Ring Lardner (and Grantland)

[inthesuburbs]

From the Daily Beast book review:

ESPN has a niche website for fine sports writing named Grantland after the famous sportswriter of the 1920s, Grantland Rice. With all due respect, they named it for the wrong person. The more appropriate name would have been “Ring.”
Rice is mostly remembered today for writing perhaps the most famous lead in sports history after the 1924 Notre Dame-Army game, “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again.” Modern sportswriters who quote those lines in tones of ashen awe are missing the joke: the lines weren’t remembered by Rice’s contemporaries because they thought them memorable but because many of thought the prose stilted and funny.
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was actually fond of Rice—“Granny,” as he called him—but his own style was crisp, sardonic, and slangy in direct contrast to the solemn, often stilted prose of Rice and his imitators. Lardner would crack up colleagues in the press box by reciting the “Four Horsemen” lead in stentorian tones. (Where was Rice viewing the Four Horsemen from that they were outlined against the sky? Was he lying down on the turf looking up at them?)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/01/the-forgotten-genius-of-ring-lardner.html

 

[Versatile]

Ring Lardner was crotchety as hell. I don't like his writing at all.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Ring Lardner was a messed-up person. He was also a noted figure in American literature, let alone American sportswriting. They teach Lardner in school, but not Rice, who was an excellent sportswriter, in the mannered style of his day. Come to think of it, all days, even this one, have mannered styles. Maybe that's why Simmons, whose style is certainly mannered, named the site after Rice.

 

[Versatile]

They teach both in school.

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

Ring Lardner was a messed-up person. He was also a noted figure in American literature, let alone American sportswriting. They teach Lardner in school, but not Rice, who was an excellent sportswriter, in the mannered style of his day. Come to think of it, all days, even this one, have mannered styles. Maybe that's why Simmons, whose style is certainly mannered, named the site after Rice.

How so?

 

[Michael_ Gee]

I am sorely tempted to reply "Shut up, he explained," as a tribute, but Lardner was a serious alcoholic even by the standards of 20th century American literature.

 

[Glenn Stout]

Jonathan Yardley's bio "Ring" is required reading, and a helpful intro. In many ways Lardner is hard to access from the present - his short stories are very much of a time, and if you don't know that time, are almost impenetrable. Sadly, his baseball reportage, which is far more accessible and often just as entertaining, if not more so, is essentially uncollected and lives almost only on microfilm. Truth is, hardly anyone has actually read his sportswriting, which is unfortunate. For a time you had he and Damon Runyon both writing competing, syndicated "World Serious" game stories, each working the high wire, looking the other in the eye while they were doing it. Highly entertaining.

They teach Rice as an example of a genre of sportswriting; they teach Lardner as literature.

I think his introduction to his book "How to Write Short Stories" is one of the funniest things ever written.

 

[buckweaver]

Boy, Lardner sure is getting a lot of publicity this week. Three days before that Daily Beast essay ran, this one appeared on The Atlantic's website:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/the-greatest-baseball-novel-ever-written-ring-lardners-em-you-know-me-al-em/279085/

At any rate, I'm glad to see him get his due. "You Know Me, Al" is still hilarious, even 100 years later. If you've never read anything from him, read that book first.

Glenn said it's hard to access his writing from the modern day, and I'd agree with that. But I think his newspaper writing can often be harder to penetrate than his short stories. There are a TON of had-to-be-there inside jokes in his Chicago baseball coverage, especially from "In The Wake of the News," delivered without a lot of context even at the time. He toned it down a little bit for his nationally syndicated column, but the local stuff sometimes leaves me at a loss. Still, once you do get it, you realize how brilliant he was. There was no one else like him.

Here's some excerpts from his work: http://www.tridget.com/excerpts.htm.

Some of y'all on this board will appreciate this humorous "FAQ from sports writers to sports fans" from 1913: http://www.tridget.com/wake/7jun13.htm. Some things don't change ...

Or this little ditty on Nebraska trying to get admitted to the Big Ten ... again, in 1913: http://www.tridget.com/wake/8jun13.htm

Ring Lardner was crotchety as hell. I don't like his writing at all.

