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Purple Prose  Here are the famed Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, immortalized by sports writer Grantland Rice and posed on horeseback by George Strickler. From left: Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden, Don Miller, Harry Stuhldreher. |
Rice’s Four Horsemen:
An Historical Con Job
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
In the midst of the college football bowlerama we are having these days the subject of a recent dinner evening got around to football and sports writers.
Friends assumed an expertise from my spending more than 50 years writing about sports; they asked who was my favorite sports writer. That was a tall order because there have been dozens of outstanding press box laureates. (We sports blokes can deal with overstatement with the best of them.)
I immediately threw out the name, Red Smith, who might well make the top of any list of sports writers. Smith came out of Green Bay to Notre Dame to Philadelphia to The New York Herald Tribune and a Pulitzer Prize when he presided over “Sports of the Times.”
He was a stylist who made the writing seem easy. “Oh, it is easy,” he would say. “You just open up a vein and let the words drip out.” I often saw him plugging away, searching for the precise word or phrase, one of the last writers to leave the press box.
I had my own favorites: First, A.J. Liebling. He got kicked out of Dartmouth in 1922, then worked as a reporter in Providence and at The New York World Telegram before moving to The New Yorker magazine in the mid-1930s. He wrote about many subjects, always superbly. He wrote about horse racing, boxing, Broadway characters (”lowlife,” his editor, Harold Ross, called them). He was a prodigious eater who said, “I am a gourmand, not a gourmet; I eat a lot.” His book about eating, “Between Meals” is a classic. He wrote about politicians, notably Huey Long’s brother Earl, who succeeded his more notorious brother as Louisiana governor. While in Louisiana enjoying Earl Long’s eccentricities, he knocked off a fascinating essay on the making of Tabasco sauce in New Iberia, La.
My list of outstanding sports writers includes Larry Merchant, Len Shecter, Bob Lipsyte, W. O. McGeehan, Bill Roeder, Lester Rodney, Jimmy Cannon, George Vecsey, Myron Cope, Bud Collins, Bill Nack, Frank Fitzpatrick and Ira Berkow. My crack research staff is out to lunch so I am sure I am leaving out many worthies.
My friend Tom Unkefer asked, “What about Grantland Rice? Wasn’t he the most famous sports writer of his day?”
“Yes, he was,” I said. “And he set the style for some of the worst sports writing ever to come out of typewriters. He was the master of purple prose. He certainly lived up to his comment, “When a sportswriter stops making heroes out of athletes, it’s time to get out of the business.”
In these days of drugs, commercialism, contemptible behavior on and off the field, we are offended by outrageous salaries, labor fights between billionaires (owners) and multi-millionaires (players). Compare Rice’s comment to that of Stanley Woodward, the Herald Tribune sports editor of the 1940s who decried against “Godding up athletes.”
The essence of Rice and his influence on sports journalism comes down to one football game, the Oct. 18, 1924 meeting of Notre Dame and Army at the Polo Grounds. From it emerged Rice’s famous lead paragraph, and therein lies the story.
Rice wrote,
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen
rode again..In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence,
Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names
are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley 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 yesterday
afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering
panorama spread on the green plain below.”
Now, that’s writing with a capital Oy. And before we go any further, what would you guess was the final score that inspired the frothing at the typewriter?
Notre Dame 73, Army 0? Don’t be silly.
Notre Dame 42, Army 0? Nope.
Notre Dame 35, Army 3? Not even close.
No, the final score of that game was Notre Dame 13, Army 7. Thus rode the Four Horsemen over the poor cadets. They led, 6-0 at halftime when the lead began to bubble up in Rice’s head.
The Four Horseman angle was the brainchild of a student sports publicist, George Strickler. He had just seen the silent movie, of the Vicente Biasco Ibanez novel, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, and planted the idea in Rice’s head with an offhand remark in the press box during halftime.
According to Stuart Miller’s chapter on the game, “Rice largely ditched the Horsemen concept after the first paragraph, playing up his cyclone imagery and throwing around references to tigers, antelopes, tanks and motorcycles as well.”
Miller wrote that “the savvy Strickler wouldn’t let his baby go. He called his dad back in South Bend and had him rent four horses from a corral next to his saloon. Upon the team’s return home, Strickler posed the four athletes on the steeds, clutching footballs….He sent the photo to wire services and newspapers around the country, and they rode the ploy for all it was worth. By the following weekend every columnist was referring to the newfound celebrities as the “Four Horsemen.”
My dinner party pal, Connie Beresin, found the tale hard to believe. “How are you going to put football players up on horses?” she scoffed. And she gave me the pained look I get from some who don’t always believe my tall tales of sports derring-do.
In order to persuade her and the others, I had to come up with a photo of the Four Horsemen on horses. It is one of the most famous sports photos of all time, so the magic of Google quickly provided a copy of the photo that underscores the purple prose passion of the immortal-in-his-time Grantland Rice.
(It is a delicious twist that the shrewd George Strickler went on to his own slice of glory. He became the longtime sports editor of The Chicago Tribune.)
©2012 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo is courtesy of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. This column first posted Jan. 2, 2012.
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