01An editor, not a byline
Most Red Smith Award recipients are columnists, and columnists leave a trail: clips, books, quotes, a Wikipedia article. Richard Sandler was a desk man. He was the sports editor of Newsday, the Long Island daily, and the public record of his career is correspondingly thin. What follows is what can be confirmed, and no more.
Sandler came to the sports department from Newsday's city desk in the early 1970s, according to the tribute material that survives. Under his direction the section collected a run of Associated Press Sports Editors awards in the 1980s, which is the most concrete measure available of what he built. Editors are judged by the section, and the section was judged good.
02The staff he assembled
The clearest evidence of his work is the list of writers who passed through Newsday sports in his years. Accounts of his tenure credit him with hiring, among others, Peter King, Tom Verducci, Tim Layden, Wallace Matthews, Jan Hubbard and Helene Elliott. Several of them went on to national reputations at Sports Illustrated and elsewhere. An editor who recruits that well has done the hard part of the job.
Those same accounts describe a desk that mixed assignments deliberately, sending a reporter to a high-school game one day and the Giants the next. That is the kind of detail that comes from colleagues rather than archives, and it should be read that way.
031989 and 1995
Sandler died in 1989 at fifty, after a year-long illness with pancreatic cancer. Six years later the APSE gave him the Red Smith Award, the first time the honor had gone to a recipient posthumously. The award had been created in 1981 as a lifetime honor, and until 1995 every winner had been present to collect it. The decision to break that pattern for a sports editor from Long Island says something about how his peers regarded him.
This archive does not have a verified birth date, birthplace or detailed résumé for Sandler, and we have chosen not to guess. If a family member or former colleague can point us to an obituary or other primary record, the page will be expanded.
Questions people ask
- Who was Richard Sandler?
- The sports editor of Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, during the 1980s. He came to the sports desk from the city desk in the early 1970s and died in 1989 at fifty.
- Why is his Red Smith Award notable?
- Because it was the first given posthumously. Sandler died in 1989 and the Associated Press Sports Editors honored him in 1995.
- Why is this page so short?
- Sandler was an editor rather than a writer, and there is no Wikipedia article or readily available obituary. We have limited the page to what can be confirmed rather than filling it out with guesses.
Sources
Entered September 11, 2026. How this page is sourced: see the sources and method.