The Red Smith Reader Read online

  The Red Smith Reader

  The

  RED

  SMITH

  Reader

  EDITED BY DAVE ANDERSON

  WITH A FOREWORD BY TERENCE SMITH

  Skyhorse Publishing

  First Vintage Books Edition, August 1983

  Foreword copyright © 1982, 2014 by Terence Smith

  Foreword excerpts from “The Natural,” published in the Columbia Journalism Review by Terence Smith, May 1, 2013

  Introduction copyright © 1982, 2014 by Dave Anderson

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2014, published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC

  Many of the articles in this book were originally published in the St. Louis Star, the Philadelphia Record, the New York Herald Tribune, and Publishers-Hall Syndicate

  Copyright © 1934 by the St. Louis Star

  Copyright © 1937, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942 by the Philadelphia Record

  Copyright © 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 by the New York Herald Tribune, Inc.

  Copyright © 2967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 by Publishers-Hall Syndicate.

  Fifty-one of these articles originally appeared in The New York Times from 1971 to 1982.

  Copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Walter W. Smith

  “The Base Was Always a Boy—One of a Kind,” by Red Smith, September 16, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jerome Holtzman and Holt, Rinehart, and Winston for permission to reprint the Red Smith chapter from No Cheering in the Press Box recorded and edited by Jerome Holtzman. Copyright © 1973, 1974 by Jerome Holtzman. Reprinted by permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Cover photo reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-486-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-103-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  Foreword

  Walter Wellesley (Red) Smith was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on September 25, 1905. He decided early on that he wanted to go to Notre Dame and become a newspaperman, just the way an older kid he admired had done, so he did. Simple as that. New York was always his goal, but his route was roundabout: the Milwaukee Sentinel, the St. Louis Star, the Philadelphia Record, and, finally, the big time: the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times. Along the way, he must have written thousands of sports columns, becoming arguably the best in the business, right up until his death at age seventy-six in 1982.

  Curiously, for all the pleasure he took in it, he was an accidental sportswriter. As he told the story, he was a junior man on the news copy desk at the St. Louis Star, just a few years into his career, making about $40 a week, when the editor, the redoubtable Frank Taylor, discovered that half his six-man sports staff was on the take from a local fight promoter and fired them. Looking around for a replacement, he called my father over and supposedly the following conversation ensued:

  TAYLOR: Do you know anything about sports, Smith?

  SMITH: Just what the average fan knows, sir.

  TAYLOR: They tell me you’re very good on football.

  SMITH: Well, if you say so.

  TAYLOR: Are you honest?

  SMITH: I hope so, sir.

  TAYLOR: What if a fight promoter offered you $10, would you take it?

  SMITH (long pause): $10 is a lot of money, sir.

  TAYLOR: Report to the sports editor Monday.

  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.”

  Pop roamed off the sports beat occasionally, covering the national political conventions in 1956 and 1968, but when invited to expand his column to politics and world affairs, as James “Scotty” Reston and others had done before him, he declined. Same answer when he was asked to become the sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune. No, he said, the column was his thing, the one thing he did best. He’d stick with it. I think he would have been a good editor, maybe even exceptionally good, but he was not drawn to management and titles never interested him.

  When I was growing up, it seemed to me that my father was always writing a column. I can remember him working in every imaginable setting: football press boxes, at the track, in hotel rooms, at fight camps in the Catskills, in summer cottages in Wisconsin, on airplanes and on the road. Very often when the family was driving somewhere, someone else would be at the wheel and Pop would be in the passenger seat with a light portable cradled on his knees, tapping the keys with two fingers. Once, when we moved into our house in Connecticut, he had the movers set up a table and chair beneath a tree and wrote a column there. It was moving day, but his deadline was looming, as always.

  Everything we did together or as a family became grist for a column. In the years when Pop was writing seven a week, it had to be. Our summer vacations in Door County, Wisconsin; fishing in the stream near our house in Connecticut; the time we tried to enter our overindulged dachshund in a local dog show (a haughty judge took one look at the plump pooch and told my mother: “This is a show for dogs, madam, not pigs”)—all these became columns over the years. It made for an intoxicating mix. The actual writing of a column might take only a few hours, but it was a twenty-four-hour-a-day occupation. Pop would no sooner finish one than he would begin to wonder aloud what he would write the next day. He and his great friend and colleague Joe H. Palmer, the racing columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, would convene in Palmer’s book-lined study at the end of a day, scotch and soda for my father, bourbon and branch water for Palmer. “Give us this day our daily plinth . . .” they would intone as they raised their glasses. It was their private joke—a plinth is the base of a Greek column—but the prayer was fervent. My father’s search for his plinth was unending.

