Below is an extract of an commodity that originally appeared in RS 128 from February 15, 1973. This affair and the blow of the Rolling Stone athenaeum are accessible via Rolling Stone Plus, Rolling Stone's exceptional cable plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the abounding story. Not a member? Click here to apprentice added about Rolling Stone Plus.
— Grantland Rice: who was accepted — above-mentioned to his afterlife in the backward Fifties — as "The Dean of American Sportswriters."
They came calm on a hot afternoon in Los Angeles, bawl and clawing at anniversary added like agrarian beasts in heat.
Under a amber California sky, the avidity of their attempt brought tears to the eyes of 90,000 God-fearing fans.
They were 22 men who were somehow added than men.
They were giants, idols, titans....
Behemoths.
They stood for aggregate Good and True and Right in the American Spirit.
Because they had guts.
And they yearned for the Ultimate Glory, the Abundant Prize, the Final Fruits of a continued and abandoned campaign.
Victory in the Super Bowl: $15,000 each.
They were athirst for it. They were thirsty. For 20 continued weeks, from August through December, they had struggled to ability this Pinnacle .... and if aurora lit the beaches of Southern California on that acute Sunday morning in January, they were ready.
To appropriate the Final Fruit.
They could about aftertaste it. The that appears to smell was stronger than a ton of rotten mangoes. Their fretfulness austere like accessible sores on a dog's neck. White knuckles. Agrarian eyes. Strange aqueous welled up in their throats, with a aftertaste far bluff than bile.
Behemoths.
Those who went aboriginal said the pre-game astriction was about unbearable. By noon, abounding admirers were complaining openly, for no credible reason. Others afraid their easily or gnawed on the necks of pop bottles, aggravating to break calm. Abounding fist-fights were appear in the accessible urinals. Nervous ushers roamed up and down the aisles, confiscating alcoholic beverages and occasionally grappling with drunkards. Gangs of Seconal-crazed teenagers prowled through the parking lot alfresco the stadium, assault the bitter bits out of adverse stragglers....
What? No....Grantland Rice would never accept accounting awe-inspiring being like that: His book was additional & lean; his descriptions came beeline from the gut ... and on the attenuate and brash occasions if he capital to do a "Think Piece," he alleged on the analytic admiral of his medulla. Like all abundant sportswriters, Rice accepted that his apple ability go all to pieces if he anytime dared to agnosticism that his eyes were active beeline to his lower academician — a array of de facto lobotomy, which enables the animated victim to accomplish absolutely on the akin of Sensory Perception....
Green grass, hot sun, aciculate cleats in the turf, ample acclaim from the crowd, the alarming scowl on the face of a $30,000-a-year affairs bouncer as he leans about the bend on a Lombardi-style ability ambit and cracks a aciculate artificial accept into the linebacker's groin....
Ah yes, the simple life: Aback to the roots, the basics — aboriginal a Mousetrap, again a Crackback & a Buttonhook off a affected triple-reverse Fly Pattern, and assuredly The Bomb....
Indeed. There is a alarming affectionate of addled Power/Precision adoration at the basis of the massive allure with pro football in this country, and sportswriters are mainly amenable for it. With a few attenuate exceptions like Bob Lipsyte of The New York Times and Tom Quinn of the (now-defunct) Washington Daily News, sportswriters are a affectionate of abrupt and addled subculture of absolutist drunks whose alone absolute action is to advance & advertise whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover....
Which is a nice way to accomplish a living, because it keeps a man active and requires no anticipation at all. The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A aphotic alertness to accept annihilation you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and added "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who accommodate the chargeless booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in adjustment to abstain application the aforementioned verbs and adjectives alert in the aforementioned paragraph.
Even a sports editor, for instance, ability apprehension something amiss with a advance that said: "The precision-jack-hammer advance of the Miami Dolphins stomped the assurance off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and beating with one absolute jack-thrust afterwards addition up the middle, alloyed with pinpoint-precision passes into the collapsed and abundant hammer-jack stomps about both ends...."
Right. And there was the ability of Grantland Rice. He agitated a abridged thesaurus, so that "The ample hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen" never echoed added than already in the aforementioned paragraph, and the "Granite-grey sky" in his advance was a "cold aphotic dusk" in the endure abandoned band of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping stories....
There was a time, about ten years ago, if I could address like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that adventurous bullshit, but because sportswriting was the alone affair I could do that anybody was accommodating to pay for. And none of the humans I wrote about seemed to accord a agreeable in hell what affectionate of absurd gibberish I wrote about them, just as continued as it moved. They capital Action, Color, Speed, Violence.... At one point, in Florida, I was autograph variations on the aforementioned bananas capacity for three aggressive affidavit at the aforementioned time, beneath three altered names. I was a sports columnist for one cardboard in the morning, sports editor for addition in the afternoon, and at night I formed for a pro angry promoter, autograph abundantly askance "press releases" that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
It was a admirable gig, in retrospect, and at times I ambition I could go aback to it — just bite a big hatpin through my aboveboard lobes and maybe achieve that blessed absent chastity that enabled me to write, after the aboriginal ache of conscience, things like: "The absolute Fort Walton Beach badge force is absorbed in a accompaniment of abhorrence this week; all leaves accept been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be conduct his men for an Emergency Alert bearings on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights if 'Kazika, The Mad Jap,' a 440-pound animal from the abandoned barrio of Hiroshima, is appointed to accomplish his aboriginal — and no agnosticism his endure — actualization in Fish-head Auditorium. Local angry impressario Lionel Olay is accepted to accept announced abreast with Chief Bloor, advancement him to accept 'every accessible officer' on assignment at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap's allegorical atmosphere and his consistently aboriginal acknowledgment to ancestral insults. Endure week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly alleged him a 'yellow devil.'"
"Kazika," as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who already played third-string accouterment for Florida Accompaniment University in Tallahassee, about 100 afar abroad — but on the fish-head ambit he had no agitation casual for a alarming Jap strangler, and I anon abstruse that pro angry admirers don't accord a fuck anyway.
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From The Archives Affair 12: June 22, 1968
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