On Not Knowing VerMudch about Football, Part 2: Seeing Value in Sports Writing
Grandpa Harry, my father's father, really liked to watch football on network television.
Grandpa liked the strategies and the steady effort -- despite suffering and loss-- toward a far-off goal. Was he a Scottish immigrant? Why yes he was, why do you ask? :D
Another thing my grandfather liked was explaining things, especially to groups of people where he could hold court. But any opportunity would do, and he'd take time to explain things to me, a timid nearsighted girl who was easily confused. Alas, Grandpa enjoyed explaining but he didn't excel at it. He'd gone to work as a young boy and thus had never been a child really. He didn't understand kids. Also, everything he'd had to do -- selling newspapers on the street and helping his washerwoman mother -- when he was young was deadly serious and a matter of literal survival. Many decades later, Grandpa had no time for nonsense and he expected people to do things correctly and to understand everything he said immediately. At the same time, as I've said, he was not a great explainer. Sigh. So my experience of learning about Grandpa's favorite sport, football,was like the mystified character Andy Griffith plays in "What It Was, Was Football."
Fortunately, I had other cultural touchpoints besides my grandfather's dizzying details, to help me know a bit about football. In the thumbnail picture for the video above, you can see the ND banner, and even when I was pretty young, I'd have recognized the initials for Notre Dame. It helped that I was from Indiana, where the college is located, but mainly my information about Notre Dame and the rest of the world and the people in it came from Channel 8. Indianapolis, in the 1960s, had a low-power non-network TV station which played ancient movies nonstop except for commercials. These flicks included "Knute Rockne, All-American," an inspiring biopic about Notre Dame's famous football coach.
But my football awareness, despite Grandpa's "help" and the presence of sports powerhouse Notre Dame was still lacking. After all, Indiana has always been a basketball state.
Honestly I mostly knew who Knute Rockne was from a series of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons. You rewmember them, the ones in which Bullwinkle plays football for good old Wottsamotta U, where our favorite moose's skills are honed by "Coach Kah-nute."
Of course football culture was one thing, but the rules of football were another. Who got the ball, when, and what did they do with it? Was it a down if the ball was down, or if a person fell down? knew approximately as much as The Three Stooges did about how it all was supposed to work.
Over time some of my grandfather's kind-but-confusing tutelage did sink into my young brain, though the whole downs system always left me in a muddle.
But as I say, eventually I did manage to grasp some of the basics of football's many rules. Once I had a bit of knowledge, then the new bits of information I randomly encountered could stick to the first fact, like a popcorn ball being formed.
For example, the 1969 hit "Backfield in Motion," by Mel and Tim, was on the radio.
By that time, I understood football to get the metaphor of the song by Mel & Tim: the backfield players can't move until the ball is snapped or the referee will stop play and issue a penalty.
Perhaps the most famous backfield lineup in football consisted of four players: Don Miller, Elmer Layden, Jim Crowley, and Harry Stuhldreher. They were, of course, Notre Dame's Four Horsemen. Stuhldrecher was the quarterback, Layden was fullback, Miller was right halfback, and Crowley was left halfback. Journalist Grantland Rice immortalized the four young men in his sports page classic "The Four Horsemen," which you can read in full right here.
Today's post is the second in a row that I've devoted to football and specifically to Grantland Rice's "The Four Horsemen." I will never care a lot about sports in general, or football in particular. But this particular sport has become such a big part of our culture, and the pandemic of 2020 has really shown how hard people are taking the loss of pro sports played in a public arena. Knowing a bit about what's important to other people seems like a good thing to me.
As I mentioned in last week's post, simply reading through sports articles isn't enough to help me really absorb what I'm taking in. I've been working my way through a collection called Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns, and as I've read sports journalism, I've been constantly surprised by all I don't know about who plays a sport, where the sport is played, why a particular event or moment made such a difference in strategy or rules, and so on. Out of the numerous articles included in the Sports section of Deadline Artists, I decided to select the football game Grantland Rice made famous as my practice case.
In last week's post ( here's a link ) I began by going over the basics. On October 18, 1924, the Notre Dame football team, coached by Knute Rockne, traveled to New York City to play the team from the U.S. Military Academy, known to most of us as West Point. The famous game was held at the New York stadium then known as the Polo Grounds because the expected crowd (over 50,000 people) would be too large for the Army team's home stadium.
