Grantland Rice

Rice's Nashville years left a place name. Covering the Southern Association team for the Tennessean, he is credited with renaming the ballpark Sulphur Dell, because, he said later, nothing rhymed with Sulphur Springs Bottom. A Vanderbilt Phi Beta Kappa who wrote verse, he took a pay cut in 1910 for the New York Evening Mail, enlisted as an army private at thirty-eight, and wound up with a column syndicated in eighty to a hundred newspapers and a weekly newsreel, Sportlight. He died in 1954.

What the plaque says

Grantland Rice A distinguished sports writer and poet, Rice was born November 1, 1880, in a house which stood here. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, 1901, he later was called the Dean of American Sports Writers, and became internationally famous for his influence on sportsmanship and fair play. He died in 1954.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stones River National Battlefield — 3.1 mi
  The Murfreesboro battlefield of December 1862, with a national cemetery built by Black soldiers, a Trail of Tears route and the story of the freedmen's settlement called Cemetery.
• Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration — 25 mi
  The Shelbyville show grounds where the Tennessee Walking Horse has been crowned world grand champion each late summer since 1939, and where the practice of soring is part of the story.
• Henry Horton State Park — 25 mi
  A Duck River park on Governor Henry Horton's former farm in Marshall County, with a mill ruin from 1845, kayak floats and the grave of a governor the House declined to impeach.
• Fort Negley — 30 mi
  The largest inland stone fort of the Civil War, built in 1862 on St. Cloud Hill by more than 2,700 conscripted Black laborers, hundreds of whom died.

More markers nearby

• Morgan's Wedding — steps away
• James Daniel Richardson — steps away
• Forrest's Murfreesboro Raid, July 13, 1862 — steps away
• State Capitol — steps away