  One lazy summer afternoon in 1977 Pop took my son, Chris, who was then five, fishing for the first time in his life on a pond near his summer house in Martha’s Vineyard. The conversation between them produced a lovely column that opened with Chris, watching his silver-haired grandfather climb through a barbed-wire fence, asking: “Grandpa, did you grow old, or were you made old?” Thirty years earlier, another colu
mn had been built around a similar fishing expedition, this time with father and son in fruitless pursuit of smallmouth bass on a Wisconsin lake. In that piece, the boy is quoted as saying: “Gee, Dad, this is the life, isn’t it? Fishing and eating in saloons.”

  It follows, then, that in later years, when I was abroad as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, that Pop’s columns continued to serve as a kind of family chronicle and newsletter. (We both wrote for a living, but not for leisure; we were lousy correspondents.) His column, appearing in the International Herald Tribune, was a way for me to follow his movements and what he was up to. Similarly, he would track my bylines and datelines and would call or write to see what was wrong if they disappeared for too long.

  Pop was able to find column material in the least likely places. Once, when he came to Jerusalem, where I was the Times’ bureau chief, we drove down to Jericho and came across an abandoned racetrack where the princes and playboys of the Hashemite court had raced camels and gambled at a casino on the shore of the Dead Sea prior to the 1967 Arab-Israel war. The place was a shambles by the time we got there, but some local Bedouin told us stories about what it had been like and, naturally, their tales produced a column entitled “Life and Times at Dead Sea Downs.”

  Writing the column was my father’s life, his livelihood and his therapy. In 1966, when we got word that my mother had contracted incurable cancer, I drove out to Connecticut to share the news with Pop. When he heard it, he broke down crying. Then he wrote a column. It was a good column-good for him to write, and good to read.

  In the last years of my father’s life, when his health and strength were fading, sustaining the column required a tremendous act of will. Yet he wanted nothing more than to keep at it. As long as he was writing, he was part of the world he had lived and loved. Pop regarded retirement as a kind of social disease. The column was his contract with life.

  Out of concern for his health, I tried repeatedly to get him to slow down, to write three columns a week instead of four. It was an unrewarding task. Fewer columns, he argued, gave him fewer chances to be good. He cared as intensely about that at the age of seventy-six as he ever had. He wrote his last just days before his death. He titled his final column, in which he reluctantly advised his readers that he would be cutting back to three times a week, “Writing Less—and Better?”

  After getting him to agree to trim his output, I upped the ante in our negotiations. I urged him, on the advice of his doctor, not to go to the Super Bowl that was scheduled for Detroit about three weeks later. Stay home and watch it on television, I argued, like millions of other Americans. Then write your column based on what they saw on their sets.

  Now I had gone too far. “Nothing doing,” he said, his voice suddenly louder and stronger. “I’m going to the Super Bowl, then I’m going to Las Vegas for a fight, then I’m going to Florida for spring training. If I can’t do that, I’d better pack it in.” Only death interrupted that schedule, and his determination to meet it.

  Pop resisted with equal force repeated invitations to write his memoirs or, worse yet from his point of view, weighty works on the role of sports in American society. He didn’t have much use for books like that, and he used to argue that he never wanted to write a book that he wouldn’t read himself. He demurred repeatedly when people urged him to write a full-length book about sports or anything else. “I’d rather go to the dentist,” he’d say. But there was more to it than that. The columns were his métier, although he would have sneered at that word. The form suited him. He was good at capturing an event or a thought or a story in 800 words or so, often with an elegant phrase or a snatch of dialogue or the perfect anecdote. After all those years of condensing his thoughts into column-length units, he was uncertain, even insecure, about attempting a book. “I’m good at writing the column,” he said to me during one long, post-midnight conversation in Martha’s Vineyard three years before he died. “I think I’ll stick with what I know I can do well.”

  Lord knows he did that.

  Contents

  Foreword by Terence Smith

  Introduction by Dave Anderson

  “I’d Like to Be Called a Good Reporter”

  1 Olympics

  2 Racing

  3 Football

  4 Baseball

  5 Politics

  6 Some Other Sports

  7 Fishing

  8 Offbeat

  9 Boxing

  10 Pals, Colleagues, and Himself

  Introduction

  When a middle-aged friend asked me recently which sports columnists I had read growing up, the first name I mentioned was Red Smith.

  My friend knew the name, and he knew that Red Smith wrote for the New York Times, but he wasn’t familiar with his columns. That was understandable. My friend was a teenager reading his local New Jersey paper when Red died in 1982, a few days after his last column appeared, but I told him: “They’re republishing The Red Smith Reader. You can read him now.”

