Former Inquirer columnist Claire Smith accepts prestigious sports journalism award

LAS VEGAS — When Klein College of Media and Communications dean David Boardman was raising money to create the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media, he found himself seeking out donors who could “write big checks” so he could name the center for one of Temple journalism’s most notable alumni.

People Smith had covered helped contribute over a million dollars to the center, but one transaction stood out — a check for $500,000 from MLB and its players’ union written in the midst of contract negotiations.

“[MLB commissioner] Rob Manfred’s response when he was approached on this was, ‘You had me at Claire Smith,’” Boardman said.

Smith, a former Inquirer columnist, is a trailblazer in sports journalism who now is educating the next generation of journalists at Temple. And on Tuesday, she was presented with the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award, which is considered the industry’s highest honor. She’s the first Black woman to win the award, and the sixth woman and fourth Black journalist to receive the honor.

“This, the Red Smith Award, that’s Mount Olympus-level stuff,” Smith said of the award named for the late Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. “There, Mount Olympus, where sports journalists’ version of the Greek gods reside, and Red Smith was their Zeus.”

Smith, a Langhorne native, began her career at the Bucks County Courier Times before she moved on to the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin. She would have been happy to spend her career there, but the paper folding necessitated a move, and she became the first woman to cover an MLB team full-time when she began covering the Yankees for the Hartford Courant in 1983.

Smith experienced hostility in MLB clubhouses, including being physically removed from the San Diego Padres’ clubhouse after a National League Championship Series loss to the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field in 1984.

While being the only woman — and woman of color — on an MLB beat was lonely, Smith had perspective from her parents. Her mother, Bernice, was a chemist at General Electric whose project helped put John Glenn into space, and her father, William, was the grandson of a slave who was a painter and sculptor and also worked in advertising.

“This was the 1960s. My mom was the daughter of immigrants, and she was in a position to lead men, mostly,” Smith said. “That’s a barrier-breaker, to me. She showed every day that being Black, being a woman, was never a burden; it was a birthright that was to be used to create outlets never before imagined.

“What I never, ever did was compare my road to theirs, because I might have been pushed out of a locker room, but I was never thrown out of a store or threatened with cigarette burns because I dared to work at the naval yard to build ships to send into World War II.”

» READ MORE: Astros’ Dusty Baker represents ‘so much for so many’ as he looks for his first World Series win as manager

From Hartford, Smith moved on to the New York Times in 1990, where she was a national baseball columnist for eight years. Smith was a columnist and assistant sports editor at The Inquirer from 1998-2007 before moving to ESPN until 2021. Along the way, she twice was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the BBWAA Career Excellence Award in 2017, the first woman to do so.

Today, she’s back at her alma mater as the founding executive director of her namesake center for sports media, where her students produce work such as the Playing Fields, Not Killing Fields collaboration with The Inquirer.

“Did the colors I chose help change the canvas of this thing we call sports journalism?” Smith said. “Did the palette I held in my hand for 40 years inspire a youngster here or there? I can only hope so.”