and now, JoPa's take on newspapers and sports.

Sent to me by a Penn St. friend, from this week's newser.

Hope it's not a d_b. It's kind of rambly.

Q. I imagine you don't pay attention to rankings too much, national rankings, but being No. 5 in the country do you ever compare your team's development to other teams?

No, don't get me into that. I don't know what we are, for crying out loud. Geez, that's the same thing hey, I honest to God, are we No. 5 is that what you're telling me? Q. Yes.
I don't know that we're No. 5.

You guys don't seem to understand. I don't pay I don't read anything about us. I get the paper. I go to the bathroom. I take the paper in there and I scan it. I look at it. The first thing I do is look at who died. All right. Second thing I look at are headlines. Something that says, "Paterno is the Greatest," I read it. (laughter) If it says I'm a bum, I don't even look at it. No, I don't pay attention. What you are today isn't what you're going to be tomorrow, all right? What you're going to be tomorrow is what you make happen tomorrow.

I read the newspapers. I feel bad about the way things have gone with the newspaper business, with the guys, with the computers (Internet), getting all that stuff on. Because it's taking away some of the guys, and I think some of the great guys I've known and who wrote well who set a standard for writing, people don't realize, they were all sports writers. They were all sports writers first. Grantland Rice and those guys.

I don't know, it's a different world. And I'm not part of that world. I'm really not. I love to read the newspapers. I'd love to read the sports page, but to be very frank with you, I don't because so much of it is you guys have to base on what you are getting in an e-mail, what you're getting because I've talked to a couple of guys about it.

You're influenced by, what people are after you to say something because you're competing. It's like I don't even turn on the television set anymore, because one television station is anti Obama. The other one you like to have somebody have an impartial view of some things because they studied it and they know about it. [
And they're not being influenced by the guy that owns the paper or the guy that owns the radio station, so it's a different world and it's not the kind of world that I'm comfortable with.

That's a speech. I usually get 100 bucks for that (laughter).

 

Did he send that out via Twitter?

 

I actually kind of like that.

 

I wonder how many guys in the room were live-Tweeting that.

I can hear his voice dottering through that in my head.

RB

 

Who is going to tell JoePa that Grantland Rice got laid off?

 

The old man has still got it.


FYI: (I know Ace was joking) Grantland Rice died at his typewriter after banging out a column on the '54 all-star game and the Say Hey Kid.
My second son is named Grantland in his honor.

 

Who's Grantland Rice?




Kidding. He started that school in Texas, right?

 

Amen, joepa. Amen.

 

It's sad that Rice's flair and style wouldn't make it into the paper today.

He wrote, "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden."

It would be edited to, "Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden lined up in the backfield for Notre Dame."

When was it decided to get away from that kind of writing and go more with straight forward prose?

 

Grantland Rice? Isn't he the guy who quarterbacked Notre Dame to its last national title a few years after writing about the Four Horsemen, and now just got enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame? Changed his name from Sam and has two daughters, Donna and Condoleeza?

 

Probably when people realized that lede wasn't actually that good, and there were a bunch of people worse than Rice trying their hands at it.

 

Grantland Rice was a terrible poet. This will be a better day for all of us if I can dig up his baseball poem in which he rhymed home, with foam.