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
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.
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.
I like to get where the cabbage is cooking and catch the scents.
The natural habitat of the tongue is the left cheek.
The Russians have a weapon that can wipe out two hundred eighty thousand Americans. That puts them exactly ten years behind Howard Cosell.
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.
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.
Ninety feet between the bases is the nearest thing to perfection that man has yet achieved.
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.