Jerry Izenberg

Jerry Izenberg received the Red Smith Award in 2000, forty-nine years into his association with The Star-Ledger of Newark. That would be a full career for most people. He has since added a quarter-century more: a first novel published at ninety, a second in 2026, the New Jersey Hall of Fame, the International Boxing Hall of Fame, and a streak of Super Bowls he ended on his own terms. In 2026 he marked seventy-five years as a newspaper writer.

He fits the award's pattern less neatly than most. Red Smith winners tend to receive it as a farewell. Izenberg took it as a marker somewhere past the middle and kept going, which is why this page is written in the present tense.

He was born in Newark on September 10, 1930, and grew up there through the Depression. He has said he used to sneak into Ruppert Stadium to watch the Newark Eagles of the Negro leagues, a memory that surfaced again in his 2026 novel. He attended Rutgers University in Newark, paying his way with part-time work, and started at The Star-Ledger in 1951 as a copy boy earning six dollars a night while still a student. The Korean War took him away for several years. When he came back he worked up to the column, and the column is where he stayed.

The Star-Ledger has been the constant. Other writers of his generation moved from paper to paper as the business consolidated; Izenberg made one paper the platform for a national byline, syndication, television and radio. He now writes as a special contributor, which is a polite way of saying the paper never found a reason to stop running him.

He covered the first Super Bowl in January 1967 and every one after it through Super Bowl LIII in 2019, one of only two daily newspaper columnists to be in the building for all fifty-three. He then chose not to travel to Super Bowl LIV, ending the in-person streak himself, though he has kept writing about the game. The New Jersey Hall of Fame credits him with fifty-five consecutive Kentucky Derbies. He was at Candlestick Park for the 1989 World Series when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, and he covered Sonny Werblin's ownership of the New York Jets from what amounted to his own back yard.

Fifty-three Super Bowls in a row, and he was the one who decided when the streak ended.

The numbers are the easy part of the story. What they leave out is that every one of those events was covered for a regional paper in New Jersey, and the column still travelled. Editors around the country picked it up because the writing was better than what they had locally, and that is the only kind of syndication that lasts.

Izenberg first saw Muhammad Ali at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, when the fighter was still Cassius Clay, and went on to cover more of Ali's bouts than any other writer. The two became friends. Defending Ali in print in the late 1960s, when the fighter's membership in the Nation of Islam and his refusal of induction made him widely hated, cost Izenberg readers and, on one occasion, his car windows: two men smashed them in protest at the columns. He has said, with the benefit of half a century's hindsight, that Ali was the easiest interview he ever had.

The boxing writing produced Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing, and it is the reason the International Boxing Hall of Fame inducted him in 2016. Few writers have been admitted to a sport's hall of fame for having watched it well enough; he is one.

He created Sports Extra, a television show that ran for eight years in the 1970s, and hosted Sports with Jerry Izenberg on NBC radio in the 1980s. He has written, narrated or produced thirty-five network television documentaries; A Man Called Lombardi earned an Emmy nomination. The book count now stands at sixteen: fifteen works of non-fiction, then After the Fire: Love and Hate in the Ashes of 1967, a novel set after the Newark riots that he published at ninety, and in 2026 a second novel, Damn You, Josh Gibson: A Ghost Story, about black baseball and the Eagles of his boyhood.

In 1979 he founded Project Pride, a Newark nonprofit for disadvantaged children. For most writers that would be a footnote. For him it is the point: the city he grew up in is the subject he keeps coming back to, in the column, in the novels and in the charity.

• Sports Hall of Fame of New Jersey, 1997
• Red Smith Award, Associated Press Sports Editors, 2000
• National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame, 2000
• International Boxing Hall of Fame, 2016
• International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, 2016
• New Jersey Hall of Fame, 2018 class (Arts and Letters)
• Russell Gabay Award, Society for American Baseball Research, 2025

The list will probably need updating. As of this writing he is ninety-five, has a new novel in print, and has given no public indication of stopping.