Grantland Rice

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: 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.

October 18, 1924 - New York Herald Tribune - writing about Notre Dame’s 13-7 football victory over Army.

The “Four Horsemen” were HB Jim Crowley (b. Sept. 10, 1902, d. Jan. 15, 1986), FB Elmer Layden (b. May 4, 1903, d. June 30, 1973), HB Don Miller (b. May 30, 1902, d. July 28, 1979) and QB Harry Stuhldreher (b. Oct. 14, 1901, d. Jan. 26, 1965).

Grantland Rice (1880-1954), American sportswriter, known as the Voice of Sports during the 1920s, and considered a pioneer in the development of modern sports journalism. Born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and educated at Vanderbilt University. From 1901 to 1911 Rice was a reporter on various newspapers, including the Atlanta Journal and the Cleveland News; after 1911 he wrote about sports events, successively, in the New York Evening Mail, Tribune, and Sun. Rice's column of sporting news, comment, and gossip, “The Sportlight,” was nationally syndicated in 1930. He was also president of a company producing motion picture documentaries about sports.

He published books of light verse.  His writings include The Duffer's Handbook of Golf (1926) and an autobiography, The Tumult and the Shouting (1954).

"Grantland Rice was the greatest man I have known," Red Smith once wrote. "The greatest talent, the greatest gentleman."

Most of Rice's contemporaries would have shared this assessment. One of the most celebrated sportswriters of all time, he immortalized Notre Dame's outstanding 1924 backfield as "The Four Horsemen," nicknamed Red Grange "The Galloping Ghost," and authored one of the most frequently quoted poetic couplets in all of sport: "For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, / He writes--not that you won or lost--but how you played the Game."