The ep50 The Uncrowned Champs

It's time for yours truly, Jimmy Powers with another Grantland Rice story. Hi there, this is Jimmy Powers transcribed with another chapter from the Grantland Rice story, the tumult and the shouting.

And so with a sharp salute to the every young spirit of Grantland Rice, I take up the narrative in first person. While I've spent much of my life heaping laurels on the winner, I have a strong feeling for the loser, particularly the unbreakables. These are the worth of the world, the pride of the

race. These who have taken their blastings, blown from the track. These who have faltered and fallen, wrecked by the pace. These who have come to their feet and dared to storm back. Yes, as I've said before, I'll always feel at home in the valleys. I'd rather look up to some peak than beyond the peak looking down on those who need help. And for these special

friends of mine, these uncrowned champions, I respected them, blown and battered, attempting to scale those peaks, and knocked into the depths they didn't know, in fact never knew how to quit. These then are some of my uncrowned champions. Some were famous, and some weren't so well known, but they fit in this category. Let's look at these athletes a little closer.

In many respects, Lou Gehrig, the iron horse of the great Yankee teams, was an uncrowned champ. Had he been claimed by any other team, Gehrig would have ridden a solid gold pedestal. However, the Yankee first baseman, yes, he's my all-time best in this position, played the majority of his years in the shadow of Babe Ruth.

When Babe went into decline, Lou, who had been around for so long he was taken for granted, like the wonderful one horse Shay. The Yankees were seeking fresh idle material when they came up with a young Italian, a fisherman's boy from San Francisco.