Grantland Rice, the Four Horsemen and the Collapse That Never Happened

The college football contest between Army and Notre Dame on November 23, 2024 will fittingly happen exactly 100 years after the 2 storied programs met on the Polo Grounds in New York City – a clash that many sports fans remember due to dramatic column remember Sports journalist Grantland Rice published the following day.

In his first paragraphRice famously compares the Fighting Irish's backfield to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and suggests that the “South Bend Cyclone” simply overwhelmed the Army players:

“The four horsemen stood out again against a blue-gray October sky. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are just aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone, before which yesterday afternoon another struggling Army football team was swept over the abyss of the Polo Grounds as 55,000 spectators gazed upon the bewildering panorama that spread out on the green plain below.”

Based on this rousing introduction, readers of the time—let alone readers today—may need been surprised that Notre Dame didn’t overwhelm the military.

The game was a 13-7 cliffhanger. After Notre Dame's offense took a 13-0 lead within the third quarter, Army's offense responded with seven points of its own before missing several opportunities within the fourth quarter to attain the game-winning touchdown.

Of course, that wasn't the story Rice desired to tell.

More than a game

In my 30 years as an English teacher and writing teacher, I even have read a number of essays that reflect Rice's purple prose. I’ll tell my students that it’s exaggerated and exaggerated.

But unlike most freshmen, Rice's style has served his purposes well.

Rice honed his craft as a sports journalist in the primary twenty years of the twentieth century, just before the start of the so-called period the golden age of sport. In the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties, newspaper circulation expanded rapidly, radio technology brought live sporting events to hundreds of thousands of American homes, and interest in college and skilled sports boomed.

As journalism scholars Patrick Washburn and Chris Lamb have explainedBefore this golden age, many American sportswriters sought to extend attendance at sporting events, a few of them even being employed by leagues and teams. They also reported the facts of the boxing matches, horse racing and baseball games they covered – the outcome, key moments and peak performances.

Rice, who had started off as a reporter for the Nashville Daily News and later became a columnist for the New York Tribune, believed that his job was not a lot to inform what happened in the sport as to create a story , which fit his vision of how sports ought to be celebrated in American culture.

He believed that sports were not only a stage for men and girls to reveal their athletic abilities; He also tried to imbue their performances with biblical drama and transform athletes into contemporary gods. Rice, a Vanderbilt University student who often wrote original verse in his columns, was the unofficial leader of the Gee Whiz school of sports writinga bunch of writers who celebrated the achievements of athletes while ignoring and even concealing their character flaws.

For Rice, athletes like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Manor, Bill Tilden And Babe Didrikson Zaharias weren’t odd individuals who happened to be good at sports. They were worthy of reverence in American culture itself – key figures in the best dramas that unfolded on the country's fields, courses and racetracks.

Advancing a narrative

It's not hard to assume a unique form of column for this 1924 game, one which highlights the Army's courage and tenacity and the heartache its players ultimately endured once they ran out of gas. This would even be story and a straightforward sell to readers, especially given the military connection.

But Rice didn't wish to downplay the tenacity the cadets displayed in the way in which they conducted themselves.played the sport.” Instead, he focused his column on the plot of a cyclone in South Bend that was beyond the control of any team. It was definitely an efficient approach.

Additionally, there can have been one more reason why Rice tried to amplify Notre Dame's win. According to sports journalist and critic Mark Inabinett: Rice was friends with Notre Dame coach Knute Rockneand the victory provided a chance to position the Fighting Irish as the very best team within the country.

Never mind that Notre Dame had won the primary two games of the yr with much larger margins. Rice used this fairly close win to show the Fighting Irish into an unstoppable powerhouse. His column – with an estimated New York readership of lots of of hundreds and a syndicated readership of about 10 million – was a spectacular opportunity to claim the team's dominance in college football.

When the literary touch goes too far

His column that Sunday morning in the autumn of 1924 was just that – spectacular.

It is the embodiment of his approach to sports writing and stays his best-known work.

His writing style inspired generations of sportswriters who followed him – including Bill Simmons, who named his influential ESPN-owned website Grantland after Rice in 2011. It also paved the way in which for a college of sportswriters to view games primarily as potential storylines: opportunities to articulate their very own ideas in regards to the cultural function of sports.

For some authors, that meant treating a hockey game as a geopolitical stalemate. For others it meant performing a Major League Soccer game as a milestone for LGBTQ+ people or see a tennis match as a lesson in aesthetic pleasure.

These are all well-written stories, and there's nothing inherently improper with following storylines and constructing particular narratives about games. Sports actually serve a cultural function and it’s the writer's prerogative to channel his vision.

However, chances are you’ll be wondering what’s lost when a game is viewed as a method to the top of the writer's work. The untold narrative may represent a more accurate account of what happened in that field that day.

Even if it was all only a loss.