Grantland Rice's account of the game in which Notre Dame defeated Army 13-7 was largely focused on the backfield players, dubbed The Four Horsemen. Now earlier in today's post, I briefly mentioned that I always knew that the backfield was not supposed to move until the ball was snapped. That's something, I suppose. But it wasn't until I began to write this post that I started learning about the types of running backs who make up the backfield. We all know what the quarterback does, of course, but there are also halfbacks, fullbacks, and tailbacks. Although apparently the fullbacks are. . .the same as the tailbacks. . .?? And I don't see either one of those on this stupid diagram. I suppose they are under "running back" as an alternative to halfback, which tells me nothing. Argh.
I thought maybe it would help me to watch some film footage of the 1924 game between Notre Dame and Army. I enjoyed the video but can't say I understood what happened any better after viewing the old film. A further puff of misty confusion is the misdating the year of the game by whoever put up the video on YouTube; the game was definitely in 1924, not 1926.
So here I've tried to understand football and how it's played, and really my best bet is to stay with Grantland "Granny" Rice and write-up of the Notre Dame / Army match from The New York Herald-Tribune's part of the press box. I find that I'm not really interested in how many yards somebody ran or even which side had the ball at any particular moment, as I wouldn't know how to judge any of that. It's the heart and spirit of the players, as their actions are written about, which matters to me. Here is the famous opening of Grantland Rice's coverage of Notre Dame vs. Army:
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 football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.
Rice's writing is simply full of life, as it was for a week after the game and has remained for nearly a hundred years. As proof, I offer one of my favorite excerpts from "The Four Horsemen":
And then, in the wake of a sudden cheer, out rushed Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden, the four star backs who helped to beat Army a year ago. Things were to be a trifle different now. After a short opening flurry in the second period, Wood, of the Army, kicked out of bounds on Notre Dame's 20 yard line. There was no sign of a tornado starting. But it happened to be at just this spot that Stuhldreher decided to put on his attack and began the long and dusty hike.
On the first play the fleet Crowley peeled off fifteen yards and the cloud from the west was now beginning to show signs of lightning and thunder. The fleet, powerful Layden got six yards more and then Don Miller added ten. A forward pass from Stuhldreher to Crowley added twelve yards, and a moment later Don Miller ran twenty yards around Army's right wing. He was on his way to glory when Wilson, hurtling across the right of way, nailed him on the 10 yard line and threw him out of bounds. Crowley, Miller and Layden -- Miller, Layden and Crowley -- one or another, ripping and crashing through, as the Army defense threw everything it had in the way to stop this wild charge that had now come seventy yards. Crowley and Layden added five yards more and then, on a split play, Layden when ten yards across the line as if he had just been fired from the black mouth of a howitzer.
At this point Harding was rushed to quarter in place of Yeomans, who had been one of the leading Army stars. On the first three plays the Army reached the 12 yard line, but it was now fourth down, with two yards to go. Harding's next play was the feature of the game.
As the ball was passed, he faked a play to Wood, diving through the line, held the oval for just a half breath, then, tucking the same under his arm, swung out around Notre Dame's right end. The brilliant fake worked to perfection. The entire Notre Dame defense had charged forward in a surging mass to check the line attack and Harding, with open territory, sailed on for a touchdown. He traveled those last 12 yards after the manner of food shot from guns. He was over the line before the Westerners knew what had taken place. It was a fine bit of strategy, brilliantly carried over by every member of the cast.
***
The cadet sector had a chance to rip open the chilly atmosphere at last, and most of the 55,000 present joined in the tribute to football art. But that was Army's last chance to score. From that point on, it was seesaw, up and down, back and forth, with the rivals fighting bitterly for every inch of ground. It was harder now to make a foot than it had been to make ten yards. Even the all-star South Bend cast could no longer continue to romp for any set distances, as Army tacklers, inspired by the touchdown, charged harder and faster than they had charged before.
You see what I mean? It's not descriptive writing exactly, yet it captures the energy of four quarters of football in just a few paragraphs. If you'd like to hear Grantland Rice himself talking about football and other sports, check out this sound recording on YouTube, which begins with a rather long musical introduction.
Next week: Nothing sports-oriented!
Garbo
.
Comments
Post a Comment