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Grantland Rice

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Henry Grantland Rice (November 1, 1880 – July 13, 1954) was an American sportswriter known for his elegant prose. His writing was published in newspapers around the country and broadcast on the radio.

Grantland Rice
Rice on telephone and microphone, c. 1920
Rice on telephone and microphone, c. 1920
Born(1880-11-01)November 1, 1880
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, U.S.
DiedJuly 13, 1954(1954-07-13) (aged 73)
New York, New York, U.S.
OccupationSportswriter
Alma materVanderbilt University
Spouse
Fannie Katherine Hollis
​
​
(m. 1906)​
ChildrenFlorence Rice

Early life and education

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Rice at Vanderbilt University in 1901

Rice was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the son of Bolling Hendon Rice, a cotton dealer,[1] and Mary Beulah (née Grantland) Rice.[2] His grandfather Major H. W. Rice was a Confederate veteran of the Civil War.[3]

Rice attended Montgomery Bell Academy and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he was a member of the football team for three years, a shortstop on the baseball team, a brother in the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and graduated with a BA degree in 1901 in classics.[4] On the football team, he lettered in the year of 1899 as an end and averaged two injuries a year. On the baseball team, he was captain in 1901.[4][5]

Sportswriter

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Grantland Rice's Sportlights ad in Exhibitor's Trade Review (Nov. 1924 – Feb. 1925)

In 1907, Rice saw what he would call the greatest thrill he ever witnessed in his years of watching sports during the Sewanee–Vanderbilt football game: the catch by Vanderbilt center Stein Stone, on a double-pass play then thrown near the end zone by Bob Blake to set up the touchdown run by Honus Craig that beat Sewanee at the very end for the SIAA championship.[6] Vanderbilt coach Dan McGugin in Spalding's Football Guide's summation of the season in the SIAA wrote, "The standing. First, Vanderbilt; second, Sewanee, a mighty good second;" and that Aubrey Lanier "came near winning the Vanderbilt game by his brilliant dashes after receiving punts."[7] Rice coached the 1908 Vanderbilt baseball team.

 
Cartoon by Grantland Rice & Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling in the New York Tribune of September 28, 1919

Rice was an advocate for the emerging game of golf in the United States. He became interested in the sport in 1909 while covering the Southern Amateur at the Nashville Golf Club. It was not his first golf event, but it was the one that seemed to pull him toward the game.[8]

After taking early jobs with the Atlanta Journal and the Cleveland News, he later became a sportswriter for the Nashville Tennessean. The job at the Tennessean was given to him by former Sewanee Tigers coach Billy Suter, who coached baseball teams against which Rice played while at Vanderbilt. Afterwards he obtained a series of prestigious jobs with major newspapers in the northeastern United States. In 1914 he began his Sportlight column in the New York Tribune. He also provided monthly Grantland Rice Sportlights as part of Paramount newsreels from 1925 to 1954.[9] He is best known for 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 1924 Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team the "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame.[10] 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 in New York City:

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.[11]

— Grantland Rice, October 18, 1924[11]
 
Grantland Rice Sportlights ad in Motion Picture News, 1926

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". Rice's all-time All-America backfield was Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Ken Strong, and Ernie Nevers.[12]

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 (the equivalent of around $1.4 million today), 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.[13] Rice then made monthly contributions to the man's widow throughout his life.[14]

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, 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 guarantee

Rice authored a book of poetry, Songs of the Stalwart, which was published in 1917 by D. Appleton and Company of New York.

Personal life

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The grave of Grantland Rice in Woodlawn Cemetery

Rice married Fannie Katherine Hollis on April 11, 1906; they had one child, the actress Florence Rice. Rice died at the age 73 on July 13, 1954, following a stroke.[2] He is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

Legacy

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In 1951, in recognition of Rice's 50 years in journalism, an anonymous donor contributed $50,000 to establish the Grantland Rice Fellowship in Journalism with the New York Community Trust.[15] In 1954, the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) established the Grantland Rice Trophy, an annual award presented (from 1954 to 2013) to the college football team recognized by the FWAA as the national champions.[16][17] The Grantland Rice Bowl, an annual college football bowl game held from 1964 to 1977, was named in his honor, as was the Grantland Rice Award given to the winner. Rice was posthumously awarded the 1966 J. G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. The award, presented the following year at the annual induction ceremony at the Baseball Hall of Fame, is given for "meritorious contributions to baseball writing".[18]

At Vanderbilt, a four-year scholarship named for Rice and former colleague and fellow Vanderbilt alumnus Fred Russell is awarded each year to an incoming first-year student who intends to pursue a career in sportswriting. Recipients of the Fred Russell–Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship include author and humorist Roy Blount Jr.; Skip Bayless of Fox Sports[19] and New York Times best-selling author, Andrew Maraniss.[20] The press box in Vanderbilt Stadium at Vanderbilt University is dedicated to Rice and named after Rice's protégé, Fred Russell. For many years, a portion of one floor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was designated the "Grantland Rice Suite". Grantland Avenue in his hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was named in his honor.

