of bodies.

During the halftime break, the sportswriters of New York gathered in a corner to smoke, sip and discuss. As always, the center of gravity was Rice, who sang in his Murfreesboro, Tennessee, lilt about the scalpel precision of the Notre Dame Box and the four young men at the corners of that box. (Oh, by the way, these same young men were immediately turning around and playing the stonewall defense that had Army completely befuddled. Remember, platoon football and player substitutions were still two decades away.)

Eavesdropping on the beat writer breakdowns was George Strickler, doing just what Rockne had instructed. He listened, he took the temperature of the press box and then, if the moment seemed right, he would perhaps nudge that temperature up or down in the Irish's favor.

"Yeah," Strickler interjected after hearing yet another Grantland Rice mention of Notre Dame's backfield foursome. "They're just like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!"

'Dad, I need four horses ...'

OUTLINED AGAINST A very gray October Indiana sky, four ice truck tow horses had no idea they were about to become famous. But not nearly as famous as the kids climbing atop their bulky backs.

Notre Dame had won the day, beating Army by a score of 13-7, and won over a city in the process. Back in South Bend, where there was no radio coverage, thousands of fans packed gymnasiums to watch scoreboard operators move a light bulb along a "football field" as they tracked the game by newswire. The contest swallowed up so much energy that a second threatened Klan march scheduled to take place that day had fizzled out.

By the time their train made it back to Indiana to a greeting party of thousands complete with a marching band, the Fighting Irish were also winning over an increasingly celebrity-obsessed nation. Early Sunday morning, as the bandaged-up victors were headed for the train station, Strickler had stopped at a newsstand and snatched up copies of all the New York newspapers. There, on the very front page of the New York Herald Tribune, he saw the byline of Grantland Rice. Then he read the first paragraph. "Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. ..."

He did it! Granny actually did it!

Moments before the Irish train churned west, Strickler found a telegraph station and excitedly sent a message ahead to his father in South Bend. He needed four horses, with saddles, on the Notre Dame campus that Monday. Stop.

"I wasn't so sure about that and none of us were," Don Miller admitted in 1949, at a 25th anniversary celebration of the 1924 season. "George came and pulled us out of practice, Rock came with us, and there were four horses lined up next to the practice field. They were no thoroughbreds, either. These were workhorses and we weren't so sure they wanted anyone on them, let alone four football players in helmets and pads."

But there they were. College kids without any equestrian experience to speak of, except for Stuhldreher, who had handled a bridle while doing deliveries for his father's store, all understandably nervous. A head coach who was all about publicity but was also all about not having his starting backfield suddenly on their backs, thrown off their mounts. The helmets. The chunky outfits. Holding onto footballs instead of holding onto the reins. The whole moment was so uneasy. That's why it lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for a local commercial photographer to snap a couple of shots, before the Four Horsemen got the hell off their horses.

As they returned to practice, Strickler went to work sending his photo out onto the wires, eager to see if any papers might pick it up. Every pic published meant a little pocket money for the kid. He had no idea he had just conjured up perhaps the most famous publicity photograph in the history of college football.

When the team returned east the following weekend to face powerhouse Princeton, they immediately noticed a change in chatter whenever the train stopped for coal, water and passengers. Now there were people waiting at every station. And they weren't asking, "Are you the Notre Dame football team?" They wanted to know where they could see the Four Horsemen.

Notre Dame beat the Tigers 12-0. Then they drubbed Georgia Tech, Wisconsin and finally exorcized their Nebraska demons. Everywhere they went, they won. And everywhere they went, different versions of the Subway Alumni were waiting. They finished the season undefeated, earning an invitation to the 1925 Rose Bowl, only the third edition of the game played in the still-new-at-the-time stadium that bears its name, to face Stanford.

Rockne, always promoting, took the Irish on the long route to Pasadena. Like, really, really long. The team traveled south to New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee; Houston; El Paso, Texas; Tucson, Arizona; and, finally, Los Angeles. At every stop, people clamored to see the Horsemen, holding up newspapers featuring Strickler's photo. Part joke, part tribute, the other members of Notre Dame's 11 first-stringers began referring to themselves as the Seven Mules.

On New Year's Day, the Irish ran past Pop Warner's Stanford team 27-10. It was a big moment for a program that had been unable to schedule any California teams to that point. The official reason was "low academic standards." To Rockne that was code for "We don't play Catholics."

In 1926, the rivalry with USC began.

The train ride home for Notre Dame's first national championship team made the trip out west seem like a walk to the store. From Hollywood and San Francisco to Salt Lake City and Cheyenne, Wyoming, revelers in every city shouted cheers about the Four Horsemen, sang songs about the Four Horsemen and asked whether their favorite local college might one day play against the alma mater of the Four Horsemen. The team was gone so long, practically the entire month of January, that angry administrators declared Notre Dame would no longer participate in bowl games because it kept the players out of too many classes. That self-imposed ban lasted until 1970. But the team added seven more national titles during that span.

