Grantland Rice
Grantland Rice (November 1, 1880–July 13, 1954) was an early 20th century American sports-writer.
Rice gained fame in 1924 when his column in the Herald-Tribune referred to Notre Dame's backfield as the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse". The next year, he began selecting the Walter Camp All America Team after Camp himself had died. He wrote a nationally syndicated column beginning in 1930.
Rice's contributions to baseball are wide ranging. In addition to hundreds of columns about the great game, Rice promoted a young outfielder in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1904 and 1905. This outfielder was Ty Cobb. In 1908, Rice was the coach at Vanderbilt University.
In 1921, Rice made the first radio broadcast of a World Series game. He also called the first complete World Series in 1922. From 1946 to 1953, he sat on the Hall of Fame's Old Timers Committee, a precursor to the Veterans Committee.
Biography
Rice was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and subsequently attended Montgomery Bell Academy and Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He was a graduate of Vanderbilt University, with a double major in Greek and Latin. He also had a Phi Beta Kappa key.
After taking early jobs with the Atlanta Journal and the Cleveland News, he later became a sports-writer for the Nashville Tennessean. Afterwards he obtained a series of prestigious jobs with major newspapers in the Northeastern United States. He is best-known as being the successor to Walter Camp in the selection of college football All-America teams beginning in 1925, and for being the writer who dubbed the great backfield of the Notre Dame team of 1924 the "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame. A Biblical reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, this famous account was published in the New York Herald Tribune on October 18, describing the Notre Dame vs. Army game played at the Polo Grounds:
| “ | 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. | ” |
The passage added great import to the event described and elevated it to a level far beyond that of a mere football game. This passage, although famous, is far from atypical, as Rice's writing tended to be of an "inspirational" or "heroic" style, raising games to the level of ancient combat and their heroes to the status of demigods. He became even better known after his columns were nationally syndicated beginning in 1930, and became known as the "Dean of American Sports Writers." He and his writing are among the reasons that the 1920s in the United States are sometimes referred to as the "Golden Age of Sports." Grantland Rice died of a heart attack at the age 73 on July 14, 1954.
His sense of honor can be seen in his own actions. Before leaving for service in World War I, he entrusted his entire fortune, about $75,000, to a friend. On his return from the war, Rice discovered that his friend had lost all the money in bad investments, and then had committed suicide. Rice accepted the blame for putting “that much temptation” in his friend’s way. Rice then made monthly contributions to the man’s widow for the next 30 years. [1]
According to author Mark Inabinett in his 1994 work, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s, Rice very consciously set out to make heroes of sports figures who impressed him, most notably Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Knute Rockne. Unlike many writers of his era, Rice defended the right of football players such as Grange, and tennis players such as Tilden, to make a living as professionals, but he also decried the warping influence of big money in sports, once writing in his column,
- Money to the left of them and money to the right
- Money everywhere they turn from morning to the night
- Only two things count at all from mountain to the sea
- Part of it's percentage, and the rest is guarantee¹
A sports-writing scholarship named for Rice and fellow Vanderbilt alumnus and former Rice colleague Fred Russell is awarded each year to an entering Vanderbilt freshman who intends to pursue a career in sports-writing. The accomplished list of past winners includes author and humorist Roy Blount, Jr.; Skip Bayless of ESPN; Dave Sheinin of The Washington Post; and Tyler Kepner of The New York Times.
Rice authored a book of poetry, "Songs of the Stalwart" published in 1917 by D. Appleton and Company of New York.
He was the father of actress Florence Rice.
Quotation
- "For when the One Great Scorer comes
- To write against your name,
- He marks - not that you won or lost -
- But how you played the Game."
(from the poem "Alumnus Football")
Legacy
In 1966, Grantland Rice won the J.G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame. His last typewriter is on display in the Hall's library.
The Grantland Rice Bowl was an annual college football bowl game, one of four regional NCAA college division championships from 1964 to 1972. It was the Mideast Regional championship, played in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from 1964 to 1968. In 1969, the regional alignments shifted and the game was relocated to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where it remained until 1975. In 1973, under the newly restructured college division playoff system, the game became the national Division II semifinal. In 1976, the game was played as the Division II semifinal in Fargo, North Dakota, and in 1977, was played in Anniston, Alabama. With the formation of the NCAA Division 1-AA and the modern playoff structure, the game ceased to exist.
For many years, a portion of one floor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was designated the "Grantland Rice Suite."
A street in his hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee is named in his honor (Grantland Street).
The pressbox at Vanderbilt Stadium (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA) is dedicated to Rice and named after Rice's protege, Fred Russell.
Bibliography
- The Winning Shot (with Jerome Dunstan Travers, 1915)
- The Boy's Book of Sports (1917)
- The Duffer's Handbook of Golf (with Claire A. Briggs, 1926)
- Understand Football (with John William Heisman, 1929)
- The Omnibus of Sport (editor, with Harford Powel, 1932)
- Spalding's Golf Guide 1932 (editor, 1932)
- The Bobby Jones Story: From the Writings of O.B. Keeler (1953)
- The Tumult and the Shouting: My Life in Sport (1954)
- The Best of Grantland Rice (1963)
Poetry
- Base-Ball Ballads (1910)
- Songs of the Stalwart (1917)
- Songs of the Open (1924)
- Only the Brave and Other Poems (1941)
- Steel and Flame: A Collection of War Poems (1942)
- The Final Answer and Other Poems (1955)
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
Inabinett, Mark, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994 (ISBN 0-87049-848-7)
External links
Template:1967 Baseball HOF
Credits
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