An Ode to Old Sportswriting

“Grantland Rice about ruined sportswriting,” said a sportswriter friend when I rang him to ask about a quote attributed to the legendary Henry Grantland Rice (1880-1954).

My friend grew up reading and listening to the legends of sports writing and broadcasting, including Red Smith, Red Barber, Jim Murray and, of course, Rice. These scribes made it hard for mere mortals to report a football game.

We are hard pressed, today, to name a sportswriter who doesn’t write for that endangered species—the hometown paper. We may be able to name someone who makes his or her living in a broadcast booth, but chances are it is someone who annoys us, a supposedly unbiased pro we think favors the team we are rooting against.

The sportswriters and broadcast men and women we can name are few. Who’s your favorite sportswriter is something we no longer ask. Writers are called content providers. Gag.

[Read this: Man Cave Collection—LSU Sports Memorabilia]

Who are the legend makers? Hard to say. Who are the legends for that matter? Few players spend careers with one team, writing their own stories with their exploits among peers year after year in the same uniform. Great contemporary players follow the money from team to team. You can’t blame them, but it does make it harder to watch a legend in the making.

Jim Palmer, legendary pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, won the Cy Young Award three times in the space of four years. He pitched and won games in three World Series in three different decades. Now, such a career would earn a player many millions. To send his children to what Palmer considered good colleges, the Orioles ace went back to school in the off season to learn the insurance business.

He ended up paying his children’s college expenses by posing in Jockey underwear print ads and television commercials. Part of Palmer’s legend has him taking the field in enemy ball parks as men’s briefs rained down from the cheap seats.

Who are the legend makers? Hard to say. Who are the legends for that matter?

He made appearances at department stores across the country including Goudchaux’s in Baton Rouge where I interviewed him. Nice guy. He was fully dressed.

Grantland Rice had a college bowl game named for him. In Rice’s case, we remember the legend maker better than the players he sought to enshrine.

Few football fans remember, unaided, the names of the players in the Notre Dame backfield that defeated Army at New York’s Polo Grounds Oct. 18, 1924, but any student of college football history knows the lede of Rice’s story.

“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horseman 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.”

It was writing like this, my sportswriter friend says, that made editors feel the writers seated at desks nearby weren’t trying. I had called the sportswriter to ask if it was Rice who had said of the Heisman Trophy words to the effect: To win the Heisman, a running back needs great linemen, a long run, and a poet in the press box.

My research failed to reveal Rice as the author, but the Heisman sentiment is one held by coaches then and now. Rice, however, is credited with this utterance: “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.”

I guess Rice deserves to be called a legend.