Legendary Sports Writers of the Golden Age

March 27, 2017
Congdon, professor emeritus of history at James Madison University and author of Baseball and Memory, pays tribute to the mythic influence of four sports scribes, Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Shirley Povich, and W.C. Heinz, whose readers followed their colorful commentary from the roaring twenties to the space age. Rice, a Tennessee native whose literate columns appeared in more than 80 U.S. newspapers, became the most famous and highest-paid of all sports writers at the time. The lofty Rice standard shaped the precision of Smith, the sensitivity of Povich, and the imagination of Heinz. Highlights include Smith’s coverage of the savage series of Tony Zale–Rocky Graziano fights, Povich’s depiction of the 1958 NFL Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants as “an art form,” and Heinz’s novel The Surgeon, which inspired the 1970 Robert Altman film, MASH. Congdon’s slender but informative homage to this quartet of newspaper legends gives readers a sense of a print world where words really mattered.