Red: a biography of Red Smith

National Review, August 1, 1986 by Joe Mysak

Red: A Biography of Red Smith

Red: A Biography of Red Smith, by Ira Berkow (Times Books, 302 pp., $17.95)

NOTHING SPOILS biography like apology. For fifty years, Red Smith distinguished himself as a newspaperman who wrote witty and eloquent sports columns up to five days a week, for a variety of papers including the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times. He believed sportswriters should be entertainers rather than crusaders, although he did pick up the lance and go into action when he thought the subject required it-- baseball's reserve clause, the boycott of the Moscow Olympics. He relished life on the beat, and earned the respect and admiration of his colleagues. Now comes Ira Berkow, no mean Times sportswriter himself, and apologizes. Red, it seems, was not quick enough to welcome blacks into major-league baseball, or to condemn Connie Mack's apparent racism. He did not fight for the right of women writers to get into the locker room. He called the children of the Sixties "unwashed punks.' He did not understand Picasso, and he liked to drink Scotch; in sum, he was a complete reactionary-- or almost complete: He always voted against Richard Nixon. And, "when in his sixties, at a time when most men become hardened in their view-- "conservative' is the word most often applied--he was able to expand, to become "more liberal.'' Well, there you go. Such writing mercifully says more about Berkow and his view of things than it does about Red Smith, who by all accounts was a happy man untouched by the obsessive gravity of progressives like Mr. Berkow. Red Smith needs no apologies.