Life and Death of a Legend

Why do old heroes and legends seem to stand so tall? Any major college football team of today most likely could run, pass and kick its way through the 1924 Notre Dame team. We know that the players are bigger, faster and better trained. The hulking football figures virtually populate American living rooms each fall Saturday via television. But hearken to the past to talk of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, and gain a measure of recognition from any passing sports fan.

Today the Four Horsemen survive in legend only. Jim Crowley, the last of the four, died on Wednesday at age 83 in a Scranton, Pa., nursing home. Unlike many old-time players, Crowley did not pass into oblivion after his college career. He coached at Michigan State and Fordham and was commissioner of the old All-American Football Conference and Pennsylvania state athletic commissioner. Still, Crowley’s name would have been familiar only to trivia experts. Say “Four Horsemen,” and that’s something else.

Why? Notre Dame, for starters. It was the football citadel of what then was “the West” to a majority of Americans. Many players played both offense and defense. Those who battered themselves for 60 minutes of straight football became Iron Men. There was only one bowl game of those that survive, the Rose Bowl, and it was won in 1925 by the Four Horsemen and the Seven Blocks of Granite. The Times of Jan. 2, 1925, referred to Notre Dame as the “Titan of the East,” and noted that Stanford outplayed Notre Dame in almost every category but the score, 27-10.

There was no Top 10 or Top 20. There was one annual titanic clash that you could count on for decades as the supergame of the year: Notre Dame versus Army’s Black Knights of the Hudson. There was only one All-American team, the Grantland Rice All-American. And there was only one Grantland Rice, who wrote these words after Notre Dame’s 13-7 victory over Army at New York’s Polo Grounds in 1924: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they were known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden.”

The stuff of legends.