Wendell Smith’s legacy

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, in The Wendell Smith Reader, edited by Michael Scott Pifer. 

Smith 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. Though none of the men were signed by the Red Sox, the ensuing press coverage presaged cracks forming in professional baseball’s color line. Just two years later, Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first Black player to break into Major League Baseball. 

The year before, Smith had accompanied Robinson on his frustrating, difficult journey through the Jim Crow South, where he was often barred from playing for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers minor-league affiliate to which he was assigned prior to his major-league debut. In the 2013 movie 42, André Holland plays Smith’s part in the biopic about Robinson’s life.

The book collects articles that span the course of Smith’s long and storied journalism career, which lasted from 1937 until the year of his death in 1972, and his main beats: baseball, boxing, and Black history. 

Standout articles include Joe Louis avenging his 1936 defeat to Max Schmeling, pride of Nazi Germany and Hitler favorite, in a reprisal fight two years later; the Kentucky Derby-winning Black jockeys of the 1880s; and the ever-meddlesome George Steinbrenner messing with his own choice of coach for the Cleveland Pipers, Johnny McLendon.

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.

Unlike the white-savior narratives presented in sports movies like The Blind Side, “the characters in Wendell’s Black history were Black individuals who were active and initiated the change in their lives,” Pifer said at a May 30 book talk presented by the Chicago Public Library. 

Rather than organizing the collection in strictly chronological order, Pifer presents Smith’s writings thematically, with chapters on foreign affairs, women in sports, and the boxing legend Muhammad Ali.

In an introduction to the collection, Michael Marsh, a former Reader staffer, sketches for readers what is one of the only extant biographies of Smith, or “Wendy,” as he was known as a boy.

Smith was born in Detroit in 1914, just one month before the start of WWI, to John Henry Smith, an itinerant chef who at one time cooked Henry Ford’s meals on his private railcar, and Lena Smith, a garment worker turned homemaker. 

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. 

The same year Robinson made history by joining the Brooklyn (now Los Angeles) Dodgers, Smith took a job at the Chicago Herald-American, becoming the first Black sportswriter at a major daily newspaper. He didn’t permanently settle in the Windy City until 1952, however, because of his commitment to his old role as sports editor for the Pittsburgh Courier, a prominent Black weekly, from which many of the articles in the collection are culled.

Like Mark Buehrle and Chris Sale, ace White Sox pitchers of yore who used a diverse arsenal of pitches to baffle opposing hitters, Smith was a versatile writer. “He could write angry when he felt he had to, but he could also write a very nice slice of life piece about a ball player in his surroundings,” Marsh said.

Rich, almost florid, description shines through in Smith’s writing from his April 27, 1946 article for the Courier about Robinson’s debut in an away game for the Montreal Royals played in Jersey City. 

“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 . . . to see Montreal play Jersey City and the first two Negroes in modern baseball history perform.”

Some of his articles also have particular resonance today, revealing recurrent concerns in the sports world and in our politics.

Presaging the current focus on the importance of mental health in professional sports, Smith writes, in a September 21, 1963 article for the Courier, about Willie Mays, the standout centerfielder for the San Francisco Giants, collapsing at the plate due to stress. 

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.”  

“You have to wonder if [the] money is of any real value,” Smith continues, “if you have to play yourself sick to earn it.”

With his wife Wyonella, Smith lived much of his later life on Chicago’s south side. Over the course of those years, he transitioned to working as a broadcast television journalist for WGN, though some commented he should’ve stuck to writing, such was his voice. Alas, even as gifted a man as Smith was not perfectly so. 

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.

Mayor Richard J. Daley memorialized Smith’s contribution to Chicago public life at his wake: “We have lost a very great citizen, who was interested in the city and most of all the city’s children.” A few years after his death, Chicago Public Schools and the Park District commemorated Smith with facilities honoring his name—an elementary school in West Pullman and a park in nearby Roseland. And he earned numerous posthumous awards, including a Spink Award from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

If Smith were alive today, he’d still have plenty to write about in terms of racial disparities in sports, despite the notable success of Black athletes like LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes, and Simone Biles. Perhaps he’d be penning articles about the dearth of Black punters and kickers in football or the precipitous decline in the number of Black players in the MLB since the 1970s. 

“What Wendell Smith devoted his life to was advancing the opportunities for the next generation of Black Americans,” Pifer said. Smith’s example serves as a reminder that writing about sports can be much more than reporting on balls and strikes, home runs and double plays.

The Wendell Smith Reader edited by Michael Scott Pifer
McFarland, paperback, 305 pp., $39.95, mcfarlandbooks.com/product/the-wendell-smith-reader