“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 sportscaster, Tom Manning.
In 2009-10, radio historian Randy Riddle’s Rand’s Esoteric OTR podcast digitized 52 episodes of the syndicated “The Grantland Rice Story” autobiographical program, complete with scans of the Thesaurus transcription disc labels.
While Powers told Rice’s stories in the first person most of the time, recordings of Rice himself illustrated at least one episode, which you can hear at Rand’s site.
Newspaper Heroes on the Air 