Rice was mentioned in an I Love Lucy episode entitled "The Camping Trip", and was portrayed by actor Lane Smith, also a native of Tennessee, in The Legend of Bagger Vance. On June 8, 2011, ESPN's Bill Simmons launched a sports and popular culture website titled Grantland, a name intended to honor Rice's legacy.[21] It operated for a little more than four years until being shuttered by ESPN on October 30, 2015, several months after Simmons's departure.[22]

References

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  1. ^ "Obituary Notes", The New York Times. October 9, 1917. Accessed on June 29, 2009.
  2. ^ a b "Grantland Rice Dies at the Age of 73", The New York Times, July 14, 1954. Accessed on December 27, 2012.
  3. ^ "Major H.W. Grantland dies", The New York Times, February 18, 1926. Accessed on June 29, 2009.
  4. ^ a b Sideliner (March 1920). "Athlete, Soldier and Writer". Outing:Sport, Adventure, Travel, Fiction. 75 (6). Retrieved April 23, 2015 – via Google books.  
  5. ^ John A. Simpson. The Greatest Game Ever Played In Dixie. p. 27.
  6. ^ "Grantland Rice Tells Of Greatest Thrill In Years Of Watching Sport". Boston Daily Globe. April 27, 1924. ProQuest 497709192.
  7. ^ McGugin, Dan (1907). "Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association Foot Ball". The Official National Collegiate Athletic Association Football Guide. National Collegiate Athletic Association: 71–75.
  8. ^ Hardin, Robin (2004). "Crowning the King: Grantland Rice and Bobby Jones". Georgia Historical Quarterly. 88 (4): 511–529. Retrieved February 15, 2018.
  9. ^ Porter, David L. (1988) Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Outdoor Sports, Greenwood Press ISBN 9780313262609 pp 88–90
  10. ^ McGee, Ryan (October 18, 2024). "How Notre Dame's Four Horsemen became college football legends". ESPN. Archived from the original on November 22, 2024. Retrieved November 22, 2024.
  11. ^ a b Rice, Grantland (October 19, 1924) [Written October 18]. Written at Polo Grounds, New York. "Cadets Prove No Match for Speedy Backs: Miller, Layden, Crowley, and Stuhldreher Form Greatest Backfield". The South Bend Tribune. South Bend, Indiana. Retrieved November 4, 2022. 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.
  12. ^ Wheeler, Robert W. (November 28, 2012). Jim Thorpe: World's Greatest Athlete. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 9780806187327. Retrieved August 23, 2018 – via Google Books.
  13. ^ Rice, Grantland (January 27, 1955). "War Interrupted Writing Career". Democrat and Chronicle. Rochester, New York. Retrieved February 4, 2017 – via newspapers.com.
  14. ^ Harper, William (February 25, 1999). How You Played the Game: The Life of Grantland Rice. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. p. 245. ISBN 978-0826212047.
  15. ^ "$50,000 Fund Created", The New York Times, May 3, 1951. Accessed on June 29, 2009.
  16. ^ "Grantland Rice Award Established in Football", The New York Times, August 14, 1954. Accessed on June 29, 2009.
  17. ^ "Grantland Rice National Championship Trophy". sportswriters.net. Football Writers Association of America. Archived from the original on May 16, 2008. Retrieved September 19, 2021.
  18. ^ "J. G. Taylor Spink Award Honorees" Archived April 13, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, Baseball Hall of Fame. Accessed on June 30, 2009.
  19. ^ http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Admissions/Archive02262007/07RussellRice.pdf Archived May 22, 2020, at the Wayback Machine "The Fred Russell–Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship" (PDF), Vanderbilt University. Accessed on June 29, 2009,
  20. ^ "Vanderbilt Student Media Hall of Fame/ Inductees". vandymedia.org. Vanderbilt Student Communications. Retrieved December 21, 2020.
  21. ^ ESPN MediaZone (2011). All-Star Roster of Writers and Editors to Join New ESPN Web Site Archived April 30, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved May 3, 2011.
  22. ^ "ESPN Statement Regarding Grantland - ESPN MediaZone U.S." Archived from the original on November 2, 2019. Retrieved August 23, 2018.

Further reading

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