Why Grantland Rice Sucked
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LOGIN TOP STORIES LATEST STORIES MONDAY, JAN 30, 2012 SPORTS NEWS WITHOUT ACCESS, FAVOR, OR DISCRETION PATRICK KANE 12,942 Let’s All Get Wasted At Patrick Kane’s Coming-Out Party SUPER BOWL 46 63,787 Woman Dumps Man Because He GRANTLANDIA Has Cancer, Still Wants His Super Bowl Tickets Why Grantland Rice BY TOMMY CRAGGS JUN 8, 2011 4:25 PM Share Like 171 72,410 79 Sucked BLOOD WEEK 1,330 A Horizon League Collision Left Grantland Rice was everything his namesake So Much Blood On The Court It website should aspire not to be. He was a Had To Be Scraped Off pandering mythmaker who wrote verse and prose the way Thomas Kinkade paints WPS 7,723 carriage lanes ("The Hills of Fame still WPS Owners Vote To Cancel beckon where the Paths of Glory lead …"). 2012 Season Reading him today is not unlike looking at your maiden aunt's collection of Precious BRISTOLMETRICS 4,959 Bristolmetrics: Joe Paterno Was Moments figurines. Moths come flying off Mentioned 116 Times On every word. He was responsible for a lot of SportsCenter Last Week; Jerry Sandusky Was the worst pathologies of sportswriting today, Mentioned 8 Times and the fact that a major web site now unironically carries his name tells me we've MEDIA MELTDOWNS 14,038 done to Rice what Rice did to so many Jon Heyman’s Tweets Make Him ballplayers over the years. We've godded up Seem Like The Richest Man Alive the godmaker. CAROLINA PANTHERS 16,836 Everyone remembers the first line of his The Carolina Panthers Logo Gets famous story about the 1924 Notre Dame- An Update Army game — "Outlined against a blue-gray RUDY FERNANDEZ 2,997 October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again" Rudy Fernandez Beats Buzzer — but not many people recall what came a With Just The Tip paragraph later: WINTER X GAMES 22,102 Shaun White Just Got The First A cyclone can't be snared. It may be Ever Perfect Score In SuperPipe surrounded, but somewhere it breaks —On His Victory Run through to keep on going. When the cyclone starts from South Bend, where ESPN 6,469 the candle lights still gleam through the ESPN Reports That Mike Vrabel Indiana sycamores, those in the way GET OUR TOP STORIES Is Now Black And Filipino- must take to storm cellars at top speed. FOLLOW DEADSPIN American Yesterday the cyclone struck again as Notre Dame beat the Army, 13 to 7, with 23,202 Like Larra Overton, Erik Hall and ESPN a set of backfield stars that ripped and 57,172 others like this. US Skier Claims She Was crashed through a strong Army defense Disqualified From The X-Games For Sarah Burke Tribute [UPDATE] with more speed and power than the warring cadets could meet. COLLEGE BASKETBALL 29,948 The Four Horseman now have become a cyclone full of stars in a war of some kind. Metaphors BYU Students Earned The martial, meteorological, and celestial, tumbling on top of one another in the same sentence, and Vaunted "Crowd Technical Foul" Last Night we're only a few words away from "a tank ... with the speed of a motorcycle" and a quartet of football players with "the mixed blood of the tiger and the antelope." Calling this purple prose is WAKE UP DEADSPIN 8,253 to suggest he wasn't using the whole crayon box at once. Carlos Boozer’s Young Son Chants "Let’s Go Heat" While The crappy mythopoetics are bad enough, but there's a real consequence to this kind of writing, Watching Boozer Play Against The Heat one Robert Lipsyte sussed out years ago: DHF 45,927 [T]he writer who likens a ballplayer to Hercules or Grendel's mother is displaying the Cockblocked By Racial ultimate contempt — the ballplayer no longer exists as a person or a performer, but as an Stereotypes! object, a piece of matter to be used, in this case, for the furtherance of the sportswriter's 11,162 career by pandering to the emotional titillation of the reader/fan. Rice populated the FIGHTS AND OR BOOBS Goalies Fight In Minor League press boxes with lesser talents who insisted, like the old master, that they were just sunny Hockey Brawl, Announcers fellows who loved kids' games and the jolly apes who played them. Herald "Mass Hysteria" A young Rice once wrote (most of the quotes here come via Charles Fountain's biography, DEADSPIN XY 59,951 The Internet Has Discovered The Sportswriter): "Did you ever hear of the battles of Gettysburg, Bull Run or Waterloo? Of how Exact Day Featured In Ice Cube’s Napoleon crossed the Alps on a mule and Washington the Delaware on a piece of floating ice? "It Was A Good Day" [UPDATE] Well, all these were mere