Grantland Rice Vs The Four Horseman

In the early to mid-1900’s sports journalism in America was quickly becoming more and more popular. Two of the most prolific journalist were Grantland Rice and W.C. Heinz. Both had differing writing styles, Rice leaning towards more exaggerations and Heinz relying more on facts and letting the subject tell the story. Rice’s myth-making and overall exaggeration of sports was entertaining, Heinz’s more realistic and use of dialog resulted in overall better and more clear articles.
One of Rice’s most famous piece of journalism was The Four Horseman, which was covering the October 18, 1924, Army vs. Notre Dame football game. The game was played at the Polo Grounds in front of 55,000 fans and Notre Dame beat Army 13 to 7. The first quarter was …show more content…
Brownsville is an example of where Heinz’s style of dialogue, realism, less context about the background, created a captivating story about a deceased boxer, Bummy Davis. Bummy Davis was the boxer who everyone loved to hate. He grew up in the rough neighborhood of Brownsville and quickly rose to fame in boxing. He was particularly great at fighting, but he could sell tickets and that is all his managers ever carried about. After years of fighting, he grew more hated and wanted to quit because he knew that everyone rooted against him. Bummy lost his license to box for being so dirty. Heinz could have made Bummy out to be a villain but instead, he uncovered another side of Bummy. The kid who grew up in a tough place and just wanted to make enough money to support his family. In Brownsville, he uses less sophisticated words to sounds more like the boxer Bummy. He also used a lot of run-on sentences and used more miscellanies information like the Bummy’s tomato selling, to make readers understand Bummy more. His technique of putting himself into the story and letting the characters tell the story made it feel unforced and as if the reader was there during Bummy’s …show more content…
In a time where most of the America relied on journalists to relay what happened in games in and interesting fashion, Rice and Heinz succeed. Both journalists were successful and even Rice change the view and popularity of college football with his tale-tale covers of games. Heinz similarly created intriguing characters like Bummy, who was more than just an average boxer, “He got $14,000 for the Friedkin fight. When he walked down the street the kids followed him, and he bought them leather jackets and baseball gloves and sodas, just to show you what money meant and how he was already looking back at his own life”. Heinz and Rice both create a persona around athletes. Rice's main style weakness was that he made every player into a god. He made every game sounds like the greatest game in history, which create a saturated pool of articles. Readers couldn’t tell what games were actually great since every game sounds the same. “The Army line was giving all it had, but when a tank tears in with the speed of a motorcycle, what chance had flesh and blood to hold?” He compares the Notre Dame offenses, who are notably average college running backs to a military tank that rips through flesh at the speed of a motorcycle. The intense imagery is not a direct representation of the game and is more fiction than facts. On the other hand, Heinz used more facts and dialogue to create