"As much as I wondered about how different life would have been without Mr. Rice's story," Layden continued in that 1947 radio interview, "I have also wondered what would have happened had we not held up our end of the bargain and won all of our games. Even one loss, and I wonder, would anyone know who the Four Horsemen are today?"

'But the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity...'

OUTLINED AGAINST A hard winter white sky, American GIs were pinned down somewhere in the forests of Western Europe. It was early 1945, and the troops were in particular danger because the Nazis had deciphered their latest codes and were infiltrating the confused U.S. platoons one at a time. So the officers devised a foolproof plan of friendly identification, a question that every single true-blooded American would be able to answer, even if they hadn't been told of the new protocol.

What team did the Four Horsemen play for?

The story was told this summer in South Bend, where a Stuhldreher was once again quarterbacking activities at Notre Dame. But it wasn't Harry. It was Mike, great-nephew of the Fighting Irish great and member of Notre Dame's Class of 1991, bellied up to the bar at the Morris Inn, the on-campus hotel. He was in town with other parents of Notre Dame students as part of the annual family volunteer camp. Every year, the university bookstore sells an item titled "The Shirt" and every Irish fan scrambles to get one. This year it featured the Four Horsemen.

Mike's time as a student coincided with the resurgence of modern Irish football success. Lou Holtz was the head coach. Tim Brown won the school's seventh Heisman Trophy. Catholics vs. Convicts. A natty. Rudy. The nation was digging back into the echoes.

"I suppose there are a lot of Crowleys and Laydens who can claim they are related to a Four Horseman. If you're a Miller, they may or may not believe you. But there's no faking it when your name is Stuhldreher," he said, laughing. "When people know, they know. When I was a student, people knew, and when I am on campus, like this summer, I get Four Horsemen questions. I love it. As the years go on, you get it less and less. But now, with the 100th anniversary, there's definitely been an uptick."

The descendants of Jim Crowley can be spotted frequently strolling through the freshly refurbished Crowley Park in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which features a monument and plaque commemorating its football ace namesake. Scranton is where Jim ultimately landed as a television station manager, following a long coaching career that included time as head coach at Michigan State and Fordham, where he and his right-hand assistant -- and future Notre Dame head coach -- Frank Leahy coached the legendary "Seven Blocks of Granite" line that included a youngster named Vince Lombardi. Crowley died in 1986.

Don Miller served as an assistant coach at Georgia Tech and Ohio State before practicing law in Cleveland. In 1925, his first year as a coach and first year out of South Bend, his Ramblin' Wreck hosted Notre Dame in Atlanta and lost to Rockne's team 13-0 at Grant Field. This Friday, only 1 mile away, the College Football Hall of Fame, into which all Four Horsemen were inducted, will host a ceremony commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Notre Dame-Army game. (On Saturday, the Irish play Tech in Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium.) Miller died in 1979.

Elmer Layden was head coach at three schools, including Notre Dame, where he posted 47 wins in seven seasons. He was asked to serve as the first NFL commissioner in 1941, and among his first hires was a publicity director for the burgeoning league, George Strickler. Among his challenges was navigating the formation of a rival professional football organization, the All-American Football League. The AAFL's commissioner? Sleepy Jim Crowley. Layden died in 1973.

The Four Horsemen gathered whenever they could over the years. In 1926, Stuhldreher and Layden were teammates on the short-lived Brooklyn Horsemen of the American Football League. All four played together one last time on Dec. 14, 1930, at the Polo Grounds, as part of a Notre Dame alumni team organized to play a charity exhibition against the New York Giants. More than 50,000 tickets were sold, with newspaper ads declaring: SEE THE FOUR HORSEMEN RIDE AGAIN.

They were back together only four months later, at Rockne's funeral after he was killed in a Kansas plane crash, and they also served as honorary pallbearers for Grantland Rice in 1954. They reunited for anniversaries of the 1924 season, various speaking engagements and private dinners. In 1965, when Harry Stuhldreher became the first of them to die, it was Layden who wrote that the Horsemen had been "left without a quarterback in every sense of the word."

Next month, the families of the Four Horsemen will ride again, into New York and into another ballpark. On Nov. 23, Notre Dame and Army will square off at Yankee Stadium, just over the Harlem River and within view of the Polo Grounds site. The Black Knights are currently undefeated. The Irish and their lone loss are knocking on the door of the top 10. That means their late-season contest might not merely be for bragging rights or Horsemen nostalgia but for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

"The Stuhldrehers will be there, coming into town 39 strong, multiple generations," reports Mike, quarterback of the invasion. He's hoping his family can meet up with the extended families of the other three Horsemen. "It's always amazing to watch the Irish play, to see what the program has become. But it will be particularly emotional to see them in New York that night, in a huge game, thinking about how it all started. Not just Notre Dame or football, but Catholics in America. I can't speak to whether or not people will always remember the Four Horsemen. But it's been 100 years and here we are talking about them. But what they started? I don't think that's ever stopping."