Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter As Mythmaker in the 1920s

The decade of the 1920s has long been heralded as the ＂Golden Age＂ of American sports. What made it golden, however, was not simply a wealth of talented athletes. Just as important-if not more so-were the sports­writers who deified those athletes.

No figure of that era better epitomized the sportswriter as mythmaker than Grantland Rice. An avowed romantic remembered for his assertion that winning or losing is less important than ＂how you played the Game,＂ Rice always preferred praising athletes’ triumphs to condemning their failures, on the field or otherwise. The dynamism and vividness of his writing not only captivated the myriad readers of his syndicated column but left a permanent mark on sports journalism.

In Grantland Rice and His Heroes, Mark Inabinett explores Rice’s critical role in creating the legends that surrounded six sports stars: Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, and Knute Rockne. Quoting liberally from Rice’s writings, Inabinett evokes the sportswriter’s ability to humanize his subjects, his passionate love of the games he covered, and the ambience of an era that shared his idealism about athletic competition.

As Inabinett notes, the sportswriters of the 1920s enjoyed a near mo­nopoly on sports news since few fans had a way to verify their accounts. And Rice, the most famous and widely read of those sportswriters, used that power to move and inspire his readers. Today, when television makes sporting events accessible to millions, the imagery and storytelling that marked Rice’s columns might seem superfluous. Yet, Inabinett says, the elements that Rice used to create his stories-heroes and goats, win­ners and losers, desire and skill-still exist in sports. ＂The stories need to be told,＂ Inabinett suggests, ＂and for a deeper reason than the games themselves.＂

Mark Inabinett was the managing editor of the Washington Daily News in North Carolina.