Grantland Rice

Biography

Grantland Rice was an early 20th-century American sportswriter known for his elegant prose. His writing was published in newspapers around the country and broadcast on the radio. Rice attended Montgomery Bell Academy and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he was a member of the football team for three years, a shortstop on the baseball team, a brother in the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and graduated with a BA degree in 1901 in classics. On the football team, he lettered in the year of 1899 as an end and averaged two injuries a year. On the baseball team, he was captain in 1901. Rice coached the 1908 Vanderbilt baseball team. Rice was an advocate for the game of golf. He became interested in golf in 1909 while covering the Southern Amateur at the Nashville Golf Club. It was not his first golf event, but it was the one that seemed to pull him toward the game.