Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s

The decade of the 1920s has long been heralded as the "Golden Age" of American sports. What made it golden, however, was not simply a wealth of talented athletes. Just as important-if not more so-were the sports­writers who deified those athletes.

No figure of that era better epitomized the sportswriter as mythmaker than Grantland Rice. An avowed romantic remembered for his assertion that winning or losing is less important than "how you played the Game," Rice always preferred praising athl...