Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith (
1905-
1982) was a legendary
New York sports columnist known for his elegant, stylish prose. A native of
Green Bay,
Wisconsin and a graduate of
Notre Dame, Smith began his long and distinguished career in sports journalism with the
Milwaukee Sentinel in
1927. After tours of duty with the
St. Louis Star and
Philadelphia Record, Smith settled for good in New York City in
1945, writing columns first for the
New York Herald Tribune and later with the
World Journal Tribune. By
1955 his syndicated column appeared in over 500 publications nationwide, even including a fashon rag, the
Women's Wear Daily. When the
World Journal Tribune folded in
1967, the
Women's Wear Daily was the only place to find the column in New York City until the
New York Times picked it up in
1971.
More than just an average sportswriter, Smith was recognized as a master prose stylist, bringing a literary but unpretentious tone to the world of sports. Shirley Povich wrote that Smith "raised the sportswriting trade to a literacy and elegance it had not known before," and Ernest Hemingway once called him "the most important force in American sports writing." Smith himself liked to say that writing was easy - you just open a vein and bleed.
Smith became one of only a small handful of sportswriters to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, and that same year he was elected to the writer's wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame.