About the award

The Red Smith Award is presented by the Associated Press Sports Editors, the professional body known as A.P.S.E., for “major contributions to sports journalism.” It is not a prize for a single story or a single season. It is a career award, given to people who have spent decades shaping how the games are covered, and it has come to function as the field’s highest honor.

It has been awarded annually since 1981. The recipient is announced in the spring and honored in June at the organization’s convention. The list of winners reads, in effect, as a short history of the American sports page across the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Walter Wellesley Smith — “Red” Smith — wrote a sports column from 1927 until his death in 1982, most famously for the New York Herald Tribune and later The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1976, one of the first sportswriters to do so, and his spare, literate columns are still taught as models of the form.

The award is named for the best there was, and given to those who came closest to him.

When A.P.S.E. created the award in 1981, the choice of name doubled as a statement of standard, and the first recipient was Smith himself. He died the following year, which lent the honor an elegiac weight it has never quite lost.

One feature sets the Red Smith Award apart from most journalism prizes: it is open to both writers and editors. Many of its recipients are the famous bylines — the columnists whose names sold papers. But others spent their careers on the desk, assigning, shaping and defending the work of others, and the award honors that labor too. A few recipients were, above all, leaders of A.P.S.E. itself.

That breadth is why the roll of honor mixes household names with figures known mainly inside the newsrooms they ran. Several awards have been given posthumously, and a number of recipients did not live long past receiving it — an occupational fact of a career award given late.

This site keeps a page for each recipient from 1981 onward, drawn from the record the earlier redsmithaward.com maintained. The award has continued since — its most recent honorees include Bill Plaschke, Thomas Boswell and Dan Shaughnessy — and the archive will follow it forward. For now, the roll here runs from Red Smith himself to the recipients of the late 2010s.

Smith's own column argued a position as often as it described one, built one paragraph at a time rather than asserted in the lead. Readers working on that same kind of case in their own writing, a paper or an essay that has to convince rather than just report, can start with AllEssay's guide to writing a persuasive essay.