Leigh Montville

Leigh Montville was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 20, 1943, went to the University of Connecticut, and then spent twenty-one years at The Boston Globe, most of them as a columnist. The Globe sports section of that period is the one people mean when they call a sports section great: Peter Gammons, Bob Ryan, Will McDonough, Dan Shaughnessy, and Montville, who was the one who wrote the sentences you read twice.

His columns were less about the score than about the person who had produced it, and the person watching. He had a habit of noticing the quiet detail in a loud room. That habit later became the whole method of his books.

Boston is a hard town to write sports in. The readers know more than the writers about the Red Sox and the Celtics, or believe they do, and they write in to say so. A columnist survives there by being either louder than the readers or more observant than them. Montville chose the second route, which is slower to build a following and keeps it longer. Twenty-one years is the evidence.

When Frank Deford assembled the staff of The National in 1989 and 1990, the short-lived daily sports paper, Montville was among the columnists he recruited. The paper lasted eighteen months, from January 1990 to June 1991, and its writers scattered to good jobs. Montville's was at Sports Illustrated, where he became a senior writer, adding television commentary for CNN/SI in the 1990s.

The one who wrote the sentences you read twice.

Magazine length suited him. The Globe column had trained him to be quick; SI let him be thorough. The shift from a thousand words to five thousand is where many newspaper writers get lost, and where Montville found the form he would use for the rest of his career.

The books are why he is known outside Boston. Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero won the 2004 CASEY Award for the year's best baseball book and remains the standard life of a difficult man. The Big Bam did the same for Babe Ruth, working around the myths rather than repeating them. At the Altar of Speed took on Dale Earnhardt after the 2001 crash at Daytona. Sting Like a Bee covered Muhammad Ali's exile years, 1966 to 1971, when the fights were in courtrooms.

What the books share is a refusal to be awed. Williams, Ruth, Earnhardt and Ali are four of the most mythologized figures in American sport, each with a protective apparatus of fans, estates and earlier books. Montville's approach is the reporter's: find the people who were in the room, ask what actually happened, and write it down in order. The result is affectionate without being reverent, and it explains why the Williams book in particular is the one later writers cite when they want what happened rather than what is usually said.

Why Not Us?, written fast in the autumn of 2004, is the exception to the pattern: a book about a season rather than a life, produced while the Red Sox were still parading. Tall Men, Short Shorts, from 2021, closes the loop by returning to the 1969 Celtics-Lakers Finals, told partly as memoir of a young reporter's Boston.

The Associated Press Sports Editors named Montville the Red Smith Award recipient in 2016, listing both The Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated. By then he had been out of daily journalism for years and was working mainly as an author, which says something about how the editors read the award: not as a prize for current output but for what a career had added to the trade. His appearances in documentary work, on Costas Now, in American Masters and in HBO sports films, are the by-product of being the person producers call when they want someone who was there and can explain it.

Montville also belongs to a small group of recipients who made the transition from daily to book-length work without the seams showing. The list of Red Smith honorees is heavy with columnists and editors whose best work lived a day and was gone; his is on library shelves, which is a different kind of durability and one the editors clearly meant to acknowledge.

He is a living recipient, and this page confines itself to the public record: the papers, the magazine, the books, the award. The rest is his.