The writer who walked away
Gary Smith was the greatest sportswriter of his generation, said Joseph Bien-Kahn in Victory Journal. Then, at the height of his powers, he decided he’d had enough.
GARY SMITH BOARDED the first train out of Rome and took it to the end of the line. He crossed the street right as a bus pulled up and rode it to the end of the line too. Now, a little red car slid to a stop beside his outstretched thumb and a man with wild black hair and wild black eyes beckoned him to get in.
It was a linguistic scramble as the man attempted to engage Smith. Italian, then English, and finally a slapdash mess of Spanish and French to get to the most pressing matter: “Where to?”
“Wherever you’re going,” Smith responded. And so, the man turned the key and they set off, the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” playing on repeat. Eventually, they pulled into a tiny village, Castel Viscardo, on the calf of Italy’s boot, 4,200 miles and a universe from the Manhattan Sports Illustrated office. It was late summer, 1983.
Gary Smith stayed in town that night, and then for months thereafter, working at the brickyard and picking the region’s famous grapes. He’d be back again with his wife and then three more times with children in tow. The magazine had paid his way across the Atlantic, but the train ride and the bus ride and the months abroad had been for only him. None of it made the story. It was never meant to.
TWO YEARS AGO, a friend from Charleston mentioned a co-worker who taught mindfulness to elementary school students. A few years in, someone finally asked that friend, “You know who that is, right?” It was the sportswriter Gary Smith.
The image of Smith, winner of a record four National Magazine Awards, living anonymously, was perfectly antithetical to that of a grizzled sportswriter telling war stories from a barstool. The unassuming legend with an unobtrusive name had seemingly disappeared into an afterlife on the Carolina coast.
Ben Yagoda once wrote on Slate: “Gary Smith is not only the best sportswriter in America, he’s the best magazine writer in America. The only injustice is that, outside the small world of editors who vote for the National Magazine Awards and the even smaller subset of Sports Illustrated readers who pay attention to bylines, he is a nobody.”
Smith existed apart from Sports Illustrated, even when his writing was definitional for the magazine. He looked like a member of “John Denver’s backup band,” to use SI writer Steve Rushin’s framing, and always lived far from New York City, in Charleston for decades, with time in Bolivia, Australia, and Spain peppered in between. He wrote just four stories a year for three decades, each a sprawling excavation of a sports figure’s soul. Even then, during the magazine’s flush times, he was an anomaly.
Last spring, I stood in front of a packed café in Charleston’s French Quarter. Smith, a lithe 68-year-old, rode up a few minutes late, waving and apologizing from the seat of a black beach cruiser. He wore a cerulean T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. His smile cast lines around his bright blue eyes and his thin beard was white, but he looked boyish.
It took a moment to find a lunch option for Smith, who struggles with spicy foods and is vegetarian. As we ate, our conversation bounced from his first newspaper job to Al Davis’ coaching career to Smith’s rock band, Post-Life Crisis. When it jumped to the precarious state of sports journalism, Smith leaned back in his chair. “This sounds like it’s gonna be a mournful story,” he says, grinning. “The asteroid came and there’s one dinosaur left and he’s out in Charleston.”
As Smith and I spoke again and again this spring, the conversation would inevitably return to: “Why retire?” But to try to place Smith in the world of anxiety and striving of the modern journalist is a folly. In David Halberstam’s book on the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, he wrote of his apprehension in taking on the yearslong book project: “A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?” Smith smiled and closed his eyes as he listened to the quote. “You pour yourself into the writing, but it is not yourself,” he says, after a pause. “If you let it get that sticky, you’re stuck.”
GARY SMITH STARTED his career in journalism while he was still in high school. His older sister Sue (Gary is the fourth of nine Smith kids) had won the Delaware Junior Miss pageant and sat on the judging panel the next year alongside the sports editor at the Wilmington NewsJournal. While there, Smith’s mother asked for advice for her sports-obsessed 16-yearold son, and the editor said he should come by the paper the next day. Smith got a job, taking on tasks like tracking down high school scores and typesetting horse race results. He went on to the Philadelphia Daily News and then to Inside Sports, Newsweek’s experiment in literary sports journalism, where he was hired on as the only staff writer.
The magazine folded after three years, and it was then, in 1982, that SI reached out, offering a coveted staff writing position. Smith, just 28 years old, responded with a counteroffer: He would take half the money to be on contract to write four feature stories per year. “I was just feeling like a student of life at that point. There’s so much I want to see and learn that if I’m on the wheel with deadlines I just won’t be able to experience,” he says.
Smith wrote under that contract for eight years until the realities of adulthood—a wife and kids and a mortgage—made health care and benefits a necessity. By that point, he’d built up enough capital—penning seminal profiles of Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali, as well as portraits of Soviet pole vaulters and eccentric aces—to come on staff at
the higher rate while continuing the four-stories-per-year structure. It was 1990. Gary Smith had the best job in sports journalism.
The SI newsroom at 1271 Avenue of the Americas was the big leagues of sports media. Every week, journalists and photographers would file from every corner of the sports world, and more than 3 million 120-page glossy behemoths would land at newsstands and front doors.
