Red Smith: the most colourful chronicler of a golden age of American racing

It was Red Smith's great good fortune to snare his first job in newspapers in the days before calling a ginger man 'Red' was designated as a hate crime. It's hard to imagine that plain Walter Wellesley Smith would have found such favour among the denizens of the racetracks of the United States as the Runyonesque Red, who in the 1930s began scouring the backstretches, the barns and the betting halls for stories that he could hammer out two-fingered on a clattering manual typewriter.

Owners, trainers, jockeys, bettors and shysters gave up their secrets to the man who, with crackling humour and palatable cynicism, became the chronicler nonpareil of a golden age of racing. From the day he was entrusted by the Philadelphia Record with covering the Triple Crown, to the day he died at the age of 76 – shortly after vowing to reduce his output of New York Times columns to three a week from four, with the intention of seeing "whether the quality improves" – he was a worldly and wise commentator and reporter on many sports, from his own amateur attempts at fly fishing to anything major in the worlds of baseball, gridiron and boxing, but he remained racing's own to the end.

The timing of his life was such that he provided a journalistic bridge between the age of Seabiscuit and Whirlaway in the wartime years, and that of Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Spectacular Bid in the 1970s, even flirting with the 1980s. Racing may have lost its fond grip on the public consciousness by the end of his career, but it never lost Smith or his enduring love of the game.