Sports Biblio Digest 7.8.18: An Appreciation of Red Smith
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: Remembering Donald Hall, Baseball Poet; American Soccer Media Trolls; The Man Who Brought Hot Dogs to the Ballpark; A Fundamentalist Frank Merriwell; Mid-Season Baseball Reading; Sports Beach Reads; Vandalism at the Negro Leagues Museum
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 130, published July 8, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
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An aspiring sports journalist asked on Twitter this week for advice for people like him who are trying to break into the business.
In my response, I wish I had mentioned something so obvious I’m disappointed I didn’t think of it then.
Read Red Smith. Read everything with his name on it that you can.
There are so many sportswriters, of Smith’s heydey in the mid-20th century, to those who have followed him, who obviously need to be read, devoured, studied and deeply understood by the next generation.
Why Smith? Why now, given the corrosive, contentious topics and abrasive edginess in current sports media?
He was a writer of his time, with a graceful pen and an understanding ear who elegantly explained what animated the varied people he wrote about, in baseball and horse racing and boxing, long-lost college gridiron heroes, even an old trout fishing friend who’d become a pilot in the Chilean Andes.
His work is clean and concise, exudes warmth, and contains not a drop of pretention. He made writing look easy, but as he famously said, it most certainly was not:
"You just open a vein and bleed."
Like many of his peers, Smith didn’t write much about the taboo personal problems, crimes and psychodramas of the superstars that are commonplace subjects today. The genre then wasn’t dominated by exposes, or shaming, or holding up sports figures as public reflections of deeper problems in a society.
This is evident across Smith’s collected works, especially his final book, “To Absent Friends,” published shortly after his death in early 1982. His wife and son tied up the loose ends of the project he had begun, a collection of nearly 200 newspaper columns, many from the New York Herald-Tribune and The New York Times.
They are memories of figures and friends who’ve passed, recollected in classic newspaper-length tributes. As much as anything, they’re classic examples of another of Smith’s credos:
“Dying is no big deal. The least of us will manage that. Living is the trick.”
The lives of the famous and iconic in sports range from Connie Mack, Babe Ruth, Nap Lajoie, Honus Wagner, Knute Rockne, Pop Warner, Rocky Marciano, Walter Hagen, Vince Lombardi, Joe Lapchick, Triple Crown winners Whirlaway and Seabiscuit, Joe Louis, Walter Johnson, Branch Rickey, Bill Tilden and Walter O’Malley.
Smith’s praise for his peers is unsurpassed, and provides a fine introduction for young journalists: James Thurber, John Lardner, Jimmy Cannon, Damon Runyon, Stanley Woodward, Frank Graham, Grantland Rice, and A.J. Liebling.
Other figures were little-known, overlooked or behind the scenes, but their lives are finely-turned as well: Gus Dorais, Ernie Nevers, Max Baer, Red Rolfe, Bob Zupke, Hardboiled Smith; George Woolf, Chuck Klein and Mosey King.
There were some surprising observations from Smith, this for Avery Brundage, the loathed American head of the International Olympic Committee, who “wasn’t evil, only blind with righteousness.”
And this about Jim Thorpe, in the Herald-Tribune in 1953, about relinquishing his Olympic gold medals because he had accepted money to play other sports: “They would have merely borne false witness, testifying that in 1912 he was an amateur eligible under the rules for competition in amateur sport. He was not.”
Smith was stating the true status of Olympic athletes then, but he didn't advocate for the changes that came about post-Brundage: “Jim wasn’t an amateur and wasn’t entitled to the medals he won.”
An aspiring sports journalist would almost certainly red-flag that observation, and likely would note Smith’s silence about Tilden, the tennis luminary whom he referred to in part as “unfortunate” upon his lonely death in his Hollywood flat in the late 1950s. There was no mention of the morals charges involving underage boys that landed Tilden in jail in the late 1940s, and quite a bit of notoriety.
Later in his career, Smith did weigh in on some hot-button issues, and admitted he often put sports figures on an uncritical pedestal. He initially wasn't fond of Muhammad Ali, including the boxer's refusal to be inducted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.
Smith also thought the IOC's amateur model had become outdated by the late 1960s, as Brundage's iron-fist reign was loosening following the Mexico City protests of John Carlos and Tommie Smith.
In completing her late husband’s foreword, Phyllis Smith summarized “To Absent Friends” this way:
“What shows is his splendid way of seeing people, his true affection for his multifarious friends, and his ability to convey it all so vividly to us.”
This is especially why aspiring young sports journalists should read Red Smith. Above all, he wrote about people, and he wrote about what sports mean to people.
