Grantland_Rice_Story_The_55-xx-xx_ep06_Great_Athletes-Past_and_Present

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
This is Jimmy Powers and happy to be coming your
way with another Grantlin Rice story. Hello, this is Jimmy

(01:39):
Powers transcribed about to bring you another chapter from the
Grantlan Rice story, The Tumta and the Shouting. Today we're
putting the finger of immortality on some of the great
athletes of the past and present, who, through their unquestioned stamina,
rank high in what Granny calls iron ore content. So,
with a nod to the young and heart spirit of
Granny Rice, I once again opened the book and take

(02:02):
up the narrative in first person. There aren't any iron
men left in sport today, but then yesterday there weren't
any Roger Banisters, John Lundy's or West Santees either. The
old time ironman has been replaced by the modern specialist

(02:22):
in business as well as sports. However, the age of
the iron man was largely from another era, and I
knew my share of them. If Ty Cobb wasn't an
iron man, who was, Ty traveled at top speed on
a pair of fairly thin legs for twenty four years.
He hunted all winter, and he played baseball all spring
and summer. He played in more than three thousand ball games,

(02:45):
and he scored over four thousand runs, always in rapid action.
If Cy Young wasn't an iron man, who was, Cy
left a small farm in Ohio in eighteen ninety for Cleveland.
His square name was Denton, had been given a tryout
and had knocked the boards right out of the back
stop with his high hard one. One critic said it

(03:07):
looked as if a cyclone had hit the place. After that,
it was no longer Denton Young, but Cy for cyclone Young.
In Cy's first game, he shut out Chicago three to nothing,
then won more games five hundred eleven than most pitchers
ever pitched. He worked through more than eight hundred ball

(03:27):
games in both leagues, and finally retired when the kid
named Grover Cleveland Alexander beat him one to nothing in
nineteen eleven. Bob Fitzimmons had a large vein of iron
ore in his system. He was born in Cornwall, England,
in eighteen sixty two, eighteen years before I arrived on
this planet. Began fighting bouts at eighteen and didn't stop

(03:50):
until he was fifty two. Never more than an overgrown
middleweight himself, Fits won the heavyweight crown from James J.
Carbott at Carson City, Nevada, when he was thirty five.
Bill Tilden certainly had an overdose of iron content to
play the brand of tennis he featured for thirty years.
Another ironman, Jack Quinn, was in the majors from nineteen

(04:13):
o nine through nineteen thirty three and was pitching Big
League ball at forty seven. His reason a wife and
six kids. Willie Hoppey, in championship billiard since nineteen o eight,
is another amazing mixture of stamina and hairline skill, having
amassed fifty one world titles. Willie recently estimated he'd spent

(04:34):
more than one hundred thousand hours over the billiard tables
and had walked some twenty six thousand miles in fifty
nine years of chasing a cue ball. There were wrestlers
and bike riders Strangler Lewis and Frank Kramer, Yes, and
Reggie McNamara, the cyclist who seemed to go on indefinitely
despite hundreds of crack ups on the velodromes around the world.

(04:57):
But there are two iron men who are especially close.
One was a baseball player, the other a football player.
Their names were lou Geig and Pudge Heffelfinger. Both were
physical giants. Lou Geig was slightly over six feet and
well over two hundred pounds. He was perfectly built for power,
bull throated, and bare of arm. The first time I

(05:20):
ever saw Gerig was on a Thanksgiving afternoon in nineteen
twenty two at New York. Columbia was playing Colgate. I
brought Dick Harlowe, Colgate's famous coach, home with me after
the game. Colgate, with Eddie Tryon at his best, had
murdered the Lions. But there was a Columbia back who
also impressed Dick. He was a young giant named Gerig.

(05:41):
About midway and the stampede, he broke his right collar bone.
He finished the game with a useless right arm and shoulder,
but he stuck to his job. When I saw Garig again,
he was a ballplayer for the New York Yankees. Wally
Pip was hurt one day in nineteen twenty five, and
Gerig moved into first base. That was Pip's last appearance
as a Yankee. When Gerig finally retired after eight games

(06:05):
in nineteen thirty nine, he had played two thousand, one
hundred and thirty consecutive games over a period of fifteen
years without missing his appointment at first base. When I
played golf with Babe Ruth years ago, we often stopped
by to pick up Lou. He followed us around the course,
but he wouldn't play. He had an idea that the
baseball swing and the golf swing were too dissimilar, that

