Miles's blog

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller 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.

That is the greatest sportswriting of all time, the lead of an article in the New York Herald Tribune, October 18, 1924, penned by the greatest sportwriter of all time, Grantland Rice.  It was one of the first examples of great writing I was given in my first journalism class.  Read it again.  It is poetry.  The imagery of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse running roughshod in a football game in New York is delicious.  Compare that to an article in today’s Montreal Gazette about a classic soccer game in the Olympics where America defeated Canada is overtime.

Canada forced a great team to make great plays. Megan Rapinoe’s second goal was a knife; the winning goal, on a header by Alex Morgan, was just a fabulous goal. Canada’s players said the result was a robbery, and you could say they were right. But you couldn’t say the Americans didn’t play their asses off, too

Yesterday at the Polo Grounds, Notre Dame kicked ass on Army, whipping the crap out of them behind four really good running backs.  Lots of people in the stands cheered a whole bunch during the game.

Like many old people, I bemoan the loss of the world gone by.  I decry the modern world’s lack of decorum, courtesy, and self-sacrifice.  Most of all, I am pained by the lack of class.  I realize that class is somewhat of a subjective assessment, and that one man’s crudity is another man’s informality, but the abject lack of ability to express oneself cogently and cleanly strikes me as a sign that society is on the downslide.  I don’t expect any current writer to approach Grantland Rice, or even to emulate his style, but the horrific writing I am forced to read daily causes me to miss the old days.

Sportswriting, and to a greater degree sports broadcasting, has been taken over by low-quality, lowest-common denominator reporting, in which the reporter is more interested in showing how hip and cool and clever he is, rather than celebrating the accomplishments of the athlete in ways which are interesting to read. 

Rice could have said “Yesterday at the Polo Grounds Notre Dame, behind their four impressive running backs, secured a hard-fought 13-7 victory over a game but overmatched Army team.”  Nobody would have criticized him for this kind of presentation.  But sportswriting in the 20s, before broadcast media was pervasive, prided itself on a style somewhere between Shakespeare and the Hardy Boys.  Their readers were far less educated, far less literate, and far less verbal than today’s readers, but their stories possessed a quality which is not only long-absent from modern journalism, it would now be seen as old-fashioned and boring.  Better to think of some cool nickname than invoke Biblical references.

Any of us who write regularly try to find a style comfortable to write, easy to read, and descriptive.  I would love to call up the Four Horsemen, Greek gods, or Impressionist paintings, but I just don’t have that skill.  But I never write about people’s asses.  The idea that an editor of a mainstream paper did not have this sentence rewritten is astounding to me.  I am sure leaving it in reflects some sort of cultural mystique about how cool the Gazette is.  Too bad.  Cool used to be command of the language, now it is more about command of the barroom.