The touch football games on the deck of the USS Rutland were pretty intense as the attack transport steamed toward Iwo Jima in February 1945. The players were Marines, after all.

Two of them were also members of football royalty. One was Captain George (Sonny) Franck, a 26-year-old running back for the New York Giants who had finished third in the 1940 Heisman Trophy voting when he ran for the University of Minnesota. The other was Jack Chevigny, a 38-year-old first lieutenant in the 5th Division who might better be described as the Jack Chevigny.

He was a legend at Notre Dame, the running back who shouted, "That one was for the Gipper," upon scoring the tying touchdown in the epic 12-6 victory over Army on Nov. 10, 1928 in Yankee Stadium. He was a former NFL coach (1932 Chicago Cardinals) who became the head coach at the University of Texas, then beat his alma mater. He played with The Four Horsemen and had a horse named after him that once raced on the same card as Seabiscuit. He had a law degree, matinee idol looks and memories of playing golf with Crosby and Hope. He was smaller than most and larger than life. He also happened to be Sonny Franck's boyhood idol.

But there he was, in the middle of the Pacific, mixing it up with men much younger on a steel playing field. In one game, he suffered a hyperextended elbow when he leaped for a pass and was tackled to the deck. With his elbow in a cast, he wrote a letter to his fiancée, Eugenia Purdy, bemoaning the deterioration of his football skills. The cast was taken off only after the top of Mount Suribachi came into view.

Every year at this time, we honor the men and women who give and gave of themselves to protect the United States of America. Heroism comes in many forms, but the simple act of putting on a uniform for your country is valor worth commemorating.

Jack Chevigny (pronounced Chev-knee) didn't have to be on board the Rutland that February; he could've been back at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, coaching the Marine football team there as he had been assigned to do. But he felt that those weren't the team members who really mattered, so he volunteered for combat duty.

His is a remarkable story, with chapters once typed by writers like Damon Runyon and Grantland Rice and narrated by announcers like Bill Stern. Over the years, fiction was mixed into fact, and his heroism became encapsulated into an anecdote about a fountain pen -- which turns out not to have been true.

But what was true makes for an even better tale, and it wasn't until a Texas schoolteacher and football coach named Jeff Walker came along that the 5-foot-7, 170-pound Jack Chevigny was fully measured.

Walker's 2012 book, "The Last Chalkline (The Life & Times of Jack Chevigny)," didn't exactly set the publishing world on fire, but it's well worth reading for a portrait of a man of God and good times, football and family, pride and patriotism. He was a gambler who led a charmed life until his luck ran out on a rocky godforsaken beach. He was complicated, but his credo was always pretty simple: You'll have to carry me off the field.

That's why Knute Rockne himself called him "the best right halfback in Notre Dame history."

His story begins in Hammond, Indiana, where his French-Canadian father, a World War I vet named Julius Chevigny, was a company physician. Jack had two brothers and two sisters, but he was the one who seemed destined for greatness. He starred in football, basketball and track for Hammond High, but he also had roles in the school plays ("She Stoops to Conquer," "Seventeen") and served as class president. The inscription on his yearbook read:

"ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD HE LOVED TO BE

BUT FEW COULD PLAY AS WELL AS HE"

He enrolled at Notre Dame, 80 miles from Hammond, in the fall of 1924, which is the same autumn that Grantland Rice immortalized that Irish backfield as "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Jack was only a freshman, but he did practice with the varsity and even got the better of a fight with an upperclassman who tried to stuff him into a locker.

Following in his father's footsteps, he was pre-med, but except for the football classes he took with Rockne, his grades weren't good, and he lost his eligibility. So he switched to pre-law, spent the summer of 1926 taking extra classes, and returned to the team in the fall as a valued backfield reserve -- Rockne would often start the game with his second team just to feel out an opponent.

Chevigny became a regular for the 1927 season, hurtling his body into the line, blocking for his teammates on sweeps, leveling opposing ball carriers. In a win over Navy, he suffered a concussion, but he didn't miss a beat as Notre Dame marched to what some people felt would be a national championship. The Irish were 5-0 when they went to Minnesota to play Bronko Nagurski and the Gophers.

