Red Smith
Red Smith
Walter Wellesley Smith, was an American sportswriter who rose to become one of America's most widely read sports columnists. Smith’s journalistic career spans over five decades and his work influenced an entire generation of writers. Smith became the second sports columnist ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1976. Writing in 1989, sportswriter David Halberstam called Smith "the greatest sportswriter of the two eras."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth25 September 1905
CountryUnited States of America
In entertainment value, the Democratic clambake usually lays it over the Republican conclave like ice cream over parsnips.
Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.
Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.
Unlike the normal pattern, I know I have grown more liberal as I've grown older. I have become more convinced that there is room for improvement in the world.
It was an ideal day for football - too cold for the spectators and too cold for the players.
Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.
Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.
In my later years I have sought to become simpler, straighter and purer in my handling of the language. I've had many writing heroes, writers who have influenced me. Of the ones still alive, I can think of E.B. White. I certainly admire the pure, crystal stream of his prose. When I was very young as a sportswriter I knowingly and unashamedly imitated others. I had a series of heroes who would delight me for a while and I'd imitate them--Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Joe Williams.
For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.
Any sportswriter who thinks the world is no bigger than the outfield fence in not only a bad citizen, but also a lousy sportswriter.
The Russians have a weapon that can wipe out two hundred eighty thousand Americans. That puts them exactly ten years behind Howard Cosell.
Ninety feet between the bases is the nearest thing to perfection that man has yet achieved.
It's no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the YankeeStadium of ancient times.