The Four Horsemen

On October eighteenth, nineteen twenty-four, Notre Dame beat Army thirteen to seven at a game played in New York. It was not the most important game of the season. Notre Dame would go on to finish ten and zero and win the national championship. But the Army game is the one that made history, because of what a sportswriter named Grantland Rice wrote the following morning.

Rice opened his dispatch: 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.

The four players Rice named were Notre Dame's starting backfield under coach Knute Rockne. Harry Stuhldreher was the quarterback. Jim Crowley played left halfback. Don Miller played right halfback. Elmer Layden was the fullback. None of them weighed more than one hundred sixty-two pounds. None of them stood taller than six feet.

A Notre Dame student publicist named George Strickler read Rice's column and understood what it could become. He arranged for the four players to be photographed on horseback. The image went out on the wire services and ran in newspapers across the country. The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame became one of the most recognizable images in the history of college football.

That season's team won all ten of its games and beat Stanford twenty-seven to ten in the Rose Bowl, clinching the national championship. All four horsemen were eventually inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Rockne himself had been at Notre Dame since nineteen ten, first as a chemistry student, then as an assistant coach, then as head coach from nineteen eighteen. He had already been building something extraordinary before that October afternoon in New York. But it was Rice's opening line that gave it a name everyone could remember.