GOOD SPORTS

Almost since American sportswriting began to come into its own after the Civil War, the pages devoted to what used to be considered fun and games have presented much of the best writing in the newspapers. Some of the most eloquent commentators on more serious matters trained on the sports pages (for example, Scotty Reston and Westbrook Pegler, two graduates who put their talents to dramatically opposing views on public affairs). What is far less celebrated is the fact that the sports pages have always contained some of the very worst prose in print.

Take this gem of a lead from a Nashville newspaper:

Did you ever hear of the battles of Gettysburg, Bull Run, or Waterloo? Of how Napoleon crossed the Alps on a mule and Washington crossed the Delaware on a piece of floating ice? Well, all these were skirmishes compared with the struggle that took place yesterday at Athletic Park.

This is a sample of the early handiwork (1901, in fact) of none other than Grantland Rice, a gentle, courteous Tennessean with a gift for hyperbole and sentimental verse who became the most revered and most successful sportswriter in America and probably, if the matter were researched, the whole world.

Rice, born on November 1, 1880, near Nashville, got his first newspaper job on the Nashville Daily News as a $ 5-a-week reporter of sports and general news after getting a good education at Vanderbilt University. He moved to sports pages in Atlanta and Cleveland, then into the New York big time, for a fifty-three-year career in which, wearing a gray fedora and a smile, and lugging his typewriter into a multitude of press boxes around the county, he churned out the astonishing total of 67 million printed words. That comes to about 3,500 words of copy every day. Well before his career ended with his death in 1954, at the age of seventythree, he had "passed from being merely a sportswriter to a combination media conglomerate" and a public figure the equal of Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Red Grange, or any of the other celebrities he wrote about. He made more money than any of them -- except Dempsey -- with his widely syndicated column radio shows, short sports films, and his annual Collier's All-American footba selection and his paid appearances on the banquet circuit.

Yet, as Charles Fountain observes in his new book about the life and times of Grantland Rice, the man responsible for the most enduring cliche in American sport -- "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" -- is dismissed today as "a sentimental anachronism. Or worse." Indeed, Robert Lipsyte, whom Fountain quotes (though not approvingly), once wrote: "By layering sports with pseudo-myth and fakelore, by assigning brutish or supernatural identities to athletes, the Rice-ites dehumanized the contests and made objects of the athletes." Lipsyte surely had in mind one of the purplest leads ever visited on a willing public, written by Rice in high heat after Notre Dame beat Army in 1924 in New York's Polo Grounds. It began:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Struhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.

Fountain offers a judgment of Rice's impact quite contradictory to Lipsyte's: "He was [sportswriting's] pre-eminent voice in the decades when sport was coming to the fore in American society, a time when -- to the newspaper reader -- the sportswriter was as central to the game as the athletes themselves. Rice found nobility and gentility in sport and chronicled it in noble and gentle language."

The public loved it. But were Rice writing today, Fountain believes, "his florid style and unfailingly upbeat assessment of all that he witnessed would doom him to deserved obscurity at some weekly newspaper buried deep in the bowels of the Heartland." Is this true? For upbeat assessments and hero worship in this more cynical age, perhaps. But for florid style? Hardly. He'd be hard pressed to surpass the excesses committed on a discouragingly large number of today's daily sports pages. (Have you heard about the fellow who rushed to see The Color Purple because he thought it was a movie about sportswriters?)

Rice, though, thoroughly dominated his time. The "Golden Age" of sport in the twenties was also a golden age of sportswriters, with Rice leading a pack that included Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Paul Gallico, and Bill McGeehan. In fact, that age might not have seemed so golden if such writers had not been around to celebrate Jack Dempsey as The Manassa Mauler, Red Grange as The Galloping Ghost, or Babe Ruth as The Sultan of Swat, not to mention the Four Horsemen. If you extend the time span into later decades, you certainly need to add the likes of Red Smith (a sort of protege of Rice), John Kieran, Frank Graham, Joe Palmer, Jimmy Cannon, as well as such creative sports editors as Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune and Arch Ward of the Chicago Tribune. Don't waste time trying to assemble a roster of such luminous talent in the 1990s. The name of only one of today's newspaper sportswriters really marshals a broad consensus, and Jim Murray is hanging up his equipment.

When Red Smith died, Murray's columns in the Los Angeles Times moved him onto most lists as the newly reigning best at the trade, winner not only of a Pulitzer Prize but a record fourteen Sportswriter of the Year titles.

Murray grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, a Depression child who got his early education from parochial school nuns and a batch of rascally, sports-loving uncles. He went to college (he doesn't bother to tell us where) and got his first newspaper job on the Los Angeles Examiner in January 1944 when, "the greenest of greenhorns," he was interviewed by city editor James H. Richardson. Upon realizing that Murray knew absolutely nothing about the city, he angrily threw down his pencil and shouted, "Well, can you write?"

"'Oh, Mr. Richardson,' I cooed. 'I can write like a son-of-a-bitch.'"

He got the job, went on to Time, working mainly as a reporter in its Los Angeles bureau, and got into sportswriting when drafted for the rounding staff of Henry Luce's new magazine, Sports Illustrated. From there he switched to the Los Angeles Times, where he has been confirming ever since the words he spoke to .editor Richardson.

"People read to be amused, shocked, titillated, or angered," Murray writes. "But if you can amuse or shock or make them indignant enough, you can slip lots of information into your message. Sort of like putting castor oil in orange juice." There is much more orange juice than castor oil in the Murray autobiography. That is not a complaint. He's amusing, provocative, and often pungent in his characterization of a given sport or people who perform it. Boxing is "a moribund sport . . . whose symbol is the brain-wave machine and the physician at ringside." Golf became his favorite sport to watch as well as play, but he says that "if they taught sex the way they teach golf, the race would have died out long ago." He once began a story on the Indianapolis 500 with:

"Gentlemen, start your coffins."

Reading the sports pages isn't as much fun anymore, and writing for them may not be, either. One reason surely is that the degeneration of sports into big business has drained out much of the romance; it's no longer "how you played the Game" (if it ever truly was) but how much you win by or how to escape the reserve clause or how to cheat the NAAC rules. Another, of course, is that after radio began to steal the immediacy from the print men in the twenties, along came television with its fifty-yard-line, right-behind-the-catcher seats, its instant replay, and John Madden sketching out the "what's behind it" right there on the screen.

And when the sets are turned off several million potential secondguessers lie in wait for next day's paper. What's left for the writer to tell them without heavy straining and wild gesticulating?

Those who fill the sports columns these days deserve credit for being less gullible and more inquisitive. Most of the old-timers, including Grantland Rice, knew that something was rotten in Chicago when the 1919 World Series was getting underway but none of them wrote anything; today's reporters would have blown the whistle before the Black Sox scandal happened. Still, the overall situation calls for sympathy. Writing sports for the daily papers is now a much tougher and less joyous job. You've really got to keep your eye on the old spheroid, run fancy on the greensward (excuse me -- artificial turf), go easy on the sauce, and, above all, eschew those dangerous steroids, or whatever they are, that bloat the prose.

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