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 ... Grantland Rice
b. 1880 d.1954
Grantland Rice was the most famous American
sportswriter of his
era. He was best known for his coverage of college
football. The
Grantland Rice Award is given every year to the college football
national champion as voted by the
Football Writers Association of America.
After graduating from Vanderbilt University, Rice worked for the Nashville Daily News and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His career was interrupted by World War I -- where he worked as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. After the war he worked briefly as an umpire in baseball and football.
In 1911 Rice moved to New York working for the Evening Mail, then the Herald-Tribune and eventually the Daily News. He wrote more than twenty-thousand columns - many of them syndicated across the country.
Rice's mix of prose and poetry in his columns made mythological heroes of the sports figures he covered. Covering the Notre Dame- Army football game of October 18, 1924, Rice wrote:
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 football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.
The
Four Horsemen of Notre Dame became college football legends.
Grantland Rice never won a Pultizer and he was just a sports reporter, but to many he was among the greatest journalists of his generation.