  Thankfully, so can all those of a certain age who, for one reason or another, had not read him much, if at all. And all those people are in for a treat, as I was in collecting the columns, many of which I had read as a teenager riding the New York subway to high school or later as a Times sports columnist who traveled with Red to the World Series, Super Bowl, and the big boxing fights.

  Dave Anderson

  June, 2014

  Introduction:

  Collecting the Columns

  by Dave Anderson

  If you blindfolded yourself, reached into Red Smith’s files, and yanked out 130 columns, any 130 columns, you would have a good collection. But in choosing these columns of America’s best sports-writer, I preferred mostly those he wrote about big names, big events, big issues.

  Clippings of the columns were stashed away in his little office in the gray barn that serves as a garage behind the white colonial home he shared with Phyllis on a quiet, leafy country road in New Canaan, Connecticut. Over his last decade, those columns he wrote at home were created in that little office on his Olympia typewriter or, in the last few months, on a video display terminal.

  His columns from the last fifteen years had been slipped into clear plastic envelopes, month by month, and stacked in the lower left-hand drawer of his red tabletop desk. Those from previous years had been tucked into cardboard shoe boxes, year by year, inside a metal file cabinet. And those from early in his career had been pasted in a now tattered, yellowed scrapbook begun nearly half a century ago. In his devotion to accuracy, if a typographical or editing error had occurred, he had corrected it in the margin. But nowhere was a column framed or on display.

  His gray wood-paneled office was as he left it before he died at age seventy-six on January 15, 1982.

  Next to the window overlooking the grassy backyard and the gravel driveway, his typewriter was surrounded by a black telephone, a telephone-number card file and a mug of pens and pencils. Along the walls, shelves held perhaps 1,500 books, not all on sports. Not far from a Bobo Newsom bubble-gum card and a reddish trout fly under glass, complete sets of the World Book and the Encyclopaedia Britannica were within reach.

  On the back of the office door, a New Yorker cartoon showed a husband and wife watching a TV quiz show. “If you know all the answers, Mr. Red Smith,” the wife is saying, “why don’t you try to get on?”

  Photos, sketches and prints were everywhere—Joe Frazier flinging the left hook that crumpled Muhammad Ali in their first fight, a collage of boxing champions, Ted Williams leaning on a bat, Yogi Berra wearing most of his catcher’s equipment as he sat on the steps of the Yankee dugout, Herman Hickman, Grantland Rice, Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, his friend Jack Murphy on a fishing trip, old English racing scenes. And a plaque with a metallic photo of a horse named for him, W. W. Smith, high-stepping across the finish line at Saratoga Raceway. “World record 1:58.4,” the plaque proclaims, “4-year-old pacing gelding 1/2-mile track 9/10/66.” Near it was a Joe DiMaggio-model bat.

  Ne
ar another window, sunlight shone across Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition, that was open to pages 1306 and 1307, from liege to ligature. The dominant word on those two pages, with all its derivatives, was “life.”

  “I’d Like

  to Be

  Called a

  Good Reporter”

  This personal recollection by Red Smith appeared in No Cheering in the Press Box, a collection of interviews with sportswriters recorded and edited by Jerome Holtzman.

  NEW CANAAN, CONNECTICUT, 1973

  I never felt that I was a bug-eyed fan as such. I wasn’t one of those who dreamed of being a sportswriter and going around the country traveling with ballplayers and getting into the games free and, oh, dear diary, what a break. I’m not pretending that I haven’t enjoyed this hugely. I have. I’ve loved it. But I never had any soaring ambition to be a sportswriter, per se. I wanted to be a newspaperman, and came to realize I didn’t really care which side of the paper I worked on.

  I’m too lazy to change over now, to start something new at this stage: I just got so comfortable in so many years in sports. But otherwise I still feel that way. I never cared. When I went to Philadelphia I didn’t know what side of the paper I’d be on. I had done three or four years of rewrite and general reporting in St. Louis when I accepted the offer in Philadelphia. I knew how many dollars a week I was going to get. That was the essential thing. I never asked what they wanted me to do.

  The guy I admire most in the world is a good reporter. I respect a good reporter, and I’d like to be called that. I’d like to be considered good and honest and reasonably accurate. The reporter has one of the toughest jobs in the world—getting as near the truth as possible is a terribly tough job. I was a local side reporter in St. Louis and Milwaukee. I wasn’t as good as some. I wasn’t one of those who could go out and find the kidnapper and the child. But I got my facts straight and did a thorough job.