Have You Heard, George Gipp died 95 years old today (12/14/1925).
Gipp may have been the best football player of 1925 but came down with strep throat in late November, and died several weeks later.
On his death bed, Gipp told his coach Knute Rockne to “win just one for the Gipper.”
Ronald Reagan made that line even more famous when he played Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American.
Gipp was only 25 when he died.
His body was exhumed in 2007, for DNA testing to figure out if he had fathered a child out of wedlock with an 18-year-old high school student.
The results show Gipp was not the father.
If Alan Kulwicki were alive, he’d be 61 today.
Kulwicki won the 1992 Winston Cup championship but died in a plane crash the following April as he flew to Bristol (TN) from a Hooters (his car’s sponsor) appearance in Knoxville.
Three others died in the crash, including Mark Brooks, the son of Hooters founder Bob Brooks of Myrtle Beach.
Mark Brooks was only 26. Alan Kulwicki was only 38.
One of the four most recent members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Craig Biggio, is 50 today.
12 men have been on the moon. The last two left there 43 years ago today.
Harrison Schmitt was a geologist, and the first scientist to fly in the NASA program.
Late in the evening of December 13, 1972 (Eastern time, but 12/14 Greenwich time), after three moonwalks, Schmitt stepped back into the lunar module Challenger, followed by the mission commander, Eugene Cernan.
Cernan, therefore, was the last person to step on the moon.
17 hours later (on December 14), the Challenger left the surface to re-connect with the command ship America.
No human has been to the moon since.
Today is “Monkey Day” and “Green Monday.”
You can see “Have You Heard” each weeknight after weather on News13 at 11:00.
