 It's time for yours truly, Jimmy Powers with another Grantland Rice story. Hi there, this is Jimmy Powers with another transcribed chapter from the Grantland Rice autobiography, The Tumul and the Shouting. And once again, I'll narrate it in first person. For a brief matter of some five decades, I've been trying to discover what the mass of readers want to read on a sporting page. Now this is no easy assignment. You write a golf column and while it pleases more than a few golfers, you are surprised to find the number who have time for golf. This despite the fact that there are some five million golfers in the country, possibly 600,000 caddies, and some three million wives waiting for their husbands to leave the locker room in the 19th hole. You write a racing column and it takes an even deeper drop. The average or normal racing fan, if there is any normal racing fan, is only interested in tips or information. And when I'm at the track, this includes me. As far as racing goes, 95% of the fans are at the track to bet. Without betting, a big day at any track would be 2,000 spectators, with possible exception of the Kentucky Derby when about half of the estimated 100,000 are there to see or be seen. Some 80% of the human race, one way or another, have the gambling instinct, whether it is in racing, bridge, gin rummy, canasta, golf, football, basketball, baseball, bingo, poker, or some other sport, including betting, on how far a toad can hop. Racing, however, is the main outlet. It is also the most spectacular and the most thrilling of them all. But racing isn't the hottest of all reading mediums, except around Derby Day, not unless you are trying to stab winners. We've discovered that racing columns are not too popular over the country. Basketball, despite its great popularity, is only read in a few states. The same applies to ice hockey. Most of the states know nothing about hockey and basketball. It isn't a reading sport nationally. Crew races and polo have a limited number of followers. The same is true of track and field. There are only a few spots where crew, polo, track and field flourish. Tennis also has its spots. These come in Davis Cup matches and national championships. Like golf, tennis has a loyal reading group that follows the game closely. What then are the top reading sports? What sports are the great bulk of the reading country more inclined to follow? We have had many arguments regarding this. Our guess would be number one, baseball. Number two, football. Number three, boxing. Number four, racing. Baseball, football and boxing have their appeal in every one of the 48 states. Racing reaches only about half this number. Golf and tennis have a nationwide appeal, but to a lesser degree. Boxing has lost many thousands of its once keen followers, and I don't mean the millions who view it for lack of anything more entertaining on the TV screen. The once highly popular sport has taken a big dip in recent years with those who once followed it intelligently and knowingly. Today it has but one high-class fighter, Ray Robinson, who has been on the verge of retirement for some time. Rocky Marciano, through his magnificent condition, may bull his foes over, but Rocky lacks the fistic skills of the Jack Dempsey or Joe Lewis. And today, Joe is a ghost staggering through a graveyard of lost dreams. There may be a boxing revival of some of the younger fighters now moving up or giving a better play. Most matchmakers are not helping the game. Jim Norris can do a much better job than he has turned out so far. Part of the big lapse has been due to fight managers who are both dumb and greedy in the main. The fight game is the first of all fundamental sports. When you consider the crookedness, chiseling, stupidity, greed, and bad handling it has known, it must be a remarkable sport to have survived. One of the reasons baseball has remained so popular as a reading sport is due to its heroes. Babe Ruth came along just when the wire services were beginning to flood the country and his deeds were put down in giant type, the better to match Babe's gigantic way of life. When an individual rates superlatives, it is wonderful to read them, but when superlatives are attached to a mediocre figure, it cheapens both the language and the sport itself. I write this as one who has reached for more than my share of the most descriptive. In this later day, the only player I've known who can reach high for the Ruthian pedestal is Ted Williams, a controversial figure down the years. Ted has never featured himself as a charmer, but credit only me with this statement. It is a nod off key sound when you hear crowds at Fenway Park and the Yankee Stadium booing one of the great hitters of all time as they booed Ted a few years back. This was a prolonged siege of gutter sniping and it reached regrettable proportions just before Ted went in for his second hitch for Uncle Sam where he flew jet planes over the writhing hells of Korea. To