"An Evangelist of Fun"

In the clubhouse at Florida's Hialeah race track, a breathless friend once greeted a reporter: "Say, I've just met Grantland Rice, the greatest guy you ever saw." "That," replied the reporter, "is the most unoriginal remark I've ever heard." In the fast, competitive world of sportswriting, where writers more often pan than praise each other, no one ever knocked courtly, gentle Henry Grantland Rice. In 53 years as a sports reporter, "Granny" Rice turned out more than 1,000,000 words of sports copy a year, plus hundreds of magazine articles and several volumes of verse. For years he picked his own All-America football teams, narrated scores of sports movie shorts, knew more sports greats than any man alive. To millions, he stood for the 1920's "Golden Age" of sports.

In his column, "The Sportlight," syndicated to more than 100 U.S. dailies, Granny Rice did more than report sports, often in sentimental verse. "He was the prophet of the glory of games," said his old friend, Manhattan Adman Bruce Barton, "he was an evangelist of fun."

Anonymous Wires. Tennessee-born Grantland Rice graduated Vanderbilt University ('01) and got a job on the Nashville News. He covered the state Capitol and county courthouse, handled general assignments and covered sports. His salary: $5 a week. He concentrated on sportswriting, soon moved on to other papers. While on the Atlanta Journal, he was harried by anonymous telegrams and letters from Anniston, Ala., all carrying the same message: "Cobb is a real comer . . ." Skeptically, Rice traveled to Anniston and watched a youngster named Tyrus Raymond Cobb play semipro baseball. The next day he began writing stories about the undiscovered outfielder at Anniston. As a result, Cobb was later signed by the Detroit Tigers and started on his matchless major-league career (20 years later, Cobb confessed to Rice that he had sent the letters and telegrams himself).

Sportswriter Rice really started to make a national name himself when he went to work for the old New York Mail. He moved on to the Tribune and other papers, finally began to write a syndicated column. He coined the phrase "the Four Horsemen'' for Notre Dame's famed backfield the day in 1924 that they beat Army ("Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence. Destruction and Death . . . Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller. Crowley and Layden").

Too Many Stadiums. Rice lived sports, was always kind to those he wrote about. At the race track he inevitably bought a pocketful of daily-double tickets, sometimes forgot to collect when he won. He was never too busy to praise a colleague, help a cub, or compose a verse. One of his favorites was:

When the Great Scorer comes To mark against your name, He'll write not "won" or "lost" But how you played the game.

Until the last few years, Granny Rice never slowed down, still worked ten or twelve hours a day, though he confessed that "lately I get the idea that I've carried too many typewriters to the top of too many stadiums." One day last week he went to New York from East Hampton, L.I., where he was spending the summer. He planned to watch the All-Star baseball game on television. He stopped at his office to write a column, suffered a stroke at noon. Six hours later, Granny Rice, 73, died. He was buried outside Manhattan near the fairway of a golf course, not far from Babe Ruth's grave.

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