GOOD NEWS FRIDAY sponsored by Liberation Farm - THOROUGHBRED RACING ASSOCIATIONS ENCOURAGE FUTURE JOURNALISTS
Friday, June 26th, 2009
By Ray Paulick
"For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks not that you won or lost, but how you played the game."
Grantland Rice, one of the great sportswriters from the golden age of newspapers, wrote those words. He also was the fellow who came up with the term "the four horsemen of Notre Dame." He was just as much a poet as he was a sportswriter.
Rice was a native of Tennessee who attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He worked for a time in his home state, but was recruited by bigger papers in the Northeast and wound up in New York, where he spent most of his career. It’s been estimated that Rice wrote some 22,000 columns and 67 million words during his career.
Another well known sportswriter from Tennessee, Fred Russell, also attended Vanderbilt. Unlike his friend, Rice, however, he stayed put for his entire career, serving as editor of the Nashville Banner for 68 years.
Both men received numerous awards and honors. Rice died in 1954 at the age of 73. Russell was 96 years old at the time of his death in 2003.
They are also memorialized in a scholarship that Oaklawn Park owner Charles Cella started in 1956 and is awarded annually through the Thoroughbred Racing Associations to aspiring sportswriters wishing to attend Vanderbilt. It covers four years of tuition. The scholarship originally honored only Rice, but Russell’s name was added some years later. Russell, in fact, mentored many of the scholarship winners.
The roster of scholarship recipients is impressive and includes such well known writers and broadcasters as Roy Blount Jr., Skip Bayless, Tyler Kepner, and David Sheinin. An old colleague of mine from the Thoroughbred Times and Blood-Horse, Chuck Manson, was another Fred Russell-Grantland Rice scholar, as was Daniel Wolken, a one-time intern at Blood-Horse who is now a sportswriter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
The TRA just announced this year’s recipient, Eric Single, a graduate of George Walton Comprehensive High School in Marietta, Ga. Single was one of 72 individuals who applied for the scholarship. Cella works with Vanderbilt officials to sort through the applicants and select the winner each year.
Single is an avid sports fan whose dream is to work in sports journalism and eventually wind up at ESPN. Many of the scholarship recipients are exposed to horse racing through internships, and the hope is that some of them will cover horse racing. That’s not all that likely now, however, with very few papers staffing turf writers and the trade publications struggling and laying off writers.
Still, the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice scholarship is a terrific program and Cella is to be commended for establishing the endowment that keeps it going. Below is the complete list of recipients since its inception in 1956.
Year Recipient
1956 Charles D. Nord
1957 Thomas E. Templin
1958 Larry G. Daughtrey
1959 Roy Blount Jr.
1960 Saxon Kim Chapin
1961 Thomas D. Quinn
1962 Robert E. Theil
1963 Richard S. Osborne
1964 Leonard Goldstein
1965 Michael Kiernan
1966 William Livingston
1967 Barry M. Morris
1968 Dennis P. McAuliffe
1969 David R. Rapp
1970 Skip Bayless
1971 John I. Bloom
1972 Irving Muchnik
1973 Kevin E. Cuneo
1974 Kevin McDonald
1975 David Brooks
1976 Michael L. Jackson
1977 Edward O. Wilson
1978 Charles C. Euchner
1979 Kenneth C. Ray
1980 Zachary V. Wenger
1980 Andrew Byer
1981 Charles R. Bush
1982 Mike Cornwell
1983 Tena Bozicevic Herlihy
1984 Thomas J. Wilson
1984 Chuck Manson
1985 Paul J. Richman
1986 Michael Holmes
1987 David Sheinin
1988 Andrew Maraniss
1989 Mitchell Light
1990 Clay Hensley
1991 Matthew O’Keefe
1992 Andrew M. Derr
1993 Tyler Kepner
1994 Allan L. Owen
1995 Lee Jenkins
1996 Not Awarded
1997 Daniel J. Wolken
1998 Samuel H. Heide
1999 Jeffrey D. Lowe
2000 Matthew James Mee
2001 Robert Craig Murray III
2002 Byron Patrick Dubow
2003 Matthew Collins McDavid
2004 Christopher F. Callaway
2005 Not Awarded
2006 Not Awarded
2007 David A. Namm
2008 Meghan Rose
2009 Eric Single
Liberation Farm celebrates the many horsemen and horsewomen who strive each day to make things better for horses and those who work with them. To learn more about Liberation Farm, click here.