 This is Jimmy Powers, and I've got a most interesting story for you today. This is Jimmy Powers. You know, I like to think I've been around the sports world a long time, 30 years worth. But I'm just a Cub Scout compared to Grantlin Rice. He served 53 years, over a half century, and was loved by more people perhaps than any person, including any or all of the presidents. Make no mistake, Granny not only covered history, he wrote it. Naturally, the heritage of the era fell on the chosen few, the men who could put in words all the drama, excitement, and thrills of what they saw, and pounded out over the jammed wires of the various press services. So, as ever, out of necessity, were born the great sportswriters of America, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Paul Gallico, and Grantlin Rice. Gallico has since turned his talents to fiction. Lardner and Runyon are gone, and so is Grantlin Rice. Now, it's hard to say if we will see the likes of Granny Rice again. Today, with radio and TV, most sport fans hear or see the big fights, the World Series, the Rose Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, and other top-flight events. The need for an eyewitness is gone, and most sportswriters today just give the facts. Yes, Granny's book may well rest on how Rice saw life through those great sport figures, for he coined a philosophy, a way of life, when he wrote, Golf causes more self-torture than any game short of Russian roulette. The quicker the average weekend golfer can forget the shop he has dubbed, or knocked off line, and concentrate on the next shot, the sooner he begins to improve and enjoy golf. Like life, golf can be humbling, but little good comes from brooding about mistakes we have made. The next shot in golf, or in life, is the big one. Into the tumult and the shouting has gone the best of Granny Rice, his vividness, his eternal enthusiasm which kept him young in heart to the very end. Another of Granny's cradles was, if fighting is your business, fight. What he was telling us is, whatever walk of life you are in, give it all you've got. And Granny Rice summarized his life and the way he lived when he wrote, when the one great scorer comes to mark against your name, he writes, not that you won or lost, but how you played the game. Sounds like quite a fella to rub shoulders with down through the ears, doesn't it? Well, I had the privilege, and I recall the first time I met Granny. It was in a press box on a rainy day in Cleveland. We were waiting for the ball game to start. Granny came over to me. I was a young reporter, put his arms around me, welcomed me to the press box and introduced himself to me. Well, you're going to rub shoulders with Granny Rice, too. And believe me, we're about to embark on the greatest, the most wonderful journey through the world of sports ever lived by one man. We're going to learn about people and the things that Granny Seldom touched upon in his daily column. Why Dempsey didn't speak to Granny for a month following the first Dempsey Tunny fight. How Babe Ruth and Granny met for the first time. The true background of Notre Dame's immortal football chant. Let's win this one for the Gipper. Also, the race between Man of War and John P. Greer. What Earl Sandy thought of his one wild ride aboard Big Red. And comparison between native dancer and man of war. You'll also meet Ty Cobb as few, but Granny knew him. You'll learn about Granny's last look at Big Bill Tilden. The living analogy between Vantham Bed Hogan and Jean Tunny. How and why Granny fell for his best girl in sports, Babe Dietrichson Zaharias. And what was Bobby Jones' biggest victory, bigger than even his immortal grand slam? You'll be in Berlin when Olympian Jesse Owens knocked Adolf Hitler right out of his box seat when he zoomed off with everything but Adolf's mustache. These are but a few. I'm going to do this series in first person and for a good reason. That's the way Rice wrote the tumult and the shouting. There is much about first person narrative that lends a warmth and credibility that somehow doesn't ring true when one switches to the more impersonal third person. So with a sincere bow to the spirit of Grantland Rice, a spirit that remains vibrant in a sports loving America he did so much to create. I turned to page one and in first person begin the tumult and the shouting. For the record, I was born at Murfreesboro, Tennessee on November 1st, 1880. My father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Bowling Hinden Rice were two very gentle people from a state that gave the nation Andrew Jackson, Davey Crockett, Nathan Bedford Forrest, John B. Morgan and Little Giffen, a flaming symbol of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Smitten with grape shot and gangrene, 18th battle and he, 14. There were two