Boxing was a Fertile Arena for Award-Winning Sportswriter Gary Smith

Gary Smith is this generation’s most decorated and distinctive magazine writer after winning an unprecedented four National Magazine Awards for non-fiction and being a finalist for the award a record ten times during his more than three decades at Sports Illustrated.

A longtime resident of Charleston, South Carolina, Smith began his career at the Wilmington [Delaware] News Journal followed by stops at the Philadelphia Daily News, the New York Daily News and the stylish monthly Inside Sports before landing at Sports Illustrated in 1982. His job at “S.I.” was to write four longform features a year. Mike Tyson and James “Buster” Douglas were among the athletes that he profiled and he also penned features on Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

Smith said it’s one thing to see an athlete perform but it’s another to know what’s inside.

“I just felt like to really render the human soul in its most honest way, that getting to understand what human beings had been through and what had landed them with whatever coping mechanism they used would be vital so people could understand a person,” said the La Salle University graduate who stepped away from the magazine in 2014. “Some of these people were doing some extreme things and if you didn’t really lay out the soil they sprung from and what brought them to that place, they would seem like aliens or freaks, but you could very much humanize them which was the only fair thing to do. We all want someone to understand why we are who we are, rather than leaving us dangling on the vine.”

Smith’s wife, Sally, is a psychiatrist, and summed up what her husband tried to lay bare in his features.

“He is not satisfied with putting facts together. He wants to understand what is the core conflict that has driven that person,” she offered many years ago. “He hopes to tell a secret that a person might not be aware of.”

It was rumored Smith would interview no less than fifty people for one feature. Smith said that wasn’t always the case, but he wanted to be thorough, which was merely one key in trying to know and understand his subject.

“You needed patience, asking and re-asking questions because you often wouldn’t get the truest or deepest answer the first go-around. Hopefully being comfortable enough in your own skin would engender trust over time,” he explained. “There would be a lot of follow-up questions, even if I had spent a week with somebody poring over the notes and going back and calling them again and again and really taking it further and further, what their interior monologue with themselves or dialogues in some cases. What was going on and felt in each of these pivotal moments in their lives, so you’d really get a feel of what was going on in the interior.”

“That’s why I did a lot of boxing stories,” said Smith. “There was so much kindling, so much psychological tension which makes for great storytelling. No one carried around tension and opposites like boxers did. It’s fertile terrain for any writer.”

A boxer, said Smith, was figuratively naked in the ring. “These are human beings who are participating in one of the most extreme things that any human being can do,” he acknowledged of the manly sport. “There’s a reason why you end up in such an extreme circumstance. You’re involved in a public mauling. You’re risking being killed or killing. To land there is virtually always a real story. You don’t land there by accident.”

Rick Telander, who worked at Sports Illustrated for 23 years, explained what made Smith’s work stand out. “Gary Smith was a unique writer,” he said. “He immersed himself in his topic, in his subject, like no one else I’ve ever read. He used his words to paint a picture that was one thousand times better than an actual photograph. You could feel the mind and the pain and the joy and the resolve and the defeat and the victory of the person he was writing about.”

Telander, who is the lead sports columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, said Smith was a one-of-a-kind talent.

“He used his skill with words to make you feel exactly what he felt, what you should feel, to understand the story of some other person on a journey to some place we all would recognize, foreign though it may be,” he stated. “No matter how long a Gary Smith magazine piece was, you had to finish it. You had to know. You had to read and feel the resolution. It was a kind of magic. And Gary was the magician. He was the best there was.”

Alexander Wolff, who spent 36 years at Sports Illustrated, shared a similar sentiment. “Gary had the ability to inhabit the head of his subject,” he noted. “He did that by relentlessly asking questions, often leading subjects to address matters and themes they’d never before thought about.”

Smith visited Tyson early in his career and said the one-time heavyweight king had multiple personalities.

“He was a bundle of opposites. At one moment, he’s kind of seething about the world and people and the next moment he’s just a puppy dog with his arm around your neck,” he said. “One moment walking away from my introductory handshake and leaving it hanging in the air when we first met and by the end of it, arm literally around my neck….The friction of opposites was always at play.”

Smith wrote his feature on James “Buster” Douglas after Douglas claimed the heavyweight crown from Tyson in February 1990.

“He was a gentle soul for the most part. Less extreme actually than most boxers. Therefore, it took a more extreme situation being in a ring with Mike Tyson to bring out the natural talents. He was God-gifted and a father-gifted fighter,” he remembered. “He wasn’t the kind who had easy access to all that desperation that’s needed to excel in boxing but after his mother’s death and the proximity to Tyson’s right hand, they brought out that desperation to use these natural gifts as a fighter.”

Like so many who were around Muhammad Ali, Smith was often amused by the three-time heavyweight champ.

“Ali was always a lot of fun to be with. He was mischievous and said things that could be striking,” he said. “Most of them were very interesting in a variety of ways. Ali was the prankster, and you might be the butt of his pranks.”

Among the many honors accorded Smith was the Dan Jenkins Medal For Lifetime Achievement in Sportswriting, awarded in 2019. Some of his finest work can be found in his two anthologies: “Beyond The Game: The Collected Sportswriting Of Gary Smith’’ (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000) and “Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories by Gary Smith” (Sports Illustrated Books, 2008).

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