By Grantland Rice

In the annals of sports writing, there is no more hallowed figure than Vanderbilt graduate Grantland Rice. By his own estimate, over his half-century career, Rice wrote more than 22,000 columns, 7,000 sets of verse, and over a thousand magazine articles. Rice was friendly with Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Christy Mathewson, Babe Didrikson, and Bobby Jones, and with his pen, maintained a ruling perch across the sports world for the first half of the twentieth century.