The game would end in a 7-7 tie that crushed Rockne, but the play of the game belonged to Notre Dame-and Chevigny. Early in the fourth quarter, the Gophers were on the brink of the go-ahead touchdown when "the Hammond Flash" made a diving tackle of the runner at the goal line. Grantland Rice observed that it was the greatest tackle he had ever seen.

Army ended Notre Dame's 1927 national title hopes with an 18-0 thumping at Yankee Stadium, but the Irish did get to play spoilers by beating unbeaten Southern Cal 7-6 at Chicago's Soldier Field. The cheers reached as far as Montreal because the French Canadians there had adopted Chevigny as one of their own.

Notre Dame had only one player returning on each side of the ball for 1928, and Chevigny was both of them. Not that much was expected of the Irish his senior year, and when they lost 22-6 to Wisconsin in the second game of the season, they started playing for pride. Chevigny, who seemed to save his best for the service academies, was magnificent on defense against Navy in the third game, playing at Soldier Field before 120,000 fans -- a record at the time for the most people ever to see a college football game.

Trailing 7-0 late in the fourth quarter, the Midshipmen had a fourth-and-one at the Notre Dame seven, but Chevigny and his teammates rose up to stuff the runner. Jack had to be carried off the field, but Notre Dame held on for a 7-0 triumph.

Jeff Walker unearthed this letter to Dr. Chevigny, written by a friend after the Navy game:

"Wasn't [Jack] marvelous? You sure can justly be proud of such a fine son, and may God spare him and all your children to a grand old age. A boy like Jack is sure an incentive to the youth of our land."

A loss to Georgia Tech the next week put an end to Notre Dame's slim title aspirations, but the date with Army -- Nov. 10 -- and the chance to avenge the loss in '27 fueled Rockne and his men.

Army was favored by two touchdowns as 85,000 fans packed into Yankee Stadium. If you've seen Pat O'Brien in "Knute Rockne, All-American," you know the story, or at least one version of it. Seeking to inspire his men against Army at halftime of a scoreless game, Rockne invoked the name of George Gipp, the great player who died of pneumonia shortly after the 1920 season. On his deathbed, Rockne told them, Gipper (or Ronald Reagan) whispered:

"Some day when the team's up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, but I'll know about it, and I'll be happy."

Nobody knows exactly what Gipper said back in 1920, or what Rockne told them as halftime came to a close, but Chevigny was sitting to his right with his head turned toward the coach, misty-eyed like the rest of his teammates. When Rockne finished with "Men, this is that day!" Jack stood up, yelled, "Let's go!" and the Irish charged out onto the field.

(In the movie version, actor Steve Pendleton wears Jack's No. 12 and sits to Rockne's right.)

Jack Chevigny during his time at Notre Dame. AP Photo

The tears must have gotten in the way -- Army scored on its first possession and led 6-0 after the point-after kick was missed. The two teams exchanged punts, with Chevigny recovering a teammate's fumbled punt return on the Army 37. Notre Dame drove toward the goal line. On fourth-and-goal from the one, Chevigny got the call and smashed through for the tying touchdown. According to one account, he tossed the ball high into the air, returned to the sideline, and yelled to Rockne, "That's one for the Gipper!"

The Irish also missed the point after, so the score was tied 6-6. But they had woken up the echoes, and Army was on its heels. In the fourth quarter, a 16-yard gain by Chevigny brought the ball down to the Army 15. When the next snap squirted free, all the way back to the 35, Chevigny jumped on it. Unfortunately, as Damon Runyon wrote, "He was so badly hurt as the Army tacklers piled on him that he had to be helped from the field."

As the crowd gave Jack a thunderous ovation, Rockne sent in the little-used Johnny O'Brien. The woozy Jack didn't get to see the next play, a 35-yard pass from Johnny Niemiec to O'Brien for a touchdown -- one more for the Gipper. Again, the PAT was missed, but Notre Dame held on for a 12-6 victory.

Even without the subsequent Gipper mythology, it was considered one of the greatest college football games ever played. The touchdown pass, wrote Runyon, "came at a moment when it looked as if the very best the boys could do would be a tie."

Notre Dame would lose its final two games, to Carnegie Tech and USC, but before that last game, Maxwell Stiles wrote this in the Los Angeles Examiner:

"John Chevigny -- remember the name. He is slick as a whistle, as swift as a hare, takes passes on the dead run, sears a blazing trail off tackle, and is just about the whole Notre Dame secondary defense wrapped up in the sinewy frame of one man."

