My upcoming book on Babe Ruth’s Called Shot homer (due out next spring) includes several passages from Red Smith.
Smith was at Wrigley Field for that famous game in 1932. He only was a young reporter for the St. Louis Star on that day and wasn’t much of a presence given a press box that included Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon.
However, Smith became a giant in the business. He wrote brilliant columns about Ruth, Rice and others. It was an honor to feature some of those excerpts in my book. Not that I didn’t already know it, but reading his columns again reconfirmed just how good he was.
Smith truly was a Babe Ruth among sportswriters. A new book, American Pasttimes: The Very Best of Red Smith, celebrates his work.
Edited by Daniel Okrent, the book features his classic columns. They truly are classics.
Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post writes:
As Smith’s son Terence, himself a distinguished journalist, says in a brief, affectionate afterword to this collection, his father was a columnist pure and simple, a master of the 800-word “plinth,” as he was amused to call his column, with no pretensions or desires to be otherwise. Born in Green Bay, Wis., in 1905, he did a prolonged journalistic apprenticeship before finally reaching the New York Herald Tribune in 1945, where he stayed until the paper’s demise in 1967 (by then it had been folded into what was called the World-Journal-Tribune), after which he floundered around until being taken in by the New York Times in 1971, where, as Okrent correctly writes, “he was, immediately and obviously, the best writer in the paper.” His last column for the Gray Lady was published on Jan. 11, 1982, and four days later he died.
Smith’s son wrote about his father in the Columbia Journalism Review:
Once he got into it, he relished writing sports and thought it was as good a vehicle as any to shed some light on the human condition. “I never felt any prodding need to solve the problems of the world,” he said in an interview years later. “I feel that keeping the public informed in any area is a perfectly worthwhile way to spend your life. Sports constitute a valid part of our culture, our civilization, and keeping the public informed, and, if possible, a little entertained about sports is not an entirely useless thing.”
Thanks for bringing this up. I have about half a dozen of Red Smith’s collections and Ira Berkow’s thoughtful biography. If there has ever been a better writer on a sports page (or, other than Russell Baker, a better writer in a newspaper), I haven’t found it!