Few writers have ever written along those lines better, and this is what I wanted to get across on the Twitter thread this week. I suggested that one never, ever forget what drew them to sports in the first place, and not to fall into the entertainment/political/social justice rabbit hole that’s swallowing up so much of sports media.
We live in different times than the one that Red Smith shaped with his words and his empathy, and to younger sensibilities what he has left behind may seem antiquated.
But what Smith demonstrated in thousands of columns, several books and a lifetime chronicling the heart and soul of the American sports scene are needed as badly today as they were evocative of his times.
RIP to a Baseball Poet
Donald Hall, 89, was a former U.S. Poet Laureate whose work included several non-fiction volumes about baseball, as well as memorable verse about the sport that landed him a cameo appearance on the Ken Burns PBS “Baseball” documentary.
While I wasn’t wild about his—or anyone else’s—baseball poetry, Hall’s passion for the game is undeniable. Others are more generous (and here), but my beef is more with the genre than any particular author.
Fortunately, his baseball prose was included in remembrances following his June 23 death at his home in New Hampshire.
Foremost among that work is “Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball,” a loose biography of the rollicking Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher and a compelling snapshot of social and racial relations in America in the 1970s.
Hall's 1984 collection “Fathers Playing Catch With Sons” was a lyrically rich ode to sports, especially to baseball. One reviewer suspected at the time that Hall was fascinated with sports because “it lets him take sides.”
The book contained a couple of basketball essays, and two years later he wrote this marvelous piece about Red Auerbach for Sport magazine. In a prolific career that included the publication of dozens of books, it’s perhaps greedy to wonder why Hall didn’t venture more like this away from the diamond.
His poet’s sensibility, blended with a fan’s heart, is admirable. The esteemed writing teacher Roy Peter Clark points out that “more than any game, baseball is for poets,” which may be true, but still makes me want to gnash my teeth.
Hall’s lauded poem “Baseball,” told in stanzas that follow the nine-inning structure of the game, is considered among his most memorable works.
It was published in his poetry collection “The Museum of Clear Ideas,” and “The Seventh Inning” offers a glimpse of his affinity for a game that never lost its bewitching qualities, even when Hall's enthusiasm goes quite a bit off the rails:
Curt Davis threw
a submarine ball, terrifying
to right-handed batters. Another
pleasure, thoroughly underrated,
is micturition, which is even
3. commoner than baseball. It begins
by announcing itself more slowly
and less urgently than sexual
desire, but (confusingly) in the
identical place. Ignorant men
therefore on occasion confuse beer-
drinking with love; but I have discussed
adultery elsewhere. We allow
this sweet release to commence itself,
4. addressing a urinal perhaps,
perhaps poised over a white toilet
with feet spread wide and head tilted back:
oh, what’delicious permission! what
luxury of letting go! what luxe
yellow curve of mildest ecstasy!
Granted we may not compare it to
poignant and crimson bliss, it is as
voluptuous as rain all night long
5. after baseball in August’s parch.
A Few Good Reads
Soccer trolls in the American media are a longstanding tradition, but at The Ringer Bryan Curtis notices they’ve been awfully quiet during the current World Cup;
Here’s some soccer trolling with a twist of “sportuality,” about how the sport polarizes many in America. I think the writer is more than a bit overwrought in his thesis;
More on faith and sports at Sportianity: A look at the Tom Huntner series of books in the mid-1940s that was inspired by the fictitious Frank Merriwell and tied to the evangelical Youth for Christ movement that author Ken Anderson was involved in;
Minor league baseball marketing is more about the experience than about the game, not exactly a new development but Adweek weighs in from the perspective of an independent operator;
The Baseball Americana exhibit has opened at the Library of Congress, and here’s a link to the fine 32-page accompanying magazine;
Vandals have disrupted renovations to the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City, cutting a water pipe that flooded an education center named after Buck O’Neil;
The story of Harry Stevens, who created baseball scorecards in the late 1800s, then became a ballpark concessionaire extraordinaire in the Major Leagues in the early 20th century.
Sports Book News
An excerpt from Brian Smith’s “Liftoff,” a look inside last year’s Houston Astros World Series championship season;
A review of “The Rebounders,” by Amanda Ottaway, who details her story as a Division I college basketball player at Davidson College, far away from the glitter and spotlight of women’s powerhouse UConn;
A Q and A with Anelise Chin, author of the 2017 novel “So Many Olympic Exertions,” a blend of sportswriting, memoir and self-help that questions American notions of success;
The Christian Science Monitor has offered up several baseball books for your mid-summer reading list;
A list of “sports beach books” to consider from Sport Heritage;
Jeff Pearlman explains why he set out to write his history of the USFL, which comes out in time for the football season.
