Favorite Stories of Grantland Rice (The Sportsmen's Club)

"For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks - not that you won or lost -
But how you played the Game."
--from the poem "Alumnus Football" by Grantland Rice

Grantland Rice is one of the best know sports writers of the Golden Age of sports. His expressive writing helped to raise sports players to heroic status. Of games and sports stories, he often compared the challenges of sports to mythic stories and the greater human condition. Unlike Bill Stern, who is best known for his riveting play-by-play presentation of sports, Grantland Rice seems to delve into the greater social and personal meaning of sports.

His memorable sports analogies speak to the human condition: "You are meant to play the ball as it lies, a fact that may help to touch on your own objective approach to life" and it's not whether "you won or lost but how you play the game" which is repeated to little leaguers to this day. An accomplished and well-versed writer and authored a book of poetry, Rice wrote "Songs of the Stalwart" published in 1917. In his life, Rice befriended sports stars from the Golden Age of sports like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Bobby Jones.

Born in Tennessee on November 1, 1880, Grantland Rice subsequently attended Montgomery Bell Academy prep school and Vanderbilt University. His career in sports writing began with Southeast newspapers like Nashville Daily News and Atlanta Journal. He relocated to New York City in 1911 and began writing for New York Evening Mail, New York Herald-Tribune, and New York Daily News. His articles were syndicated in over 100 newspapers. After a career in sports writing for 40 years, Grantland Rice died of July 13, 1954 of a stroke. He finished an autobiography shortly before his death, The Tumult and the Shouting.

This collection included dramatized sports stories are chosen by Grantland Rice from his personal collection of sports stories. In the 'extras' folder on the disk 2, there are some additional Grantland Rice recordings including: an episode from Bill Stern, Rice's appearances on the old time radio game show, Information Please, and a couple Biography in Sound recordings.

Drop in at the Sportsman's club and listen in to "yarn spinning" of the best and most exciting sports stories!

See also: The Grantland Rice Story