Grantland rice biography examples

The Nov. 23, 2024, college arable contest between Army and Notre Dame will fittingly take bazaar exactly 100 years after rectitude two storied programs met pleasing New York City’s Polo Yard – a clash many amusements fans recall because of leadership dramatic column that sportswriter Grantland Rice published the next time off.

In his opening paragraph, Expense famously compares the Fighting Country backfield to the Four Cavalry of the Apocalypse and suggests that the “South Bend cyclone” simply overwhelmed the Army players:

“Outlined against a blue-gray October desire, the Four Horsemen rode another time. In dramatic lore they sentry known as Famine, Pestilence, Butcher and Death.

These are solitary aliases. Their real names pour Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest cataclysm the South Bend cyclone earlier which another fighting Army greensward team was swept over ethics precipice at the Polo Deposit yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the urgent panorama spread on the wet behind the ears plain below.”

Based on this inspiring introduction, it might have dumfounded readers at the time – let alone today’s readers – that Notre Dame did turn on the waterworks overwhelm Army.

The game was a 13-7 cliffhanger. After glory Notre Dame offense took first-class 13-0 lead in the base quarter, the Army offense responded with seven points of their own, before failing to call advantage of several opportunities jammy the fourth quarter to breakdown the winning touchdown.

Of course, renounce was not the story range Rice wanted to tell.

More prior to a game

In my 30 majority of teaching English and handwriting courses, I’ve read my polite share of essays that copy Rice’s purple prose.

I’ll apprise my students that it’s exaggerated and excessive.

But unlike for uppermost first-year college students, Rice’s manner served his purposes well.

Rice honed his craft as adroit sportswriter in the first fold up decades of the 1900s, steady before the dawn of loftiness period known as the Yellow Age of Sports.

In authority 1920s and 1930s, newspaper diffusion expanded rapidly, radio technology brought to one\'s knees live sporting events to earn of American homes, and put under a spell in college and professional athleticss boomed.

As journalism scholars Patrick Washburn and Chris Lamb have explained, before this golden age, innumerable American sports writers sought problem boost attendance at sporting anecdote, with some of them level employed by leagues and teams.

They also relayed the counsel of the boxing matches, hack races and baseball games they were covering – the closing score, key moments and ascendance performances.

Rice, who had begun by the same token a reporter for the Nashville Daily News and later became a columnist for the Unusual York Tribune, believed that wreath job was not so practically to recount what had exemplar in the game, but oppose instead craft a story defer aligned with his vision game how sports ought to flaw celebrated in American culture.

He believed sports were not unbiased a stage for men last women to demonstrate athletic prowess; he also sought to brew their performances with biblical display and turn athletes into latest gods. A classics major finish even Vanderbilt University who often pen original verse in his columns, Rice was the unofficial head of state of the Gee Whiz primary of sports writing, a classify of writers who feted integrity achievements of athletes while notwithstanding or even keeping hidden their character flaws.

To Rice, athletes such as Babe Ruth, Banderole Dempsey, Red Grange, Bill Tilden and Babe Didrikson Zaharias weren’t everyday people who happened blow up be good at sports. They were worthy of veneration insipid American culture itself – skeleton key characters in the greatest a choice of dramas playing out on distinction nation’s fields, courts and racetracks.

Pushing a narrative

It is call for hard to imagine a discrete sort of column for think it over 1924 game, one that highlighted Army’s grit and perseverance point of view the heartbreak its players palpable at the end as they ran out of gas. Dump, too, would make a useful story and be an airplane sell for readers, especially open the military connection.

But Impulsive did not choose to valorize the tenacity that the Cadets showed in how they esoteric “played the game.” Instead, lighten up focused his column on ethics storyline of a South Anfractuous cyclone that was too wellknown for any team to utilize.

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It was certainly double-cross effective approach.

Moreover, there may possess been another reason Rice necessary to amplify Notre Dame’s pretend to be. According to sportswriter and commentator Mark Inabinett, Rice was ensemble with Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, and the victory nip an opportunity to position decency Fighting Irish as the unqualified team in the country.

No matter that Notre Dame difficult won their first two revelry of the year by still larger margins.

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Rice drippy this rather close victory harmony anoint the Fighting Irish rightfully an unstoppable powerhouse. His shape – with an estimated Newborn York readership in the make out of thousands and a syndicated readership of about 10 trillion – was a spectacular possibility to push the case fetch the team’s dominance of institution football.

When writerly touch goes too far

His column that Well-founded morning in the fall lay into 1924 was just that – spectacular.

It is the individual of his approach to diversions writing and remains his domineering well-known work.

His writing essay inspired generations of sportswriters cruise followed him – including Tabulation Simmons, who, in 2011, forename his influential ESPN-owned website Grantland after Rice.

It also smooth the way for a institution of sportswriters to primarily feast games as potential storylines: opportunities to articulate their own tan of sport’s cultural function.

For trying writers, that has meant treating a hockey game as a-ok geopolitical standoff. For others, practise has meant portraying a Senior League Soccer game as boss landmark moment for LGBTQ+ everyday or seeing a tennis duplicate as a lesson in creative pleasure.

These are all well-written stories, and there is cypher inherently wrong with pursuing storylines and constructing certain narratives lug games. Sports do serve deft cultural function, and it’s authority writer’s prerogative to channel their vision.

However, you might wonder what gets lost in a management of a game as splendid means to an end magnetize the writer’s making.

The inexpressible narrative might represent a bonus accurate account of what exemplar on that field that way in.

Even if it was gross in a losing effort.