From the baseball diamond to the boxing ring, Grantland Rice witnessed, interviewed and immortalized the top sports stars of the 1920s and beyond. Rice (1880-1954) wrote for newspapers, magazines and newsreels — back in the days before television — and literally wrote poetry about the great stars of the day. Here’s an example, courtesy of Wikipedia’s biography of Rice.
A streak of fire, a breath of flame
Eluding all who reach and clutch;
A gray ghost thrown into the game
That rival hands may never touch;
A rubber bounding, blasting soul
Whose destination is the goal
— Red Grange of Illinois!
“The dean of sportswriters” Grantland Rice not only appeared on radio himself, he was profiled in “Biography in Sound,” and his autobiography, “The Tumult and the Shouting”, became a mid-fifties radio series, “The Grantland Rice Story,” narrated by sports editor Jimmy Powers of the Daily News, who was also well-known as NBC sports broadcaster.
See the New World Encyclopedia entry on the famous sportswriter, and listen here to the 55 minute “They Knew Grantland Rice” episode of “Biography in Sound.” (Note: The audio file begins with a Kool cigarettes commercial and five-minute 1956 newscast.) The narrator is another sports journalist, broadcaster Tom Manning.
In 2009-10, radio historian Randy Riddle digitized 52 transcription-disc episodes of the syndicated “The Grantland Rice Story” autobiographical program for his Rand’s Esoteric OTR (now out-of-service) podcast, complete with scans of the Thesaurus disc labels. Since then, the Old Time Radio Researchers Group has uploaded the series both in single-episode format and in a 647MB ZIP file of the full collection. Radio historian J. David Goldin includes episode summaries in his Radio GoldIndex database, an easy way to choose among Rice’s reminiscences about Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and dozens of other sports heroes.
Jimmy Powers of the New York Daily News told Rice’s stories in the first person throughout “The Grantland Rice Story” series, but recordings of Rice himself illustrated at least one episode, under the heading “Granny’s Own Voice.”
Newspaper Heroes on the Air 