Bill Dwyre

The Red Smith Award is given by an association of sports editors, and every few years it goes to one of their own. Bill Dwyre's turn came in 1996, in his fifteenth year running the sports section of the Los Angeles Times. He was a past president of the Associated Press Sports Editors, and the members knew exactly what they were honoring: the person who hired, assigned, budgeted and argued so that other people's bylines could look good.

That is a harder thing to celebrate than a column, and it is why editor-recipients are a minority on the list. Dwyre's case was unusually clear-cut because of one event a dozen years earlier.

The Times sports section he ran was, by staff size and travel budget, the largest in the country, and it used the money on things other papers could not afford: a reporter at every major event, columnists who traveled, long investigative pieces on the business of sport. Running a department like that is closer to running a small newspaper than to editing copy, and Dwyre's reputation among his peers was as an administrator who still read every word.

Dwyre was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on April 4, 1944, and graduated from Notre Dame in 1966 with a degree in communication arts. His first newspaper job of note was on the sports copy desk of the Des Moines Register in 1968, a paper with a reputation for turning out editors. He moved to the Milwaukee Journal and became its sports editor in 1975, running the section for six years.

In June 1981 the Los Angeles Times brought him west as an assistant sports editor and promoted him to sports editor within the year. He also kept a sideline going the whole time: a monthly column for Referee magazine that ran from 1972 to 2002, thirty years of writing about officiating for the people who do it.

The Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles in 1984, and Dwyre had been in the job three years. The Times decided the Games were a local story on a global scale and staffed them accordingly: more than a hundred reporters and editors under his direction, and a special Olympic section published every day of the Games, twenty-four editions in all. Nothing on that scale had been tried by an American sports section before, and papers hosting later Games worked from the model.

More than a hundred reporters, twenty-four daily Olympic editions, one sports editor.

The scale is easy to state and hard to picture. A hundred people filing from two dozen venues across a metropolitan area the size of a small country, every day for sixteen days, into a section that had to be edited, laid out and printed on top of the regular paper. The logistics alone would have justified an award for management. What the editors remembered was that the writing in those sections held up, which is the part a sports editor is actually responsible for.

The recognition came fast. In 1985 the National Press Club named him National Editor of the Year, an award not restricted to sports, and the Olympic section won a National Headliner Award the same year. When the A.P.S.E. voted him the Red Smith Award in 1996, the 1984 Games were still the first thing anyone mentioned, and probably still are.

In June 2006, after twenty-five years, Dwyre gave up the sports editor's chair and moved to full-time writing for the Times. Editors who try this late are often exposed; Dwyre was not. He wrote about boxing, tennis, golf and the general oddities of Los Angeles sport with the dry manner of someone who had spent decades reading other people's copy and had opinions about how it should go. In 2010 he was named California Sportswriter of the Year, fourteen years after being honored as an editor.

The Referee column deserves its own note. For thirty years, through the whole of his editing career, Dwyre wrote monthly for a magazine read by umpires, referees and officials, people whose work is noticed only when it goes wrong. It is a small, specific readership, and the fact that he kept the column from 1972 to 2002 says something about how he saw the job of sports journalism: not only to describe the game but to understand the people who run it.

He remains a Notre Dame man, serving on the advisory board of the university's John W. Gallivan Journalism Program, and lives in San Dimas, east of Los Angeles. He is one of the few recipients who could plausibly have won the award twice, once for each half of the career.