Red: A Biography of Red Smith Book

This book does the one thing that biographies tend to fail to do: show the extent and to some degree of the genius that makes the subject an attractive study.

Usually a god biography will contain funny anecdotes and unknown facts about what happened to a person. But rare is the biography that gets into the subject's mind. Here, Berkow frequently seems to be able to channel what it was that made Smith so beloved.

On the other hand, even at its reasonable length, it seems too long. And Berkow seems to be going out of his way to protect Red Smith who was clearly, just from the stuff that Berkow retells, an alcoholic who put his career well ahead of his family and who could be very hostile and competitive to his colleagues.

I think the thing most clearly missing from this book, though, is Smith's perspective. Berkow lauds Smith for his late-in-life liberalism and his apparent emphasis that sports were just a game. Is that it? He wrote for fifty years and he sometimes stuck up for the little guy and didn't seem to take his subject seriously? Is Smith lauded for style but, like almost every sportwriter, forgotten because the substance was just an interesting way of relating time-bound minutia?