skirmishes compared with the struggle that took place yesterday at Athletic Park." HORSE RACING 13,612 Elderly Irish Horse Trainer To Rice was covering a minor-league baseball game. TV Reporter On His First Big Win: "I’ll Have Fuckin’ Sex Tonight And An older Rice wrote: "Only those who looked upon the spectacle today can know what it means. Everything" One might as well attempt to describe the glory of the Grand Canyon or the peak of Mount Everest at dawn." FLIPPING THE BIRD 20,560 What Earned This On-Air Rice was covering the fucking Olympics. Double-Bird From San Francisco’s NBC Affiliate? News The Raiders Four years later, he called the success of American blacks at the Berlin games "Darktown on Hired Dennis Allen parade" and wrote: "America will be okay until it runs out of African entries. ... We may have to comb Africa again for some winners." Elsewhere, Joe Louis was "stalking" his prey, a "panther" HIGHLIGHT REEL 20,677 with the "speed of the jungle, the instinctive speed of the wild." (He once said of Louis, LeBron James Hurdled John "Sportsmanship should be the very mortar of an athlete but never an entity in itself for conscious Lucas To Complete This Alley- display," and a modern reader might hear the same harp music that played over all those Oop preposterous stories about Kevin Durant's humility.) The standard defense here, that Rice was only as bigoted as his time, is probably accurate. But the casual racism was also a rancid TRICK SHOTS 18,093 variation on his habit of reducing human beings to the front end of a metaphor. Joe Louis was a Don Mattingly Beans a Bear And Other Trick Shots jungle cat. Jim Crowley was a Biblical plague. Some busher from Selma was Pickett making for Cemetery Ridge. Kobe Bryant is Teen Wolf. SOCCER 11,069 Oh, wait. Liverpool And Manchester United Fans Engage In "A Good Rice was right about a lot of things. He saw Babe Didrikson for the phenomenon she was at a Bit Of Banter" Including Miming Like A Monkey time when his colleagues were more or less calling her a dyke. He said smart things about baseball's reserve clause in 1913 that people didn't start saying en masse until the 1970s ("Every JR SMITH 240,903 Please Get J.R. Smith Out Of one knows the reserve clause in baseball will not stand the test of American law."). He wrote China Before His Family Starts about Jim Thorpe and amateurism in a way that too few people write about Terrelle Pryor today World War III ("The difference between Thorpe and several dozen others who rank high in the amateur world is that the Redskin was caught with the merchandise."). He could certainly turn a phrase — he ROB GRONKOWSKI 46,384 called the boxer Jess Willard "a drab outline against a dull gray sky," which for my money is a Rob Gronkowski’s Father Has A better bit than the Four Horsemen line. But he was also sports' truest True Believer (during History Of Saying Too Much World War I he noted that a German has no recreation to "erect in his soul a foundation of fair About His Son play"), and that was his biggest folly. He was the high priest of sportswriting's Church of the Perpetually Innocent, a guy who was always shocked to find that the games he covered didn't BASEBALL 22,622 deserve all the metaphysical frou-frou and moral uplift he loved to swaddle them in. He knew Ty Baseball Executives Continue To Show They Have No Idea How Cobb as well as anyone but professed horror that baseball players were capable of dumping a Baseball Works World Series. When two of the Black Sox were warmly received after their indictment, Rice wrote: "Anyone who would extend a welcome to crooked ball players ... would endorse burglary WAKE UP DEADSPIN 22,958 and child murder." Patrick Kane Proves That Superman Truly Is From Chicago Bill Simmons is on the record as saying the name wasn't his choice. The story goes that the site's designer had used "Grantland" as dummy text, Grantland Rice being the only sportswriter he UFC 18,688 could think of. Eventually the name caught on with certain ESPN executives, the suits who are in Chael Sonnen Continues To the mythmaking business just as surely as Rice ever was. And now the name of mainstream Confuse MMA With WWE sportswriting's last best hope is an homage to so many of the bad impulses that helped snuff out mainstream sportswriting in the first place. Grantland has to be good, because Grantland Rice was so bad. Contact Tommy Craggs: EMAIL THE AUTHOR COMMENT TWITTER RELATED STORIES Disney's ESPN's Bill Simmons Has Committed 98 Potential SOPA Violations On Grantland So Far A.J.