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A few words...
Welcome to a brief summary of the events of my life. Although I do believe that my life is important, I believe my articles to speak even louder than anything I could say about the events of my life. Nevertheless, feel free to read on!
Biography
I was born to humble beginnings in Murfreesboro, Tenn. on Nov. 1, 1880. I’ll skip the details of my childhood, but I will tell you that I have always loved sports. I attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville where I found my second love – writing. After graduation, I began my journalistic career at the “Nashville News.”
Later I bounced around from newspaper to newspaper before moving to Atlanta and finally New York. I began writing for the “Evening Mail,” then the “Herald-Tribune” and the “New York Daily News.” In 1924 I penned one of my most famous articles, “The Four Horsemen.” The name, which I gave to a group of young men with incredible football talent, seemed to stick among my readers. It eventually gave rise to the mass-media coverage of Notre Dame’s football team. My sports column, “Sportlight,” was nationally syndicated in 1930, giving me the chance to reach hundreds of thousands of people every day.
I also published books of poetry in my career. These writings include “The Duffer's Handbook of Golf” and an autobiography, “The Tumult and the Shouting.” A phrase that is eternally famous in the sports world came from one verse of my poem “Alumnus Football” – “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.”
Being much more than merely a sportswriter, I made a series of short films on sports and was in charge of selecting the All-American football team for “Collier's” magazine. In 1966 I received the J.G Taylor Spink Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame. According to my death certificate, I received this award post-mortem, but as we all can learn from my article on Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen as well as the existence of this webpage, legends never die.
After my death, my colleague and fellow Vanderbilt alumnus, Fred Russell, referred to me as an “outstanding man in the history of his profession, and the most beloved; his gift for poetry and prose and his sense of honor and fairness contributed inestimably to the wholesome development of sports in America.”
To this day, a sportswriting scholarship named after Russell and I is awarded every year to one Vanderbilt freshman who intends to pursue a career in sportswriting.