(Walter Wellesley Smith), 1905–82, American sportswriter, b. Green Bay, Wis., grad. Notre Dame, 1927. After working on newspapers in St. Louis and Philadelphia, he began a syndicated column in the New York Herald Tribune in 1945. He joined the staff of the New York Times in 1972. Smith is regarded as one of the most literate and amusing sportswriters the craft has produced. Among his books are Out of the Red (1950), Views of Sport (1954), The Red Smith Reader (1982), To Absent Friends (1982), and the posthumous Red Smith on Baseball (2000).