Lardner was always sardonic, even in his youth, but he did famously become more cynical after the 1919 World Series scandal broke his heart. His writing in the 1920s until the end of his life is definitely crotchety. He ain't the first nor the last ...

 

[Small Town Guy]

Buck, Did he actually sing "I'm forever throwing ballgames" during the series? Actually what were his writings like during the series, and then in the aftermath?

 

[Versatile]

Ring Lardner was crotchety as hell. I don't like his writing at all.

Lardner was always sardonic, even in his youth, but he did famously become more cynical after the 1919 World Series scandal broke his heart. His writing in the 1920s until the end of his life is definitely crotchety. He ain't the first nor the last ...

I have a pretty high reverence for the work of many old-timers, but I have read Lardner before and after the 1919 World Series and can't stand his style. He was like a more articulate (insert pompous moralizing modern columnist here). He was click-baiting before clicks were a thing.

Lardner would have just hated the designated hitter.

I should add that I've never read anything but his sports writing. I am sure I would prefer his fiction, but why bother?

 

[buckweaver]

I should add that I've never read anything but his sports writing. I am sure I would prefer his fiction, but why bother?

Life's too short to read authors you don't like. I won't read another word from Jane Austen, either.

EDIT: But I would disagree that Lardner was anything like a modern-day Heyman or Morosi (or insert your favorite moralizing national columnist here.) He was an equal-opportunity cynic, and he made fun of the old-guard baseball purists as much or more often than he did the young idiot ballplayers. At least until he got old, too, and then he was just a Debbie Downer on everyone.

He certainly wasn't a progressive, and I don't know how he would have felt about the DH, but he was by no means a tsk-tsk moralist.

 

[buckweaver]

Buck, Did he actually sing "I'm forever throwing ballgames" during the series? Actually what were his writings like during the series, and then in the aftermath?

He claimed that he did, and Hugh Fullerton vouched for it. But Lardner said (and I'll have to look up the source on this) he sang it at a nightclub/tavern in Kentucky, not on the train to Chicago. Certainly not in front of the players, which would have gotten him punched in the mouth. The incident sounds much more like a joke among writers at the bar.

As for his World Series columns, here, read them yourself: http://www.dropbox.com/sh/q7j009arcugqa2i/_VtK9xxaBK

Nothing earth-shattering, and a lot of the "juicy parts" that are remembered today seem more salacious in hindsight (such as the bit about Cicotte's sore arm on Oct. 5.) But it's still interesting to read and get a feel for what the Series was like to experience at the time. It definitely helps to read one of the gamers first to know what happened on the field, though. His joke about the fourth inning being eliminated won't make sense unless you see how the Reds scored in Games 1 and 2.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Second buckweaver. The "You Know Me Al" stories are great reading. I randomly found a copy of "The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring W. Lardner, 1914-1919" in a used book store years ago, and I have read it cover to cover several times.

I have read Grantland Rice, and it's not the same. I put his newspaper work in the context of a place and time, and understand him for who he was. But he was not the writer that Lardner was.

Lardner has a more timeless, and obviously crossed into literature, quality. I put him side by side with Damon Runyon. Their abilities to capture language as it was spoken, mannerisms and make characters come alive, was special.

 

[Versatile]

The writer Grantland owes most might be Tony Kornheiser, with his wealth of pop-culture references, detailed approach to humanized feature writing, crossovers into the style section and general smarminess.

 

[TigerVols]

Without Ring Lardner, the world would never have known Lonnie Lardner. And that would be a shame.

 

[buckweaver]

Without Ring Lardner, the world would never have known Lonnie Lardner. And that would be a shame.

Or Ring Lardner Jr. (Academy Award winner), or George Jr. (Pulitzer winner) or Rex Jr. (Esquire, SI), or John Lardner (Saturday Evening Post) or James Lardner (WaPo, Inequality.org) or Susan Lardner (New Yorker).

Hell of a talented family, all around.

http://www.tridget.com/lardnermania/writingl.htm

 

[Glenn Stout]

FYI, new Library of American Lardner Collection due out soon.

http://thestacks.deadspin.com/ring-lardner-an-american-original-1214055929

 

[Michael_ Gee]

I think John Lardner might be my favorite sportswriter of all time.