Smith was a modern Twain
Boxing writer killed by suspected drunk driver
Some people found out from a 200word report in the Glendale Daily
News-Sun. Others saw it on Facebook. The rest learned of Don Smith’s death from word of mouth.
“Someone reached out to me and told me,” said Laura Hall, longtime partner of Michael Carbajal.
Hall said that out of respect for what Smith meant to the Phoenix boxing community, “I just immediately started reaching out to everyone, whether it was amateur boxing folks or folks from the professional ranks, I called Top Rank … it was just so important to reach out to those that knew him and respected his talents.”
Smith, 74, was killed May 15, hit as he was walking in an unincorporated area near Glendale by a suspected drunk driver.
Friends mourned him as a modernday Mark Twain – as the Rev. Jarrett Maupin put it – going from one adventure to the next. The stories sound like tall tales.
Geoff Ronning says Smith got sick after returning from Vietnam and apparently didn’t like the advice doctors had for him in New York. He figured he needed some sun, so he moved to Florida and lived on the beach for a year.
“He said he got so brown people would just start speaking Spanish to him,” Ronning said.
Smith, ostensibly cured, left Florida for some small town in Texas, where he ran a tiny newspaper, Ronning said. He was a one-man band who peppered conversations with the editorial “we” – as in, “we’ll look into it.” It was common practice, but Smith figured it wouldn’t hurt if people thought the dinky publication had a big staff.
He also told anyone who would listen, including me, that he wanted a career in journalism so bad that he wouldn’t give up, even when he couldn’t get hired.
“I slept in my car,” he said during a phone conversation about a month before his death.
Smith’s dedication put him in some interesting spots. He was also quick to
say, “I interviewed five presidents.”
That line – and Smith’s rumpled appearance – came up several times at a recent memorial service at Sonny’s Boxing Gym in Goodyear, giving the two dozen mourners an opportunity to smile between tears.
No one knew quite when Smith came to Arizona or why. They also couldn’t picture the Phoenix boxing scene without him.
Starting in 2012, Smith wrote a weekly, online column with the straightforward title, “Arizona Boxing News & Notes.” He filed 239 reports, most all of them long.
He didn’t always write about fights, but he always wrote about the people in the ring – and he stuck up for those who needed it.
After a seven-fight bout card in California ended with fighters waiting two weeks to get paid, Smith wrote that checks from the show had bounced and that after his column published, the promoter explained there had been a clerical error and “wired the money owed to the Arizona victim and all is well that ends well.”
Another column explained that a fighter had been detained and was facing deportation. His wife “asked ABNN authorization to investigate the charges and forward our findings to her … a request for disclosure of the nature of complaints and names of judge(s) mentioned in complaints was denied access to the person(s) who requested the information through the powers granted by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”
Smith wrote that he reached out to a congressman and published a judge’s name and address so people could send letters.
“Don was willing to go down routes and say things that others were not,” Ronning said.
Sharon Torres used to work for a newspaper in Buckeye and knew Smith for about six years. The first time they spoke, “I hung up on Don. I said, ‘When you know how to be polite, call me back.’ ”
She later found his bluntness endearing, and Smith became “like an adopted uncle.”
Torres wants to see state law changed so that this sort of thing can’t happen again. The man charged with killing Smith had been arrested just weeks earlier for “extreme DUI.”
Torres wants to see penalties made stiffer so that he wouldn’t have been on the street.
“Why can’t we have a Don Smith Law?” she asked.