Apologies to Grantland Rice*
Thanks to the grownups in charge,
onto campus still ride the four horsemen:
famine, pestilence, destruction, and death.
Away from the action, go daughter and son
onto campus, governed by men and women
whose preference is not action but order.
Order is the folly that leads grownups to
transform nature’s grass fields into gridirons,
for the harvest of concussions made there,
Which fertilize fields of study, once enough
gold has poured from gridiron professors
into some dean’s wide receiving hands,
For distribution among the professions
who share in the plentiful spoils
of gridiron wars, who design the tools
Of actual wars, the ones against others
and the one against nature herself,
who knows only a daughter and son.
Dave Read
* 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. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below. – Grantland Rice, New York Herald Tribune, October 18, 1924