Educated at Vanderbilt University, Rice was an excellent athlete and a talented scholar, becoming both varsity captain of the baseball team an a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating in 1901, he joined the staff of the Nashville Daily News as a sportswriter. In 1902, he moved to the Atlanta Journal as a sports editor. In 1907, he returned to Tennessee and became sports editor for the Nashville Tennessean. He moved to New York in 1910 and became a sports reporter for the New York Evening Mail where his reputation was cemented. He moved on to the New York Tribune in 1914. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Rice enlisted as a private in the army and spent two years in France and Germany. He returned to New York in 1919 and continued his journalistic career, becoming famous for coining the terms the "Four Horsemen" in relation to the backfield of the Notre Dame football team and "Galloping Ghost" in relation to footballer Red Grange. Rice was a good friend of such sporting greats as Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth and other writers like Damon Runyon, Rex Beach and Ring Lardner. By 1930, Rice's column was syndicated throughout America. He was also editor of Golfer's Magazine and in 1926 published The Duffer's Handbook of Golf. Rice published some short stories and volumes of poetry in addition to his autobiography and other works such as Base-Ball Ballads (1910), The Winning Shot (1915), Songs of the Stalwart (1917), Songs of the Open (1924), Only the Brave and Other Poems (1941), The Bobby Jones Story (1953), The Tumult and the Shouting (1954) and The Final Answer and Other Poems (1955 Posthumous). In 1962, Rice was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sports Writers Hall of Fame. |
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