Grantland Rice

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Grantland Rice (1921)

Henry Grantland Rice (born  November 1, 1880 in Murfreesboro , Tennessee , †  July 13, 1954 in New York City ) was an American journalist and author who is considered one of the most influential sports reporters in the USA in the first half of the 20th century. He became known nationwide in particular for the distinctly descriptive and sometimes poetic style of his articles. Through his work, he contributed significantly to the popularity of athletes such as Jack Dempsey , Babe Ruth , Bobby Jones , Bill Tilden and Mildred Didrikson Zaharias .

Life

Grantland Rice was born in Murfreesboro in 1880 and graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville by 1901 , where he played college football and basketball while studying . He then worked for various newspapers in the south of the country such as the Nashville Daily News , the Atlanta Journal , the Cleveland News and as a sports journalist and at times as a theater critic for the Nashville Tennessean . He has also served in the region as an umpire and referee at baseball and football games . This was followed by employment with renowned newspapers, mainly in the northeastern United States, such as the New York Evening Mail and the New York Herald Tribune , and from 1930 his articles were taken over by around 80 to 100 newspapers nationwide. During the First World War , his career was interrupted by around 14 months of military service, most of which he spent in France and Germany .

Grantland Rice was considered an enthusiastic sports reporter with an encyclopedic expertise and a descriptive and sometimes poetic style of language. Through his articles, he made a significant contribution to popularizing sport as part of recreational culture in the USA and to making athletes stars. Athletes who made his articles famous included boxer Jack Dempsey , baseball player Babe Ruth , golfer Bobby Jones , tennis player Bill Tilden, and track and field athlete Mildred Didrikson Zaharias . His report on a football game between the University of Notre Dame and the United States Military Academy in October 1924, with which he coined the nickname Four Horsemen of Notre Dame , based on the Horsemen of the Apocalypse , for the back formation of the Notre Dame team, is considered to be “Sports story that changed America”. In addition to reports and columns in daily newspapers, he has also worked for magazines such as Collier’s and Look, as well as sports magazines such as The American Golfer , for which he also temporarily served as co-editor , and Sports Illustrated , which was founded shortly before his death .

He stayed completely out of the discussion about participation or boycott of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin . But when the American team was set up and the boycott movement tried to thwart the financing of the deployment of the team, he vehemently advocated deployment and funding: If you drive. then one should also win.

Grantland Rice was married in 1906 and had one daughter. He died of a heart attack in New York City in 1954 , and his grave is in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx . The Grantland Rice National Championship Trophy is named after him and is awarded annually by the American football reporters' association Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) to the college football team that the FWAA considers to be the national championship of the National Bowl subdivision Collegiate Athletic Association , as well as the Grantland Rice Bowl , which was held between 1964 and 1977 as the regional championship in the east of the country . In 1966, he posthumously received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers Association of America for outstanding performance in reporting on baseball. A scholarship in sports journalism bears his name at his alma mater, Vanderbilt University .

Works (selection)

  • Grantland Rice's Cities Service Football Guide. New York 1935
  • Grantland Rice Tells How to Win Against Odds. New York 1940
  • The Tumult and The Shouting: My Life In Sport. New York 1954
  • The Best of Grantland Rice. New York 1963

literature

  • Charles Fountain: Sportswriter: The Life and Times of Grantland Rice. Oxford University Press, New York 1993, ISBN 0-19-506176-4
  • Mark Inabinett: Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter As Mythmaker in the 1920s. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1994, ISBN 0-87-049848-7
  • William Arthur Harper: How You Played The Game: The Life of Grantland Rice. University of Missouri Press, Columbia 1999, ISBN 0-82-621204-2
  • Rice, Grantland (1880-1954). In: Edward J. Rielly: Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2009, ISBN 0-80-329012-8 , pp. 303/304

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Arnd Krüger : The Olympic Games 1936 and the world opinion: their foreign policy significance with special consideration of the USA. Berlin: Bartels & Wernitz, 1972 (= Sports Science Papers Vol. 7). ISBN 3-87039-925-2 , pp. 186f.
personal data
SURNAME Rice, Grantland
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rice, Henry Grantland (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sports journalist
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Murfreesboro , Tennessee
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1954
Place of death New York City