John Steadman

John Steadman died in Baltimore on January 1, 2001, at seventy-three. On June 29 the Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award. He is one of the few recipients honored posthumously, and the gap between the two dates says something about how the vote went: the editors did not treat his death as a reason to pick someone else.

The choice also broke a pattern. Most Red Smith winners are national names, columnists at papers that circulate far beyond their city. Steadman's paper and his subject were the same place. He was a Baltimore writer about Baltimore teams for fifty-five years, and the award recognized that a career can be measured in depth rather than reach.

John F. Steadman Jr. was born in Baltimore on February 14, 1927. He went through eighth grade at Blessed Sacrament and then to Baltimore City College, the public high school, where he was the varsity catcher. He was good enough to spend two seasons in the minor leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization and honest enough to notice that he was not going further.

The newspaper career had already started. In 1945 the Baltimore News-Post took him on as a sports reporter at fourteen dollars a week. He stayed with the Hearst paper through its years as the News American and, after it closed, moved to The Baltimore Sun, where he was still writing a column in the last weeks of his life.

Baltimore gave him a great deal to write about in those years. The Colts arrived in 1947, the Orioles in 1954, and a city that had been a minor-league town for half a century had two major-league franchises inside seven years. Steadman was eighteen when the first came and twenty-seven when the second did, young enough to grow up with both teams and old enough to be on the payroll the whole time. Few writers get to cover a city's entire big-league history from the first game.

The number that follows him around is 719. That is how many consecutive Baltimore Colts games he attended, beginning with the franchise's arrival in 1947 and ending on December 10, 2000, three weeks before he died. The streak survived the team's 1984 move to Indianapolis, which is the detail that turns a statistic into a character study. He was not following a city's team. He was following the team.

719 consecutive Colts games, from 1947 to December 10, 2000

For two stretches, 1955 to 1958 and 1963 to 1966, he was also the color commentator on the Colts' radio broadcasts, which put him in the booth for the Unitas years. Separately, he covered every Super Bowl from the first through Super Bowl XXXIV in January 2000.

The 1984 move tested the streak and, in a way, the writer. The Colts left for Indianapolis overnight in March of that year, and Baltimore spent twelve seasons without a team. Steadman kept going to the games anyway, in another city, for a franchise that had taken his city's name off its helmets. Baltimore got the NFL back in 1996 with the Ravens, and he covered that too. The Ravens won Super Bowl XXXV on January 28, 2001, twenty-seven days after he died. He had covered the first thirty-four and missed the one his own city won.

The 1958 NFL championship, the Colts beating the Giants in sudden-death overtime at Yankee Stadium, is the game usually credited with making professional football a television sport. Steadman was there for the News-Post and wrote the book about it the following year: The Greatest Football Game Ever Played: When the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants Faced Sudden Death (1959). The title has been borrowed many times since, usually without credit.

The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association elected him to its Hall of Fame in 2000, while he was still writing and still attending Colts games. The Red Smith Award followed in 2001, the twenty-first time it had been given and one of the rare occasions the recipient was not there to accept it. He was survived by his wife, Mary Lee.

It is easy to make a hometown writer sound quaint, and this page has tried not to. Steadman was a working reporter who broke stories, covered the Colts through their best and worst years, and kept doing the job into his seventies. The streak is the headline; the fifty-five years of copy are the reason for the award.