younger brothers, but the central figure in our family was my grandfather, Major Henry Grantland, for whom I was named. He died grudgingly at 95 following a bad fall. How vividly I recall his tales about the Civil War. A cotton farmer and 100 proof individualist, grandfather didn't turn the tide for Robert E. Lee, but he did manage to run five waterlogged bales of cotton into a million dollars following the war. That went out the window during the crash of 1893, a worldwide affair. My early education involved various military schools. And when I entered Vanderbilt University in the fall of 97, I was about six feet tall and a slow galloping 135 pounds. As a halfback, I never would have scared Doc Blanchard of Army fame. However, I managed to letter my junior year before winding up in the hospital with a span of torn ribs, a broken collarbone and multiple lacerations. As a shortstop, my damaged wing forced me to throw underhand my last season as captain of Vanderbilt's baseball team. We won the conference and after graduation, we barnstorm for several weeks. As a student, I managed to qualify for Phi Beta Kappa rating, but strictly on Greek and Latin, two subjects I really liked. In July, 19 one, the Nashville Daily News had just got going. I went down to the news and, low and behold, landed a job as sports editor. My assignments included covering Capitol Hill, the produce market, the customs house, all for five dollars a week. There were no Grantland Rice bylines and those first few issues. And then one day editor Martin commented on an unsigned story he had stuck on the front page. You write rhythmic headlines for your leads, Rice. Keep it up. Perhaps one day you'll make a good inside man on the desk. Heaven forbid. If there's one thing I didn't want, it was to be chained to a desk job. Personally, I like the open road. While working for the Atlanta Journal in 19 five, John McGraw's Giants and Connie Max Athletics met in the World Series. My job was to write the entire sport page and the salary check zoomed to a big twelve dollars and fifty cents a week. I covered that 19 five series in both New York and Philadelphia. And while I may have been amazed at the big city of New York, I was even more impressed with the three shutouts Christy Matheson pitched for the Giants. The Cleveland News somehow caught those columns. And when I arrived home, I found a letter offering me fifty dollars a week with the news. I grabbed the bait like a barracuda. The following spring, 19 six, wedding bells rang at the Old Church in America's Georgia. Catherine Hollis, a lovely blonde five feet two, had consented to become Mrs. Grantland Rice. A year later, our daughter Florence was born. And before too long, I was back in Nashville working for another newspaper, the Tennessean, at seventy dollars a week. My only duties were two pages of sports daily, four pages on Sunday, write a column of verse and paragraphs on the editorial page, seven days a week, cover the theater practically every night, Nashville being a one night stand. This meant writing around thirty thousand words, excluding some twenty sets of verse each week. It also meant leaving home at eight in the morning and not seeing Kate and the baby until long after midnight. I wonder what the newspaper guild would have said about that. Well, anyhow, it was nineteen ten that I received a letter from Mr. Henry L. Stoddard in New York, offering me fifty dollars a week to join his paper, The New York Evening Mail. I hesitated. The salary was a come down. But my bride said, Granny, go ahead. If I had what I imagined it took to crash the big town, it was high time to find out. Leaving Kate and the baby in Nashville at my mother's house, I took a northbound train and eventually found the office of the mail at Broadway and Fulton Street. Hat in hand, I also found Mr. Stoddard. He didn't waste words. Rice, he said, I've been reading your stuff, especially your verse. I never knew a sportswriter worth fifty dollars a week, but in your case, I'll risk it. New York in those days was a maelstrom compared to the quieter, more sedate ways of Nashville. Kate and the baby followed me in a few months. But during the next few years, there were times when I vowed we'd go home to Nashville, but somehow I knew I wouldn't. But we have set our soul ahead upon a certain goal ahead and nothing left from hell to sky shall ever turn us back. Kate Florence and I had made the big step, a step destined to take me to the press boxes and rooms behind the scenes of the nation and the world. Now, this is Jimmy Power saying, that's it for today transcribed. Next time, I'll tell you about Grantland Rice's first meeting with the one and only Babe Ruth, a meeting that started a friendship of nearly 30 years. Until then, this is Jimmy Power saying, so long for now.