Dave Anderson

In 1976 the Pulitzer board gave its commentary prize to Red Smith and, in doing so, admitted that a sports column could be serious writing. Five years later it gave the same prize to the man at the next desk. Dave Anderson won the Pulitzer for Commentary in 1981 for Sports of The Times, the second sportswriter honored and the second from the same paper. Smith died that January; the succession was not planned, but it read as one.

When the Associated Press Sports Editors gave Anderson the Red Smith Award in 1994, the choice had that history built into it. He was the recipient who had most plainly inherited the space the award's namesake left, and he held it for another thirteen years.

David Poole Anderson was born in Troy, New York, on May 6, 1929, and grew up in the city. He went to Xavier High School in Manhattan, graduating in 1947, and to the College of Holy Cross, where he took a degree in English literature in 1951. He had already been inside a newspaper: at sixteen he ran copy as a messenger for The Sun.

The Brooklyn Eagle hired him as a clerk out of college and made him a sports reporter, covering the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees, until the paper folded in 1955. He moved to the New York Journal-American that year, covered the Rangers for nine seasons and wrote a column, and in 1966 crossed to The New York Times as a general-assignment sportswriter. The column came in 1971.

Two of his first three papers died under him. The Eagle closed in 1955 and the Journal-American disappeared into a merger in 1966, which is a fair sample of what happened to New York's afternoon press in those years. The Times was the survivor, and joining it turned out to be the last job change he ever made. He was thirty-seven, had been a working sportswriter for fifteen years and had already written for national magazines; the Times did not have to wait long to find out what it had.

The piece that made his reputation with other writers came in 1980, when George Steinbrenner fired Dick Howser after a 103-win season and staged a press conference to pretend otherwise. Anderson wrote the scene straight, down to the sandwiches laid out for the reporters, under a headline that told the reader exactly what they were looking at.

The Food On a Table At the Execution

That was his method: stay out of the way and let the detail do the work. He had shown it earlier in magazines, with a 1961 Sports Illustrated piece on Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak and a 1964 True magazine profile of Sugar Ray Robinson, and boxing remained the beat where he was most at home. The Boxing Writers gave him the Nat Fleischer Award in 1974; the International Boxing Hall of Fame inducted him in 2006.

Anderson published twenty-one books, many of them written with the athletes and coaches he covered. John Madden, Larry Csonka, Sugar Ray Robinson and Frank Robinson all put their names beside his. It was a sideline that paid, but it also kept him close to the people whose lives the column depended on, and he seems to have regarded the collaborations as reporting by other means.

The range of co-authors maps the range of the column. Madden and Csonka were football, which he covered from the Giants beat onward and which brought him the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Dick McCann Memorial Award in 1994, the same year as the Red Smith. Sugar Ray Robinson was boxing, his first love as a subject. Frank Robinson was baseball, the beat he had started on in Brooklyn covering three New York teams at once. Hockey, from the Rangers years, and tennis rounded out a portfolio that a columnist at a paper with one team in each sport would never have been allowed.

The honors ran the length of the career rather than clustering at the end of it.

• E. P. Dutton Award, 1965 and 1972
• Page One Award, 1972
• Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, 1981
• National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, 1990
• Red Smith Award and Dick McCann Memorial Award, both 1994
• Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Journalism, 2005
• PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, 2014

He retired from the Times in 2007 but kept filing occasional columns until 2017, more than fifty years after his first byline there. His wife, Maureen, died in 2014. Anderson died on October 4, 2018, in Cresskill, New Jersey, at eighty-nine, survived by four children, among them Steve Anderson, a vice president at ESPN.