“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.”
—Grantland Rice, sportswriter, in “Alumnus Football”
“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
—Vince Lombardi, NFL coach
Grantland Rice is a major reason why sports are such a big deal in the United States. His syndicated column, “The Sportlight,” described by Britannica as “the most influential of its day,” anointed some of sport’s greatest legends. It helped college and professional sports tug at America’s heartstrings during the Roaring 1920s, and a nation of sports fans has never second-guessed its devotion since.
Rice created the “Four Horsemen” of Notre Dame and the “Galloping Ghost” of Red Grange—monikers still steeped in lore 100 years later and so influential that I once embarrassingly asked my high school English literature teacher how was it possible for there to be “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” in the New Testament when I thought Grantland Rice coined the term.
Not only did Grantland Rice write and broadcast sports, but he also gave advice about how it should be played. It’s “not that you won or lost—but how you played the Game,” he wrote in his oft-quoted 1908 poem “Alumnus Football.”
Yet, as much as I admired Rice—again, I instinctively believed he was also the author of the Book of Revelation—I thought his advice about “how you played the Game” was a bunch of crap.
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