A new book collects the work of the first Black sportswriter at a major daily newspaper. | ✍️ Max Blaisdell
For the first time in more than 50 years, Chicago’s avid sports fandom can refamiliarize themselves with the insightful and generous writings of Wendell Smith, a pioneering sports journalist who served as the first Black president of the Chicago Press Club, inSmith is most known today, if at all, for his role helping Jackie Robinson and two other Black baseball players secure tryouts for the Boston Red Sox in 1945.
Smith plumbs history for striking anecdotes, charting the remarkable life of Bill Richmond, who was plucked from his home in Staten Island by an English duke during the American Revolutionary War to be his personal valet, and grew up to be America’s first great overseas boxer before becoming a tavern owner and serving pints to Lord Byron, the famed Romantic poet of his day.
Despite being a standout athlete in baseball and basketball, Smith was repeatedly denied a shot playing organized or professional sports—his predominantly white high school wouldn’t let him play for their teams and, after leading his American Legion baseball team to a championship, he was told point-blank by a scout for the Detroit Tigers that he couldn’t be signed on account of his skin color. These experiences profoundly shaped his views on race and racism in America.
Rich, almost florid, description shines through in Smith’s writing from his April 27, 1946 article for the“The sun smiled down brilliantly in picturesque Roosevelt Stadium here Thursday afternoon and an air of excitement prevailed throughout the spacious park, which was jammed to capacity with 25,000 jabbering, chattering opening day fans,” writes Smith. “A seething mass of humanity, representing all segments of the crazy-quilt we call America, poured into the magnificent ball park . . .
Instead of chastising Mays for folding under pressure as so many sports commentators of that era or even today might have done, Smith makes an acute observation: “In trying to live up to the almost inhumanly high standards set for them, some [Black] players exert themselves into a state of complete mental and physical exhaustion.”
But that didn’t mean his broadcast work had no impact. Bryant Gumbel, the four-time Emmy Award-winning broadcast sports journalist for NBC who attended De La Salle high school in the 1960s, cited Smith as an important inspiration.
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