Grantland Rice (1880-1954) was a sportswriter for the New York Herald-Tribune. He was really one of the first, if not the first, famous sportscasters, immortalizing Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame squad as the “Four Horsemen” of the apocalypse, among other things, and coining many a pithy stanza along the way (e.g., “There’s no dearth of kindness in this world of ours; Only in our blindness we gather thorns for flowers.”). I imagine that his colorful commentary was often repeated by those growing up in the first part of the 20th century, particularly by boys like my father (born in 1928, the same year as Mickey Mouse). Such things leave great impressions. My father, for example, until his death often repeated something of Rice’s every now and again:
“When the one Great Scorer comes to score and writes against your name, He marks not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game.”
In other words, it’s the means that matter. Never the ends. That’s a good thing to bear in mind.
