Who said: "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game."?

Grantland Rice was an early 20th-century American sportswriter; he was known for his elegant prose. His writings were published in newspapers around the USA and broadcast on the radio. He established himself over many years as one of the United States' leading sports authorities. The well-known saying "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game" is derived from Rice's poem 'Alumnus Football' (1908). The poem was written specifically for a gathering of the Vanderbilt Alumni Association.

Henry Grantland Rice, aka Grantland Rice, was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in November 1880. He lived for 73 years and died in July 1954, following a stroke. During his life in 1922, Rice became the first play-by-play announcer carried live on radio for the World Series game. He said that he preferred writing to radio and rose to fame in 1924 when his column in the New York Herald-Tribune referred to the University of Notre Dame's backfield as the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. In 1930 he started a syndicated column that would eventually appear in 100 newspapers.

His expressive writing helped to raise sports players to heroic status. He often compared the challenges of sports to mythic stories and the greater human condition. Rice frequently looked at the greater social and personal meaning of sports. Rice turned his poem 'Game Called' into a eulogy for Babe Ruth ('Game called by darkness - let the curtain fall,/ No more remembered thunder sweeps the field.')