Bob Broeg: A Reminiscence of Red Smith

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).

 

To me, a secret of Red Smith’s success — and I always teased him by calling him Walter Wellesley — was, in addition to his obvious love affair with the King’s English, the background by which he surged to the top in our field and his strict reportorial responsibility that made his writing accurate as well as entertaining. 

As a kid in Green Bay, Red read Milwaukee papers. At South Bend in college, he read the Chicago papers. He apprenticed at Milwaukee, then put in seven years at St. Louis where, in addition to traveling with two pennant-winning ball clubs, 1930-31, he also blossomed by covering topflight crime stories and nonsports features. 

Coupled with several more years, traveling in and out of Philadelphia, doubling up covering big league baseball and writing a column, he was figuratively a Gulliver in Lilliput when he stepped into the main event in New York (1945). 

There, until his death, he continued to write marvelously at the painstaking pace best exemplified by press critic A.J. Liebling, who wrote: “l can write faster than anybody who writes better and I can write better than anybody who writes faster.” 

Walter Wellesley (Red) Smith was a verbal nitpicker, a fussbudget behind the typewriter. So we who read him were richly rewarded by the heavyweight champion of sportswriters.