College Football’s Godfather, Grantland Rice

College football has had many watershed moments and influential figures in its century-plus existence: Walter Camp shaping the early game; President Theodore Roosevelt’s calls for reform; Jim Thorpe’s awe-inspiring feats. On an October day in 1924, Grantland Rice penned what remains the most famous story in the sport’s history, and set the foundation for popularizing college football to the level it’s reached today.

Rice was the nation’s most read sportswriter, and as such carried tremendous influence. His influence lives on now, readily evident in the title of the just-launched ESPN venture Grantland.com. Upon my own graduation from the University of Arizona, my dad gave me a copy of the Rice biography “How You Played The Game.” His styling sets the benchmark for what I aspire to reach even just a fraction of.

I sought the opinion of CollegeFootballNews.com scribe Matt Zemek, like myself college football-obsessed and Rice-inspired. He dons a Rice avatar on his Twitter account (@MattZemek_CFN), and he put Rice’s influence best: “The question many sportswriters have asked – but which will remain sadly unanswered – with respect to Granny’s career is simply this: ‘What Would Grantland Do?’

“The thing we moderns have to come to terms with in assessing Grantland Rice is similar to the way in which we – as 21st-century citizens – must look at the South of the 1950s. We can’t view past eras and societies with today’s knowledge. If I grew up in 1949 Birmingham to a well-monied Caucasian family with political connections in the city, can I say that I would have been able to outgrow the prejudices that were taught to children throughout that society? The only honest answer to that question is “no.”

So it must also be for Grantland Rice and his contemporaries, Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, the men who carried sportswriting in the 1920s and ’30s to give the genre – and the events the genre encapsulated – new heft and stature within the whole of American culture. We should not judge Rice’s reverential tones and his tendency to make gods of mere mortals as corrosive or harmful.”

Rice’s writing was far removed from the matter-of-fact style ingrained in journalism students, and commonplace most everywhere. It was more reminiscent of Homer, and similarly it created legends. One could argue George Herman Ruth’s larger-than-life aura wouldn’t have reached such epic expanses were it not for Rice’s writings. Likewise, his “Four Horsemen” take on the Notre Dame backfield of Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden, Don Miller and Harry Stuhldreher outlined how football players would be perceived for decades to come.

"Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller 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."

Powerful men, bringers of destruction, feats of literally biblical proportions. It was hyperbolic, sure, but that’s precisely why it lives on today. And it’s also what turned the attention of millions to the game.

Sport needed heroics in that era. America’s Game was five short years removed from the Black Sox scandal. Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey had won the belt in the same year under controversy and had a two-year hiatus between championship bouts. The landscape was ripe for something new to emerge. Rice helped make football that void filler.

A part of Rice’s legacy that is truly impressive when examined through a modern scope is that Rice was able to push such influence because he was a celebrity. The sportswriter-as-celeb exists today, but Rice did so without overshadowing his subject. It would be difficult now for a writer with the prominence of Rice to make such an impact on a burgeoning sport and not make it about him or herself. The Four Horsemen story is about the Four Horsemen, not “Grantland Rice Presents The Four Horsemen.” Rice golfed with dignitaries, wrote for film and dined with stars but did it without the self-important preening prevalent today.

Said Zemek:

“It’s entirely true and necessary to make sure that sport – in the boardroom, at the negotiating table, in the courts, and on the police blotter (among other non-field realms) – does not corrupt or harm individuals and communities, but the cultural richness of sport – the way in which it fills our lives and gives us something to enjoy during midwinter snowstorms or sweltering late-summer evenings – is something that needs to persist in a broken world that, while requiring vigilance and mindful citizenship, also brings about the need for a little escapism when we’re not doing the work of citizens and breadwinners.

“How would Granny Rice respond to publicly-financed stadia, nine-figure contracts, the bastardization of postseasons – especially in Major League Baseball – to squeeze more money out of the operation at the expense of the sport’s integrity? How would he make sense of the gael-force winds producing more change than organized sports structures – especially at the Division I collegiate level – can barely begin to police?

“The fundamental tension that would emerge in Grantland Rice’s world – and in any discussion of his approach to the contemporary sports landscape – boils down to this: Rice loved sports. He was fully captured by the thrill of the gameday event. He respected the athlete’s art and the work it took to produce balletic brilliance in the heat of competition. Rice reverenced legendary golfer Bobby Jones, and his seminal game report, The Four Horsemen, embodied his passion for the action between the painted lines, not the off-field dramas that necessarily demand just as much attention from modern-day sports journalists.”

Rice had perspective that is all-too-often missing in the current landscape. He conveyed in his writing something that today is often frowned upon as uncool: that sports are pretty damned fun, a departure from the doldrums of everyday life.

“What do I think Grantland Rice would do today? I think he’d celebrate the virtues of sport and the great athletes who make these competitions sing. I also think that Rice would make a very conscious attempt to ensure that sport remained as much a province of leisure and enjoyment – whenever organized sports structures – pro or college – preyed upon people and introduced more evil than good, Rice would find a way to identify the right tension points and failings. Ultimately, he was the product of one era and the author of a certain kind of narrative. It is up to today’s writers to retain everything that was good about Granny Rice while being responsible enough to root out the rot from the athletic-industrial complex.”

Indeed, Rice’s own star shone bright, but its illumination lit others’ even more.