Sporting Life

By Stephen Smith

THE RED SMITH READER Edited by Dave Anderson Random House; 308 pages; $15.95

TO ABSENT FRIENDS FROM RED SMITH by Red Smith Atheneum; 478 pages; $17.95 riling a column is easy," he used to say. "You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead."

The job must have had its masochistic charms, because Red Smith never wanted to be anything but a "newspaper stiff." He started on the news side in Milwaukee in 1927, shifted to sports two years later in St. Louis, then spent ten years covering Connie Mack's Athletics for the old Philadelphia Record. He went to New York in 1945, when writing sports in the Big Town was like playing the Palace. First at the Herald Tribune, and for the last ten years of his life at the New York Times, he turned out a syndicated column that was the envy of every sportswriter.

Smith covered the big games, races and fights, but it seldom mattered who won or lost. What counted was the sights and smells, the cadences of conversation, the laughter of old friends. Precious anecdotes were salted away and used again years later. This ability to call up the past gave his columns a resonance that has grown rare in daily journalism. To be sure, some of the 300-odd pieces gathered in these two volumes should have been left in yesterday's newspaper. But most are timeless, literate and witty enough to appeal to readers who do not know the backstretch from the front nine.

As The Red Smith Reader generously demonstrates, the columnist preferred to write about athletes with a touch of the rogue. His portrait of Babe Ruth is a small masterpiece. It ends with two Yankee teammates, Waite Hoyt and Joe Dugan, sitting together at Ruth's funeral on a sweltering day in 1948. "I'd give a hundred dollars for a cold beer," Dugan whispers. "So would the Babe," Hoyt replies.

Smith was most at home at the race track, even as "a slightly bewildered Yank" visiting Ascot. "Half the royal family was on the premises," he writes in 1960, "and horseplayers were being so polite their teeth hurt." He savors "the soft afternoons under the old elms of Saratoga" and the memories of great races, like the 1941 Preakness: "Whirlaway came loping along counting the house with Arcaro sitting still as a bluepoint on the half-shell." To Smith, horses are people with four legs and wonderful names. What a pleasure to learn that a colt by the French stallion Compte de Grasse is named Mow de Lawn.

Smith had less patience with twolegged animals, particularly when they ran athletics into the ground. George Steinbrenner was George III. Avery Brundage and his flunkies on the International Olympic Committee were the "waxworks." He idolized owners like Connie Mack and Branch Rickey but later sided with the players "in the slave cabins."

In the few years before his death last January, Smith lost some of the hop on his high hard one. Unable to get out to the ballpark as much, he tried to compensate with guile and memory. By then most of the old sports mob--Joe Louis, Knute Rockne, Grantland Rice and the incomparable saloonkeeper Toots Shor--had been written up on the obituary page. Smith's own goodbyes, collected in To Absent Friends, are enough to make an umpire cry. One of the most poignant was composed for the sportswriter John Lardner: "This is a loss to the living, to every one with a feeling for written English handled with respect and taste and grace, a tragic loss to the world of laughter."

Readers of Red Smith feel a similar ache when the newspaper slaps down on the doorstep. They remember him as a friend. Taking a sauna in Helsinki, pub crawling in Melbourne, trout fishing in Montana (where he comes across a baby eagle "as big as Bobby Ussery, with a Durante nose"), he is gentle, funny and wise.

As a young father he takes his son, then eight or nine, to a crossroads tavern after a morning foray against the smallmouth bass of Wisconsin. The kid stuffs his face and observes: "Gee, Dad, this is the life, isn't it? Fishing and eating in saloons." A quarter of a century later he takes another tyke fishing, this time on Martha's Vineyard. "Grandpa," the boy asks, "did you grow old or were you made old?" These volumes provide the answer. He grew old gracefully and, like every other superstar, made everyone who watched him feel young.

--By Stephen Smith

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