Jimmy Cannon

Most Red Smith Award recipients are alive to collect it. Jimmy Cannon was not. The Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the 2004 award thirty-one years after he died, an acknowledgement that the list had a gap in it. The other names usually placed beside his, Red Smith and Jim Murray, were honored in 1981 and 1982. Cannon, who wrote in the same city as Smith and argued with him about how the job should be done, had to wait.

The wait was partly a matter of style. Cannon's prose was hot where Smith's was cool. He wrote in the second person, in long unpunctuated runs, and he took sides. That is easy to admire and hard to institutionalize. By 2004 enough of his imitators were sitting on award committees that the debt got paid.

Cannon was born in Greenwich Village on April 10, 1909, the eldest of three sons of a Tammany Hall ward worker. He left school at fourteen. His first newspaper job was in the classified department of the Evening World; by sixteen or seventeen he was a copyboy at the Daily News, and then a reporter. The formal education stopped there, and he spent the rest of his life making up for it with a vocabulary that, as Jerry Izenberg later put it, was white-collar in a blue-collar writer.

The break came through Damon Runyon. Cannon was writing a radio column at the World-Telegram in the early 1930s when Runyon noticed him and, by the usual account, got him hired at Hearst's New York American as a sportswriter in 1936. Cannon covered the Bruno Hauptmann trial and politics along the way, but boxing and baseball became the beats, and Runyon's Broadway cadence stayed in the writing for good.

When the war came Cannon went to Europe for Stars and Stripes, the Army's own paper, and attached himself to Patton's Third Army. His dispatches were collected in 1943 as The Sergeant Says. He would go back to a war zone once more, to Korea, in the 1950s. The experience gave him a permanent suspicion of men who talked tough about games, and a soft spot for fighters, who at least got hit for real.

It also fixed a friendship with Ernest Hemingway, who admired the columns and told people so. Critics compared Cannon's style to Hemingway's for the rest of his career, which flattered both of them and was not entirely wrong: short declarative punches, then a long one to the body.

Cannon joined the New York Post in 1946 and wrote a daily column there for thirteen years. By the time he left in 1959 he was reportedly being paid a thousand dollars a week, which made him the best-paid sportswriter in the country. The Journal-American hired him away that year, and he is generally credited as the first sportswriter with a six-figure annual salary. King Features Syndicate carried the column nationally. He kept the column going, in the Journal-American and through the syndicate, until his own health gave out.

He was also, in those years, a fixture of the New York night. He knew Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra well enough to be a character in their biographies, and he lived for a time in the apartment that had belonged to Leo Lindemann of Lindy's. The column was the household.

The device that outlived him was a column of unrelated one-line opinions, each beginning with the same four words. "Nobody asked me, but..." was borrowed by sports columnists everywhere and then by columnists on every other page of the paper. It is still in use, usually without attribution, in newspapers that no longer know where it came from.

Nobody asked me, but...

The sentence people remember best is not from that column. Writing about Joe Louis in an era when praise for a Black athlete usually came with a qualifier, Cannon wrote that the champion was a credit to his race, the human race. He called boxing the red-light district of sports and kept covering it anyway, because that was where the stories were. Of Howard Cosell he observed that if Cosell were a sport, he would be roller derby. He was the sportswriter other writers quoted at the bar.

Two collections gathered the columns: Nobody Asked Me, But... and Who Struck John? Edwin Pope, who had a Red Smith Award of his own, said Cannon was about as close to perfect as a sportswriter could get. Others found him overheated. Both camps read him every morning.

A stroke in 1971 put him in a wheelchair for what turned out to be the last two and a half years of his life. He kept dictating. He died in New York City on December 5, 1973, at sixty-four, a few months short of the age at which the honors usually start arriving.

They came late instead. The Boxing Writers Association of America gave him its A. J. Liebling Award in 1996, the International Boxing Hall of Fame inducted him as an observer in 2002, and the A.P.S.E. added the Red Smith Award in 2004. The three-decade gap between the death and the award is the largest in the honor's history, and the archive notes it here without apology. Some writers are simply ahead of the committees.