(06:27):
golf was bad for baseball. One morning, I dropped a
ball and handed him Ruth's mid iron. He took a smooth,
easy swing and hit a perfect shot out some two
hundred yards. I couldn't get him to hit another. It
was the same with hunting. Lou enjoyed hiking along for company,
but he wouldn't shoot anything. I just can't kill. He

(06:48):
told me to Gerig. A quail, a duck, or a
dove was a beautiful bird. That's the sort of fellow.
He was tremendously powerful, but as gentle as a child.
If Lou hadn't been struck down when almost in his prime,
he might have carried his mark to three thousand consecutive games,

(07:08):
for he never cott into an injury or illness. Lou
somehow struggled through eight games of the thirty nine schedule
before he went to manager Joe McCarthy's hotel room in
Detroit and quietly put down his glove. After two thousand,
one hundred and thirty consecutive games, the Iron Horse, at
thirty six years of age, had completed its final run.

(07:28):
Two years later, in June nineteen forty one, Lou passed away.
With the passing of Gerrig and Ruth in seven years,
I lost two irreplaceables. The other iron Man was a
football player known as William W. Pudge Heffelfinger. Born and
reared in Minneapolis, Pudge was on Waldercamp's All American teams
of eighteen eighty nine, eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety one.

(07:51):
He was another giant, better than six feet in some
one hundred ninety pounds, but he was faster than most halfbacks.
Years later, when Pudge pushed about two hundred and thirty
pounds but remained hard as granite, he became a walking
legend of Yale football. When you looked at Pudge, you
almost expected to see in the background the mystic figures

(08:11):
of John L. Sullivan, Pop Anson, Snapper, Garrison, Harry Varden,
Barney Oldfield, and other unbelievables of the bygone sports era.
Joe Williams once said that he had heard and read
so much about Pudge that until he actually met him,
he was certain the old boy never existed. Around nineteen fifteen,

(08:33):
after practice one day, Walter Camp, then Yale's coach, called
Pudge to one side and said, the trouble with you, hef,
is that you play guard only one way. You are
a fine guard, but remember there are at least two
ways to play your position. I began to study things
and practice on students related Pudge. They soon began to

(08:55):
run when they saw me. Ten days later, I told
Camp I had followed his advice, and now I had
six different ways to play guard. Heffelfinger was undoubtedly the
first of the running guards, I mean the pull out
and lead, the interference type. He was a terrific blocker.
When Pudge was forty three or forty four, he returned
to Yale for several days, Tad Jones was the coach.

(09:19):
Pudge lined up with the Scrubs, much against Tad's wishes.
He was afraid a man of forty four playing against
twenty year olds might be hurt. That was an historic afternoon.
When the Scrubs got the ball, Pudge turned to Jess Spaulding,
second team half back, and said, Jess follow me. I
followed him, related Spaulding, I also ran fifty five yards

(09:41):
for a touchdown with at least four tacklers sprawled out
on the field. Every man Pudge hit was flattened. Heffelfinger
was a bit sore about that scrimmage. You know, Grant,
He said. They said I broke a couple of Cupie
Black's ribs. I didn't. I happened to bump into a
man and drove him into Black. The collision occurred just
a week before the Princeton game and two weeks before

(10:03):
the Harvard game. It marked the last time Heffelfinger was
allowed on Yale field in a football suit. When Pudge
was fifty two, he played in a professional charity game
at Columbus Ohio. Bull mc millan, famed centered college hero
and later a fine coach, was quarterback. Before the game,
Pudge somehow dislocated his shoulder, but twisted it and jerked

(10:25):
it until the shoulder snapped back. Mc millan told me
they didn't think Pudge would last five minutes. Heffelfinger played
fifty four minutes of that game. Related mc millan him
fifty three and me twenty two. He played one of
the best games at Guard I ever saw. Shortly before
his death at Blessing, Texas in the spring of nineteen

(10:46):
fifty four, Pudge was in New York for a Touchdown
Club dinner and an award. I remember him saying, Grant,
it's fun to look back on a half century of
football playing. But I'm reconciled to a seat in the
stadium now, even if it's on the fifty yard line.
I know folks say I never outgrew a campus hero complex,
but at least they know I never rested on my oars.

(11:08):
I stood up to them all for three generations. That
night I toasted Pudge with these lines. As we look
them over in the Big Corral, as the years march by,
as they rise and fall, Here's to Big Pudge, my
pick and my pal, the greatest Roman of them all.
Right up to the end, Pudge Heffelfinger carried into life's

(11:30):
battle all the enthusiasm of a rookie. That closes the
book on another chapter from the grantven Rice story, the
tumult and the shouting until next we meet. This is
Jimmy Powers transcribed saying to you the best of the
bestest