Red from Green Bay

He noted how the wind was blowing, looked at the portrait, poured another glass of Valpolicella, and then started to read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune . . . He was reading Red Smith, and he liked him very much.

--Across the River and into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway

A million or more people besides the hero of Hemingway's newest novel read Red Smith's syndicated column every day in the Herald Tribune and 24 other newspapers, and most of them like him very much indeed. Professor Mark Van Doren has read Smith's columns to his Columbia University English classes. Humorist Frank Sullivan rates Smith "a humorist of purest ray serene." Smith's friendly rival on the New York Journal-American, Frank Graham, who travels south every year with Red to cover spring baseball training, calls him, "the country's best sports writer."

This week, with the publication of Red Smith's collected columns, Out of the Red (Knopf; $3), readers who skip the sport pages can see the reasons for all this praise. Like almost any collection of newspaper columns, Out of the Red sounds slightly dated. But Smith's easy style, dry wit, fresh imagery, and casual approach to big & little figures of sport make even year-old columns pretty good reading.

The Sensational Reversal. When the judges changed their verdict in an Olympic track meet, Smith called it "the most sensational reversal since Serutan." Towering (6 ft. 9 in.) Basketballer Harry Boykoff, guarding an opponent, "adopts the technique of a lovelorn octopus."

At times Smith's prose punches as sharply as a good left jab: "Now Walcott was in full flight, and the crowd was booing him. He ducked and danced and ran. He was caught and hit; he clinched and held; he ran again." After a visit to the Westminster Dog Show, Smith announced a discovery: "The ladies tethered to the tiny toys are invariably the most magnificent members of the species . . . The smallest pooch noted was towing the largest handler, a celestial creature measuring 17 1/2 hands at the withers, deep of chest, with fine, sturdy pasterns."

Smith can paint a miniature portrait with a few swift strokes, as in last week's column about little Bill Boland, the 18-year-old apprentice jockey who rode the winner of the Kentucky Derby (see SPORT): "A few minutes after the jockey room was cleared of its Derby confusion, four people [walked] down the track toward the backstretch stables. Hiking along just inside the clubhouse rail was a kid in a peaked cloth cap and leather windbreaker, with blue jeans clinging tightly to bowed legs. He carried one red rose from Middleground's blanket. The thousands who saw him pass didn't recognize the kid who'd just won the Derby."

At his best, a column by Red Smith combines a good reporter's facts with a good writer's style. Smith himself thinks of column-writing as a kind of architectural exercise. "Give me," he has said, "my daily plinth, and I figure to do all right." Despite the smooth and seemingly effortless result, Smith works as hard at writing as if he were chipping marble. Says he: "It comes out with little drops of blood."

The Glowworm. Walter Wellesley ("I hate the name") Smith, 44, a balding, mournful-looking product of Green Bay, Wis., went to Notre Dame ('27), once placed last in a mile race, the only one he ever ran. After that he took up spectator sports. He broke in on the Milwaukee Sentinel, moved to the St. Louis Star (now the Star-Times) as a copyreader. "One day they fired the sports department," recalls Red, and he got his chance. His first assignment was night football practice at Washington University. Red wrote the story from the viewpoint of a glowworm outshone by the floodlights. It was "cute," but it made a hit with readers, and Smith was a sportwriter for good. In 1936, he moved to the Philadelphia Record and a bylined column, and in 1945 to the Herald Tribune. Red's favorite sports : baseball, football, boxing, horse racing. Says Smith: "I like the sports that write well. Baseball writes itself. It's two out and the bases are loaded and -- well, you've got a situation right there. In basketball, some big goon throws the ball up and it either goes in or it doesn't."

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