Grantland Rice at Work.
Grantland Rice was the caviar of sportswriters back in the 1920s, in the days prior to television, readily available next day sporting event movies, or all the other visual media we have built into our smart phones and our Internet-wired lives of today. That culture of the 1920’s pulled upon the man’s artistic talents to write for the newsprint reporting sources about the games that people play in stadiums for big money as if he were the eye of all who could not be there to witness that particular event in person. And he did it with words. But he did it with words that rapidly connected in the mind’s eye of readers as pictures in the present tense. Over time, Rice’s story of the crushing Notre Dame victory over Army at the Polo Grounds in 1924 may be his second most famous surviving example:
“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.”
~ Grantland Rice, October 18, 1924, describing the Notre Dame backfield that buried Army in a football game at the Polo Grounds.
Rice has been honored by some and criticized by others for being a myth-maker for his tendency to write about sports figures he liked in ways that actually embellished upon their actual accomplishments. As best I can tell, this disagreement rag on Rice’s powerful writing ability bore little wind from critics in his own era. And that makes sense. Rice wrote about people like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Knute Rockne – figures who were perfectly capable of inspiring mythology in the words of almost any writer who took them on as contemporary subjects.
On the other hand, one could reasonably argue that comparing four undergraduate Notre Dame football players to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was slightly overstated. But it was pure Rice. And Rice could not take an event like that Saturday afternoon ND-Army blow-out and put it in words that read like house paint on the side of an old barn from the very start.
The talent and style of Rice in typed form was a visual medium. Ironically, when Grantland Rice was asked to try his hand at early baseball game broadcasting, he behaved more like a financial savant who could figure out a company’s equities from observing the stock market prices on a given day, but couldn’t balance his own checkbook any given day. On the air, he lapsed into past tense reporting, waiting until a play had been completed before reporting it in bare bones past tense words over the air. Broadcasting was not his medium and he soon gave it up.
But give him the dramatic moment, like the time Grover Cleveland Alexander came out of the bullpen for the Cardinals in Game Seven of the 1926 World Series with the bases loaded and two outs to fan Tony Lazzeri of the Yankees and protect a 3-2 Cardinal lead that would hold up as the final score, and Rice became the best next day friend to the hinterlands as their version of a moving picture account:
“Yankee Stadium, New York – Oct 10 (1926) – For just one brief moment in the seventh inning the screeching and the roaring gave way to a sudden hush, gripping in its intensity as the straining eyes of the crowd looked out across left field.
“Under the heavy shadows of this silence that seemed to be part of a dark day, the Yankees had the bases full, there two out and the Cardinals were leading 3-2 with Tony Lazzeri waiting at the plate. And then as suddenly as it had stopped, the screeching and the roaring broke into a new wave of greater sound as an old, familiar sight came shuffling in from a hidden bull pen in left field. He came on shuffling side by side as the same old badly fitting cap cocked on top of his head as if balanced there by a trick.
“He paid no attention to the emotional salvo of thousands who had turned from cheering a Yankee rally to pay tribute to an old arm that was on its way to put the home club down.
“So it was that Alexander, 10 years in the service, last of the grenadiers, came to the mound again to send his ‘whoos!’ ball whizzing through at the vital moment of the seven-game series. Here was the spot where $50,000 rode on every pitch and every swing, where a base hit meant a Yankees victory and the end of Lazzeri meant the end of Yankees hopes.
“Jess Haines had just given way to the old master who now stood looking at Lazzeri before he began to pitch. Without a quiver or tremor, unhurried and unworried, old Aleck started back to work. Strike – strike – ball – strike – and the old timer started to the bench again with the winner’s end rolled up inside his tobacco-soaked glove.
“It was upon this last pitched ball that struck Lazzeri out that the young, hard-fighting Cardinals rose to the baseball championship of the world. Needing both games on New York turf to reach the peak of fame and the top of the golden pyramid, they beat the Yankees 3 to 2 in the seventh and decisive game in spite of the brilliant pitching of Waite Hoyt and Herbert Pennock that, with even fair support, would have shut the Cardinals out.”
~ Grantland Rice, October 10, 1926
Grantland Rice is arguably best remembered for these lines from his poem, “Alumnus Football”:
“For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes – not that you won or lost –
But how you played the Game.”
Times change, but true genius transcends time. I’ll take Grantland Rice and his beautifully descriptive prose and poetry over Tweet-Script any time. By the same token, I’ll also take our own gem, Mickey Herskowitz over all the self-anointed generals and the several house-paint dabbers who pass themselves off as sportswriters out there today.
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