It was a forgettable 5-4 last season for Chevigny, but he did get to score in a game for the ages. And Rockne saw a future for Jack. He not only made him an assistant coach, but also a co-star of his coaching clinics across the country. At one point, they passed through Hammond, and Rockne told the Chamber of Commerce that Chevigny was "one of the greatest team men I ever had."

As Jack worked for his law degree, he helped Rockne lead Notre Dame to two unbeaten national championship seasons, in 1929 and 1930. When Rockne had to go to the Mayo Clinic for treatment of his phlebitis, it was Jack who stayed by his bedside in Rochester, Minnesota.

He was clearly Rockne's heir apparent. But on March 3, 1931, the great coach boarded TWA Flight 599 in Kansas City, bound for Los Angeles, where he was to help in the filming of "Knute Rockne, All-American." The plane crashed in bad weather, killing all eight people aboard.

News photos of the coach's funeral mistakenly identify the young man to whom Rockne's wife, Bonnie, is clinging as one of his sons. It was actually Jack Chevigny, but as Jeff Walker writes, "In a way, they were right."

Rockne was, of course, irreplaceable, but Notre Dame administrators did something curious: They appointed two men to take his job: 31-year-old Heartley (Hunk) Anderson, the "senior coach," and 24-year-old Jack Chevigny, the "junior coach."

Anderson was himself a Notre Dame legend, one of the blockers for The Four Horsemen, but from the outset, he and Chevigny clashed. While Jack did much of the work, Hunk took much of the credit for Notre Dame's 6-0-1 start. Then, when they lost the last two games to Southern Cal and Army, Hunk passed much of the blame onto Jack. Anderson told the administrators that he wanted Jack out of the picture.

Stung by the abandonment, Chevigny resigned his position on Feb. 1, 1932. Six months later, he decided to take the job as the head coach of the Chicago Cardinals in the fledgling National Football League, replacing legendary player-coach Ernie Nevers.

Chevigny knew he was going from crowds of 80,000 to crowds of 3,000, but it was a chance to make his own imprint. He brought in two Notre Dame teammates, Tim Moynihan and Al Culver, and switched offenses from Pop Warner's single wing to the Notre Dame shift. He saw the potential in a college dropout named Joe Lillard, who happened to be African-American.

But Jack was also younger than a lot of his players and headstrong, insisting that they play hurt-like he did. He lost the locker room amid a season in which the Cardinals finished 2-6-2 in league play (7-6-2 overall). So with one eye on South Bend, Chevigny resigned and took the head coaching job at St. Edward's College in Austin, Texas, a school run by the same Holy Cross order as Notre Dame.

It was there that he worked a miracle. Starting out with only 27 players, few of whom were any good, he changed the team name from Saints to Tigers and installed an innovative offense featuring a delayed lateral. In the Texas Conference title game, he upset the Texas College of the Mines to end the season at 7-1-1.

In the meantime, the other college team in Austin, the University of Texas was finishing the season at 4-5-2. Jack had made overtures about returning to Notre Dame to replace Hunk Anderson, who was fired, but the fathers chose one of the Horsemen, Elmer Layden, instead. That left him free to be courted by the powerful oilmen and ranchers who ran UT football. Thanks to his success at St. Ed's, his charismatic personality and the Rockne association, Jack was a popular figure, so popular that a rancher and card-playing friend, Houghton Brownlee, named a thoroughbred after him.

Chevigny didn't mind -- he loved the ponies. And he loved the idea of taking over a major college team that had Notre Dame as the second game on its 1934 schedule. The announcement of his appointment as the new head coach was made at halftime of a Texas-Baylor basketball game. Jack promised the crowd he would "make the flag of the University of Texas fly high among the schools of the nation."

The new coach suffered a personal setback on the first day of spring contact drills: His father died of a heart attack while he and his wife were visiting their son in Austin. At the graveside funeral back in Indiana, Jack was consoled by Bonnie Rockne, the widow of his "other" father.

Once mourning was over, Chevigny returned to Forty Acres to prepare the Longhorns for the 1934 season. Their first opponent was Texas Tech, and in the days leading up to the game, Jack borrowed a page from Rockne by bad-mouthing his team's chances, telling the press, "Only 15 more days until we take our first spanking."

John E Chevigny