Red Smith

When the Associated Press Sports Editors created a lifetime honor for sports journalism in 1981, they named it for Walter Wellesley Smith and then gave it to him. It was less a decision than an acknowledgement. For most of the century Red Smith had been the writer other sportswriters read to learn how it was done, and to name the award after anyone else would have required an explanation nobody could supply.

He died the following January, at seventy-six, so his tenure as the award’s first recipient lasted only a few months. That timing gave the honor a valedictory quality it has carried ever since: it tends to arrive near the end of a long career, and it began by crowning one just as it closed.

Smith was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1905 and graduated from Notre Dame in 1927. He worked his way east and down the masthead the hard way — the Milwaukee Sentinel, the St. Louis Star, then nine years at the Philadelphia Record beginning in 1936. It was in St. Louis and Philadelphia that the style formed.

In 1945 he arrived at the New York Herald Tribune, and his column “Views of Sport” became the one to beat. At its peak it was syndicated to hundreds of American papers and hundreds more abroad. When the Herald Tribune folded in the 1960s he eventually landed, in 1971, at The New York Times, where he wrote until the week he died.

What set Smith apart was restraint. He wrote against the purple prose that ruled the sports pages of his youth — the “Gee Whiz” school — and made a case, column by column, that games deserved the same clean, literate handling as anything else in the paper. He was funny without straining for it, and he trusted the reader.

Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.

That line, half joke and half confession, is the one everyone quotes, and it captures the discipline underneath the ease. The apparent effortlessness cost him something every day. David Halberstam called him the greatest sportswriter of two eras, which is another way of saying he outlasted the styles around him without ever sounding dated.

In 1976 Smith won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, cited for his sportswriting — a rare crossing of the line that then separated the sports desk from the paper’s serious business. The same year he received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award from the baseball writers. The 1981 A.P.S.E. honor completed the set and, by attaching his name to it, made him a permanent fixture of every year’s ceremony.

Every recipient since has, in effect, been measured against him. That is a heavy thing to hang on a trophy, but in his case the field agreed it was fair.