Van McKenzie

The Red Smith Award is given by sports editors, and every so often they give it to one of their own. Van F. McKenzie, associate managing editor for sports at the Orlando Sentinel, died at his home in Heathrow, Florida, on January 26, 2007, at sixty-one, after three years with cancer. The Associated Press Sports Editors named him the 2007 recipient shortly afterward. According to colleagues quoted at the time, he had regarded the award as the top of the profession and doubted he had earned it.

The sections he ran suggest otherwise. In his seven years in charge at Orlando, the APSE repeatedly ranked the Sentinel's sports pages among the best in the country, which is the closest thing an editor gets to a byline.

His career, as recorded in the Sentinel's obituary, ran through most of Florida's newspapers and then out of the state and back.

• Ocala Star-Banner
• Orlando Sentinel (first stint)
• Cocoa Today, now Florida Today
• St. Petersburg Times
• New York Daily News
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• The National, as managing editor
• Orlando Sentinel, from 2000 until his death

The National deserves a line of its own. It was the first nationwide daily sports newspaper in the United States, launched on January 31, 1990, with Frank Deford as editor-in-chief, and it closed on June 13, 1991. Deford later said hiring McKenzie away from Atlanta was the best decision he made there, and credited him with bringing in much of the writing staff. The paper failed for reasons that had nothing to do with its sports desk.

The measure of an editor is usually who worked for him next. By the count in his obituary, more than thirty people who had worked under McKenzie went on to run sports departments of their own, in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Newark, St. Louis and San Jose among other cities. That is a large share of the country's major sports sections descended from one desk, and it is probably the strongest case for the award.

There is no Wikipedia article on Van McKenzie, and the obituaries this page draws on do not give a birth date or birthplace beyond the age at death, so neither is stated here. The Orlando Sentinel's own obituary, republished in Editor and Publisher and the Houston Chronicle, is the primary source, together with The National's Wikipedia entry for his role there. Anyone with a fuller biography, or copies of the sections that won those APSE rankings, would be adding to a thin public record.