The Golfer’s Epitaph – Golf Poetry

The Golfer’s Epitaph – Golf Poetry

THE GOLFER'S EPITAPH 

UNDER the wide and open sky, 
Dig the grave and let me lie; 
Gladly I've lived and gladly die, 
Away from this world of strife; 

This be the epitaph for me — 
"Here he lies where he longed to be — 
Lies in death by the nineteenth tee,
Where he lied all through his life." 

Grantland Rice, in Lyrics of the Links, 1921

Grantland Rice (1880 – 1954) is arguably among the greatest sports writers ever to pound a keyboard.

During the Golden Age of American Sports, Rice’s columns and radio broadcasts made household names of Bobby Jones, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Babe Didrikson and Knute Rockne. Rice reportedly set out to turn these athletes into heroes.

He succeeded.

One of my favorite Grantland Rice bits is this. It likely is familiar, even if you don’t know the author:

When One Great Scorer comes 
to write against your name, 
He marks, not that you won or lost, 
but how you played the game.

Of Bobby Jones, Rice wrote: “One might as well attempt to describe the smoothness of the wind as to paint a clear picture of his complete swing.”

He also wrote: “Bobby Jones is not one in a million persons … I should say he is one in ten million – or perhaps one in fifty million.”

O.B. Keeler’s biography of Bobby Jones was edited and polished by Rice.

And also this in 1940: “Bobby was a short, rotund kid, with the face of an angel and the temper of a timber wolf. At a missed shot, his sunny smile could turn more suddenly into a black storm cloud than the Nazis can grab a country. Even at the age of fourteen Bobby could not understand how anyone ever could miss any kind of golf shot.”

Rice gave the nickname “The Four Horsemen” to the 1924 Notre Dame backfield of Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley and Elmer Layden.

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.

Grantland Rice, 1924