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
The natural habitat of the tongue is the left cheek.
Look at him and you'd think he's 16. Talk to him and you think he's 26. Talk baseball with him, and you'd think he's 36.
He had splendid conformation-broad shoulders, white hair and erect carriage-and was beautifully turned out in an ensemble of rich brown. One was inclined to hope he would, in the end, award first prize to himself.
I've had many writing heroes, writers who have influenced me. ...When I was very young as a sportswriter I knowingly and unashamedly imitated others ... But slowly, by what process I have no idea, your own writing tends to crystallize, to take shape. Yet you've learned some moves from all these guys and they are somehow incorporated into your own style. Pretty soon you're not imitating any longer.
I like to get where the cabbage is cooking and catch the scents.
As a ballplayer, (Dizzy) Dean was a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef. Nobody ever taught him baseball and he never had to learn. He was just doing what came naturally when a scout named Don Curtis discovered him on a Texas sandlot and gave him his first contract.
Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.
Young men have visions, old men have dreams.
I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.
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.
My best girl is dead.
It is well known that the older a man grows, the faster he could run as a boy.
Baseball is a dull game only for those with dull minds.
I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.