Certain phrases and images enter the popular imagination almost from the moment they are created. Passages from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow remain in the minds of readers who know no other poetry. Millions who have no idea who George Orwell was know that "1984" and "Big Brother" are ominous phrases. The sportswriter Grantland Rice made at least two such contributions to popular mythology. As long as men and women engage in athletic competition, one can expect to hear his most famous lines of verse: "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." These lines were first published on 16 June 1908 in the Nashville Tennessean. The lead paragraph for Rice's best-known newspaper article provided an image almost as enduring. Describing a gridiron encounter between Army and Notre Dame in 1924, he wrote:

Outlined against the blue-gray October...