Oct. 18, 1924—In the fading afternoon twilight in
the press box at New York’s Polo Grounds, New York Herald Tribune columnist Grantland Rice pondered how to convey the excitement of the University of Notre Dame’s 14-7 win over Army that day, in a way that would
distinguish his piece from that of talented friends on rival papers.
Suddenly, a chance conversation from the year before and an anecdote he’d heard that week about the moviegoing habits of the Fighting Irish inspired the courtly Southerner to compare the winner’s swift backfield to a whirlwind force and to the “Four Horsemen” of the Apocalypse, in perhaps the most famous lead in the history of American sports journalism.
Suddenly, a chance conversation from the year before and an anecdote he’d heard that week about the moviegoing habits of the Fighting Irish inspired the courtly Southerner to compare the winner’s swift backfield to a whirlwind force and to the “Four Horsemen” of the Apocalypse, in perhaps the most famous lead in the history of American sports journalism.
Rice’s dramatic opening and the importance of the
game itself (a major clash of collegiate football powers) led the
sportswriter’s editors to splash the piece on the front page, above the fold,
of the Sunday paper. The column proved a public-relations bonanza for Notre
Dame, providing one of the legendary moments in an athletic history filled with
them.
In his heavily distributed column “Sportlight,” Rice was not above
alluding to the Greek and Roman literature he had studied at Vanderbilt
University. This afternoon, however, he referred to a piece of literature better known to religious-minded Americans, including the winning team—the Book
of Revelation:
"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.”
There was some poetic license involved with this—not
a surprise, really, since, liberally sprinkled among the 67 million words
produced throughout his five-decade career, Rice tossed in his own verses for
the sake of variety. Purists noted, for instance, that there was no way that
the Army team could be “swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds,” because
the field sprawled out below the
precipice under Coogan’s Bluff. Moreover, for subsequent generations of English majors
raised on the prose of Ernest Hemingway, much of this is sounded like purple
prose.
But Rice had his share of friends and admirers, even
among those who wrote in ways that differed dramatically from his. Stanley
Woodward, who acted as mentor to a generation of famous sportswriters as sports
editor at the Herald Tribune, observed
that among Rice’s legacies to subsequent practitioners of the craft was “rhythm
and euphony.” Roger Kahn, author of the masterful elegy for the Brooklyn
Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, noted
simply that the “Four Horsemen” passage was “the most remarkable lead ever
written on a football game”—one that, like the cyclone that functioned as the
article’s central metaphor, “swept away all before it.”
As Rice recalled the creative process that led to
this in his autobiography nearly 30 years later, The Tumult and the Shouting (excerpted in a fine football anthology
just published by the Library of America, Football: Great Writing About the National Sport), after being nearly run over by three of the players in the
Notre Dame backfield as he was standing on the sideline, he told a friend, “They’re
like a wild horse stampede.”
But when he remembered this, Rice was in his early 70s, ailing, and, likely,
forgetful about a more immediate influence on his thinking. Back in October 1924, George Strickler,
then coach Knute Rockne's student publicity aide and later sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, told Rice and other
reporters during halftime who were marveling over the exploits of quarterback
Harry Stuhldreher, left halfback Jim Crowley, right halfback Don Miller, and fullback
Elmer Layden that they were “just like the Four Horsemen,” a reference to the
movie the team had seen the Wednesday before they traveled east for the game: The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, starring
an exotic new newcomer to Hollywood named Rudolph Valentino.
Reporting that day was as talented a group of
sportswriters as may ever have watched a single game: Damon Runyon, Paul
Gallico, Gene Fowler, Westbrook Pegler, Jack Kofoed, Davis Walsh, and Frank
Wallace. Significantly, though, it is only Rice’s account that is still
remembered.
The hyperbolic nature of his prose and the
prominence given his story by The Herald
Tribune accounted for much, but not all, of the reasons for this. Once Notre
Dame made it home to South Bend, Strickler quickly got Stuhldreher, Miller,
Crowley and Layden, all dressed in their uniforms, to mount horses from a local
livery stable, and made sure that the wire services received the resulting
image. The photo became indelibly associated with a team that went
on to win the Rose Bowl and compile an undefeated record. The power of Rice’s
words, then, was multiplied by a single image.
If the 1920s represented the Golden Age of Sport,
then Rice was its bard. What he did with this passage illustrated what contemporaries
regarded as his greatest gift, and what many today see as his greatest failing:
transforming a transitory athletic moment, place, and people into mythological
status.
A couple of years ago, Tommy Craggs posted a
devastating critique of Rice’s literary failings (“Why Grantland Rice Sucked”) on the sports Website Deadspin. The notion of a sportswriter comparing a minor-league baseball game to Gettysburg, Bull Run or
Waterloo is, indeed, laughable.
But at least some of this is unfair to Rice. As a onetime
college athlete himself, he knew intimately the competitive instincts and
stresses of those who played sports, and he was part of a writing fraternity
that was not interested in exposing the peccadilloes of players. It would take
a full two generations after the appearance of the “Four Horsemen” column before
that laissez-faire attitude changed.
What had altered, too, was the nature of the media
covering these events. For No Cheering in the Press Box, a 1974 oral history of sportswriting edited by Jerome
Holtzman, Strickler mused that by then, it would have been impossible for Rice
and his brethren to practice the craft the way they had before:
“Your stories today are shorter because of the
economics of getting out a newspaper. Your columns are narrower. Your type is
larger. And when you start to trim a Grantland Rice or a Davis Walsh, you get
down to the straight Associated Press story. You trim out the little touches,
the man's nuances. You trim out the man himself. So how are they going to build
up another Red Grange?”
(The reference to Grange is apropos here. While Notre Dame was crushing Army, Grange was leading the University of Illinois to victory over Michigan with an electrifying, five-touchdown performance, leading Rice, in a typical bit of versification, to term him the "gray ghost.")
(The reference to Grange is apropos here. While Notre Dame was crushing Army, Grange was leading the University of Illinois to victory over Michigan with an electrifying, five-touchdown performance, leading Rice, in a typical bit of versification, to term him the "gray ghost.")
The other basic change was what boosted this particular
column by Rice to begin with: the image. With the rise of television—and especially the
multiple cameras and instant replay that were increasingly used—viewers could
now see for themselves, in real time—and repeatedly thereafter—any plays. They didn’t
need the likes of Rice to talk about the action. The emphasis, then, switched to
the individuals associated with the game.
More has disappeared, however, than the romantic style of sportswriting epitomized by Rice (who, incidentally, in perhaps his best-known bit of verse, wrote: "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"). The Polo Grounds, scene of countless legendary baseball and football contests, was demolished in 1964.
Even the types of backs hailed by Rice could no longer exist today. The biggest of the Four Horsemen, Layden, weighed only 164 pounds. In contrast, on this year's much-ballyhood Fighting Irish roster, quarterback Everett Golson and running backs Cam McDaniel, Tarean Folston, and Greg Bryant average 200 pounds.
More has disappeared, however, than the romantic style of sportswriting epitomized by Rice (who, incidentally, in perhaps his best-known bit of verse, wrote: "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"). The Polo Grounds, scene of countless legendary baseball and football contests, was demolished in 1964.
Even the types of backs hailed by Rice could no longer exist today. The biggest of the Four Horsemen, Layden, weighed only 164 pounds. In contrast, on this year's much-ballyhood Fighting Irish roster, quarterback Everett Golson and running backs Cam McDaniel, Tarean Folston, and Greg Bryant average 200 pounds.
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