High praise from someone who was pretty good himself at Sports Illustrated. If Gary Smith isn’t the best magazine writer ever, then he is at least in the team picture.

Writes S.L. Price at SI.com in a tribute to Smith:

Smith’s 13 selections in The Best American Sports Writing is a record, as are his four National Magazine Awards. When he won his first, in 1992, for Shadow of a Nation, he beat a stunning piece written for Life — by Gary Smith. All too often the man was competing only with himself.

Smith, 60, has decided to retire from SI and magazine writing, to focus perhaps on books or something entirely different. For the last six years he has taken to going, once or twice a year, on a silent retreat. “Just figuring out how the mind works,” Smith says. “Turn the lamp inward and watch the mind and what it does. We’re just a piece of the universe, and you can start to get a glimpse of how it all works if you can get the mind quiet and still enough.”

Price writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that every sportswriter of a certain ambition and age — let’s say from 20 to 70 — has had a Gary Smith moment. This is not fun. What starts as excitement soon becomes a swirl of puzzlement, awe and surprise; the frantic fluttering of pages forward and back; the parsing of sentences like so much Kremlinalia; some involuntary, half-baked blurts like, “How did he…?” and “Why did no one else…?” — and all of it leads back to you, you sorry bastard, and how you’re never, ever going to write a story like that, so what were you thinking getting into this business in the first place?

Since youth is the time of prime vulnerability, such a moment always hit fresh-faced Hemingways the hardest. Mine came at 23, when Smith’s cover story in the Nov. 18, 1985, issue of Sports Illustrated began like this:

When Dale Brown was nine years old, he set fire to the building where he worked. He didn’t mean to. Something he didn’t understand drove him to strike a match in the furniture warehouse and light the piece of straw sticking out from the leg of a chair. It made him feel fearless and free. Suddenly the chair was in flames and the feeling was gone. He raced into the street unnoticed, up the stairs to the family apartment just a few doors away, and into the bathroom.

He pulled down his pants, sat on the toilet and put his head in his hands, heart hammering, each scream of the sirens. …

Indeed, to read Smith was to take a ride into a place you never had experienced in the pages of a magazine. His long tales and unique style weren’t for everyone, and Price writes, he occasionally had some misses.

But more often than not, you were at once riveted and blown away by what Smith produced.

Sports Illustrated will be tweeting out his best stories today. Here are a few:

Fallen coach George O’Leary.

A cover piece on troubled high school basketball star Richie Parker.

Muhammad Ali’s entourage.