At the time, Rick Reilly was the more boisterous star of the magazine. The grenade-lobbing writer USA Today called “the closest thing sportswriting ever had to a rock star” once appeared in a Miller Lite ad alongside Rebecca Romijn. Smith was more like sportswriting’s Townes van Zandt. SI contemporaries dubbed the softspoken Smith “the demon beat writer” for his uncanny ability to uncover each subject’s hidden demons. His Tyson profile charted the path from a traumatic childhood to the heavyweight belt; his Andre Agassi story traced the tennis player’s obsessive rebellion back to an overbearing father.
Reilly and Smith had an unlikely friendship—“sort of mismatched socks,” as Rushin puts it—and were inseparable while covering the Olympics or on the SI retreats, dancing, drinking, and singing karaoke. To Reilly, who eventually took a lucrative deal to move to ESPN in 2008, it was fascinating to see how Smith leveraged his industry capital into more freedom, rather than more money. “A lot of people would have probably been like, ‘Screw that. You guys love me. You need me. I’ll write more, but you’ve got to triple my salary,’” Reilly says. “But no, he wants less work. You know, ‘I’ll do the same salary, but a lot less work. So that I can pour myself even deeper into these people.’”
The athletes agreed to let that light be shined on their darkest parts because the illumination itself held value. “The trade was: ‘You’ll explore some of my shadows in this piece, but out of it, I’ll get this coverage in a national forum that can be beneficial for my career or what I want to do after,’” Smith says. As the magazine industry shrank and the athlete’s pulpit grew, the calculus inverted. The magazine needs the athlete now, not the other way around. “So, the shadows get shut down and the person controls the whole thing. It’s a step of trust no longer necessary for celebrities to take. So why take it?”
That now-legendary Tyson profile contains a revelatory scene: At one point, the heavyweight champ longingly reminisces about robbing strangers to the actress Robin Givens as they ride through Brownsville, Brooklyn, in a silver Lincoln stretch limousine. “Being profiled by Gary Smith would be like being paraded down Main Street naked in a cage. Everyone sees everything you are, warts and beauty,” Reilly says. “And you couldn’t really complain about it, because he usually got you so right.”
But Reilly’s framing distorts Smith’s actual approach—the profiles are less parade than portraiture. As his SI colleague S.L. Price wrote when Smith retired in 2014, “Smith had little interest in painting Mike Tyson or Allen Iverson as pure villains or Dean Smith as a pure hero. He knew better. His great achievement was an inversion of sport’s central allure—the way it reduces messy existence to clear winners and losers, good guys and bad guys.”
FOR SMITH, THERE was never pressure to chase clicks or move the salacious stuff to the lede. There were ESPN offers, sure, but he valued the space and time afforded by his SI gig. There were many inquiries about book deals, but he’d already spent months pulling back the layers of his subjects. So eventually for Smith the calculus changed.
“To find stories where I felt like I could learn something and wouldn’t be repeating on a subject, that grew more challenging in the latter years,” he says. “There was a bit of a sense of not having as much desire to go and fill all those notebooks. It wasn’t as fervent a desire as the one that had been compelling me all the way up until that moment.” It was time to walk away.
Smith tells me he’s writing a novel: a heavily researched, imagined history of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. It’s been seven years and he’s still not certain when it’ll be done. But he’s sure it won’t be long now. For decades, he’d had three months per story; now he spends four hours every day basking in the novel’s world. “I don’t feel any need of a deadline to get me to produce something. I’d rather just work it until it gets better,” he says. “The process is really what I love. The doing of it, not having it done.”
So, perhaps that was the secret all along.
It’s what let him live for months in Italy a year into the SI gig others would die for.
It’s what let him stay put for three decades instead of chasing greener grass. It’s also what let him walk away. Today, the most decorated sportswriter of his generation spends time teaching students at Title 1 schools mindfulness as a tool to be attentive and calm their nerves. He rarely shares a Tyson or Tiger Woods anecdote.
“It’s an incredibly complicated thing that we’re thrust into as human beings. You can either take it at face value and just scramble or survive, or you can try to understand as best you can what’s really happening here, inside of us, around us,” Smith says. His years of reading, writing, and exploring were in the service of a goal: “To learn how to play this game most wisely, with the least amount of suffering and the most amount of enjoyment.”
It wasn’t Smith who first shared the Castel Viscardo story. It was Reilly. He brought it up, still a bit awestruck by his friend after all these years. “He just wants to explore the world until there’s no inch left,” he says. “When he explores it all, he says, ‘Wait a minute, there’s about eight inches between my ears. Let’s see what that’s like.’ Now he explores that too.”
When I ask Smith about the trip, he corrects an error in Reilly’s retelling: He’d been in Rome, not Madrid. Then he’s off, telling me about the hand gestures at the crowded bar and how they baked bricks the oldfashioned way in the afternoon sun. He’d been in Europe on assignment, profiling an Italian long-distance swimmer ahead of the 1984 Olympic Games. The interviews were done, so he headed to the station to ride the first train and then the first bus to the end of the line. “When I got to the end of the line, I got off and put my thumb out,” he says. “Whoever picked me up, wherever they were going, that was where I was gonna land. And, you know, just see what happened.”
Adapted from a story that originally appeared in Victory Journal. Used with permission.