Grantland Rice wrote elegant sports prose

It is the birthday of legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice (1880), who contributed significantly to sports journalism and dominated it during the Roaring Twenties with elegant prose and thoughtful poetry. He was the first to call the 1924 Notre Dame backfield the Four Horsemen and the first to broadcast a World Series on the radio.

Rice interviewed all the major sports figures of the era and made heroes of many of them, including Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Knute Rockne, Babe Ruth, and Babe Zaharias. His writing raised sports events to a new mythical level, comparing the contests to ancient quests of strength and courage.

Of the 1924 Notre Dame-Army game he 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."