my knowledge, Williams was and remains one of the most serious hardworking players baseball has known. Ted reported to the Red Sox from Minneapolis back in 1939 and en route to the present lost three years so far as baseball goes with Navy aviation in World War II and nearly two years more with the Korean conflict. His all-time year perhaps will be remembered as 1941 when he reached a batting average of 406, the last of this abnormal tribe. It seems 400 hitters are rapidly becoming as extinct as the vanished Dodo or the Great Ock. Then there is another fellow who could also get that ball as well as hit it. That was Ty Cobb. I recall the 1947 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers. Two tourists at those games were Williams and Cobb. Ted had led the American League that season in batting and home runs and runs scored and runs batted in. There was nothing left for Ted to lead where you use a bat. Well, Ted and Ty met one afternoon beneath the stands. You might think that with a season's record such as the Red Sox star head he would be well satisfied with himself. I just wanted to say this, Ty. Ted opened up. In my book, you are the greatest hitter that ever lived. Your average of 367 for 24 years proves this. What I'd like to do is to learn all I can about hitting. Could you give me a tip on the best way to hit a sinker? Cobb smiled. I'm sorry, he said, but I didn't have to hit against sinkers. Spit balls, knuckle balls, fadeaways, screw balls, and a lot of speed and curves were mostly what I had to swing against. My guess would be to get back further in the batter's box. That might be all right, Ted said, if I knew when the sinker was coming up. I know almost everyone seems to think I should learn to hit to left field. I suppose I should, but I'm not being stubborn. I have a certain way of swinging a bat. If I change that method, I'm afraid there's a chance I'll lose my smoothness and that's what swinging means. You were nearly always a choke hitter, which means you could hit to any field. It's tougher to do that when you take a full cut. The main point is that Ted Williams with a great lifetime record is still trying desperately to improve. Joe DiMaggio, who looked to be in great shape during that 47 series, was still smiling about his one throw a game. That's all I had this season, he said, one good throw a game. Whenever I had the chance, I put all I had in one good one early in the game. After that, I didn't have to throw again as no one was running on me. But that one good one hurt a lot. I couldn't have thrown twice, bone chips in the elbow. I'll soon have them cut out, heal an elbow. I wonder what it will be next. I asked Joe why it was the National League had taken over the leadership in hitting for the first time in some years. Different pitchers in a slightly different ball, he said, might have something to do with it, especially different pitchers. But I've never tried to figure it out. Mies and Kiner led both leagues in 47 with 51 home runs. The Giants as a team set an all-time home run record far beyond the old Yankee mark. Harry Walker at 362 was 19 points above Ted Williams at 343. But after all, the Yankees were the power team of that 47 World Series, where a few sensational catches killed at least two homers and two triples that have might have closed out the series in five games. How long will it take you to forget John Fredio's catch? I asked him, Joe. That's one I'll never forget, he said. We were three runs behind. There were two on. When I hit the ball, I knew it was a homer. It couldn't miss. That meant a tie game with the Dodgers on the run. It meant something too for all-man Joe. And then it was just another out. Since 1950, the surge of a new era of bright young ball players is on the move, and the move is up. It may be the likes of Duke Snyder, Roy Campanella, Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Harvey Keen, Ted Kluzowski, Eddie Matthews, Willie Mays, and many others. It may be that these acknowledged stars of today have something in their chemistry that will make old-timers forget or at least displace the hulking shadows of the greatest, most devastating baseball gang of all time. I mean those 1927 Yankees with their brute power and their peerless play in the field. And the rumble that this group led by that might of a man, Miller Huggins, started a rumble that has continued with succeeding Yankee teams. Bill Dickey, my all-time catcher, was just as sproutling when those pre-depression Yankee teams were marauding the bastions of baseball. But had Bill been born five years earlier, he would have belonged to that team. Manelder has a right to his dreams. And while I've always tried to live for tomorrow, I find that my firmest baseball allegiance goes to those middle years and the Yankees. Well, that closes the tumult and the shouting. Granny Rice's autobiography for today. So until next time, this is Jimmy Power's transcribe saying, so long.