The Five: "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky" (1924)

One hundred years after Grantland Rice.

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I.

In October of 1924, inside a bustling press box at the Polo Grounds in New York City, a man named Grantland Rice typed a series of sentences that would become the most enduringly famous in the history of the peculiar profession known as sportswriting. Rice had just witnessed Notre Dame defeat Army, 13-7; he dug deep into his arsenal of florid metaphors and unspooled a paragraph that led with an evocative seven words…

Outlined against a blue, gray October sky…

…and quickly devolved into what we in the business might now refer to as “total fucking schlock.”

…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: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

Rice’s story got even wilder from there. It evoked tigers, antelopes, motorcycles and the Rock of Gibraltar. One hundred years after the fact, it can be definitively stated: Grantland Rice’s prose now seems patently overblown, and his career-long tendency to spin athletes from human beings into mythological figures feels almost hopelessly naive. (His views on racial and gender equity, given the overwhelming attitudes of the times in which he lived? A bit more of a mixed bag.)

It is odd to think that Rice’s prose was once considered the standard by which all other sportswriting should be judged. But it also had one thing going for it that still holds up: It strived to marry sports with ideas that went far beyond sports. It attempted to elevate sportswriting into a common language to be consumed far beyond the target audience. “There were readers who cared not a whit about sports who enjoyed his writing,” wrote Rice’s biographer, Charles Fountain. “There were others who wouldn’t know a poem from a point-after-touchdown who were equally avid.”

For all of his overwriting, Rice ultimately aimed to make sportswriting more human, and more relatable. And yet the one place where Rice’s prose is most closely replicated these days involves absolutely no humanity at all.

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II.

Every Tuesday, I get an unwelcome surprise in my email inbox: An article written by a Yahoo algorithm summing up the past weekend’s fantasy football game. It is a tortured mess of idiotic metaphors and painful prose; it is the worst of Grantland Rice, combined with the worst of AI. It is neither funny nor entertaining; sometimes, as when it chastises a player who got hurt without realizing that player got hurt, it is patently cruel. And yet I find myself spending 12 seconds to consume it every Tuesday morning, and then feel a strange sense of indigestion, like the aftermath of a Taco Bell breakfast. And every time I finish one of these stories, I think, once again, about just how cheap words have become.

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III.

The most depressing story I’ve read so far this week (though there’s still time left) is this piece, by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, headlined, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Horowitch interviews a handful of professors at top universities whose students simply don’t have the patience or mental stamina to take on the assigned reading. And this was the paragraph that really got me:

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

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IV.

There is a need, as one expert in Horowitch’s story acknowledges, to recognize this happens to every generation as they age—at some point, we will all wonder why students don’t read as much or as deeply as we once did. I know my own experience reflects this: I absolutely fucking hated the assigned reading in high school. I learned to love literature through an odd alchemy of MAD Magazine and Sports Illustrated and Dave Barry columns and Bloom County. That was my gateway drug to Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But it does feel like there’s something truly unprecedented happening these days. Our brains have been rewired: It takes me a month to read a book, where it once would have taken days, and so I imagine the impact on young people who are buried in social media is that much more stark. Most of them don’t come to the written word in unconventional ways, like I did; most of them just don’t view the written word as a way to expand the human experience at all. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” one professor told Horowitch. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

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V.

I struggle with this now, even in sports: Sometimes I watch a great game, and the next day I seek out a story that captures the emotion and flow of that game in ways that I may not have even comprehended. Sometimes I find one, and it expands my sympathies for that event or the person at the center of it. But it is far more depressing on those days when I just can’t find anything to read about it at all.

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