We’ve got the truth, but where’s the ‘gee whiz’?

William Bryan, Special to the News

Published December 24, 2006 at midnight

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Professional football needs more "gee whiz."

Grantland Rice, generally accepted as the best sportswriter in world history, wrote heroic descriptions of games and players, descriptions so flowery, so full of open and unbridled enthusiasm, that he could not contain himself in prose. Many of Rice’s oft-cited quotations are from poems he composed as part of his reports.

Mike Lupica, Mitch Albom, Rick Reilly – no poetry.

A common theory, particularly among professional athletes, is that the modern negativity in sport, the dark underside composed of drugs, tantrums, crime, cheating and money, is effectively a media creation. A complementary theory is that sport has always been corrupt, that there never were good old days, but that we believe in a long-lost innocence because of Rice’s writing from the first half of the 20th century.

Rice published more than 67 million words, according to one particularly time-rich biographer. Roughly 50 were negative, and those were probably inserted by rookie copy editors.

Were Rice writing in the modern era, Sean Taylor and Pacman Jones could find weekly respite in his columns, which people could read and never know that either player had ever been arrested. Albert Haynesworth, Shawne Merriman and Tank Johnson could quietly go away for a few weeks and return with no more acknowledgement from Rice than a note that they were missed.

Were Rice writing in the modern era, nobody would have forgotten running back Joe Delaney. In 1981, his rookie year with the Chiefs, Delaney took a sweep 75 yards for a touchdown against the Broncos. The Chiefs were called for a false start, and on the next play Delaney took an identical pitch for an 80-yard touchdown. In 1984, he died trying to save three children from drowning, an act of astounding heroism considering he could not swim. Where is Joe Delaney’s poem?

None of this is to suggest that Grantland Rice should be part of every journalism curriculum, or that he was right, or even that he responsibly performed his duties. If Rice was responsible for creating a faux golden age, then he was also a hopeless romantic, a wide-eyed innocent. His famous "gee whiz" journalism was a very narrow version of the truth, but it certainly captured sport’s best side.

With the information available today, to say nothing of the prejudice of many disappointing years of fandom, innocence is next to impossible. Rather than enjoying the breathtaking unpredictability of Michael Vick, we have to think of him as a coach killer, as a guy who would flip off people who paid $185 a ticket to watch him play.

In a sense, the athletes are absolutely right. Negativity in sport is a media creation. Even if Lupica, Albom and Reilly really did write in verse . . . well, that would be awful, but the point is that regardless of medium, the press will continue to report the truth, and the truth is not all heroes and flowers.

The truth will never give football fans as much joy as "gee whiz."