The Nov. 23, 2024, college football contest between Army and Notre Dame will fittingly take place exactly 100 years after the two storied programs met at New York City’s Polo Grounds – a clash many sports fans recall because of the dramatic column that sportswriter Grantland Rice published the next day.
In his opening paragraph, Rice famously compares the Fighting Irish backfield to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and suggests that the “South Bend cyclone” simply overwhelmed the Army players:
“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 football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.”
