From the Shelves of the Paco Library

I don’t follow sports with anything like the intensity of my younger days, although I’m still a die-hard Detroit Tigers fan, and I always cheer on the North Carolina college basketball teams. I do, though, admire good sports writing, and Red Smith set the standard in that profession, combining superior powers of observation with great wit and an inimitable style.

Many of his best articles were collected in an anthology titled The Red Smith Reader, which provides a wonderful sample of his writing on baseball, boxing, football and even that celebrity phenomenon, Gorgeous George, of pro wrestling fame.

Perhaps his best-known article is the one he wrote in 1951, “Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff”, in which he recounts the thrilling end to the National League pennant race, as the New York Giants, after a lackluster performance, came back with one swing of Bobby Thompson’s bat to erase a 4-2 deficit in the ninth inning and defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers 5-4. (“Now it is done”, he writes. “Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”)The Dodgers had played extremely well, and the Giant’s Bobby Thompson had made a number of bonehead moves (including, in the second inning, running to second base only to find that it was already occupied by his colleague, Whitey Lockman). But Thompson redeemed himself with “the shot heard ‘round the world”, hitting a three-run homer off relief pitcher, Ralph Branca in the ninth. The closing to the piece is pitch-perfect: “Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse. The number on his uniform looked huge. Thirteen.”

In 1973, on the 25th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s death, Smith recalled the Sultan of Swat:

“Roistering was a way of life, yet Ruth was no boozer. Three drinks of hard liquor left him fuzzy. He could consume great quantities of beer, he was a prodigious eater and his prowess with women was legendary. Sleep was something he got when other appetites were sated. He arose when he chose and almost invariably was the last to arrive at the clubhouse, where Doc Woods, the Yankees’ trainer, always had a bicarbonate of soda ready. Before changing clothes, the Babe would measure out a mound of bicarb smaller than the Pyramid of Cheops, mix and gulp it down.

‘Then,’ Jim Kahn says, ‘he would belch. And all the loose water in the showers would fall down.’

The man was a boy, simple, artless, genuine and unabashed. This explains his rapport with children, whom he met as intellectual equals. Probably his natural liking for people communicated itself to the public to help make him an idol.

He was buried on a sweltering day in August 1948. In the pallbearers’ pew, Waite Hoyt sat beside Joe Dugan, the third baseman. ‘I’d give a hundred dollars for a cold beer,’ Dugan whispered.

‘So would the Babe,’ Hoyt said.”

I’ve cited two baseball articles, but as I said, Smith covered the greats and the great moments of every sport: Secretariat, George Halas, Willie Shoemaker, Cassius Clay’s fishy knockout of Sonny Liston (“The Big Sleep”), the Olympics. There’s also a section – “Politics” - in which Smith writes of an interview with Leon Trotsky, of all people.

This is a great browser, and even those who may not know the difference between a safety and the infield fly rule will enjoy the fine writing, the warm humor and the shrewd insights of a master craftsman.