A Front-Row Seat with the Sportswriters Who Sat There
Sit down with host Todd Jones and other sportswriters who knew the greatest athletes and coaches, and experienced first-hand some of the biggest sports moments in the past 50 years. They’ll share stories behind the stories -- some they’ve only told to each other.
Claire Smith part 1: “How You Used Those Barrels of Ink Mattered.”
This is the first of a two-part conversation with Claire Smith, a pioneer for women and journalists of color. She discusses breaking barriers while covering baseball for 39 years, including her worst day: When the San Diego Padres physically removed her from their clubhouse during the 1984 National League playoffs. Hear how Steve Garvey helped her in that moment, and how Claire’s love of baseball powered her through a career that led to her being honored at Cooperstown in 2017. Claire shares tales of George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson from her time covering the Bronx Zoo Yankees. Claire also recalls her years of working with Joe Morgan, and how Jackie Robinson influenced her career, which has impacted so many others.
Smith spent 32 years in the newspaper industry, starting in Pennsylvania at the Bucks County Courier Times. In 1979, she moved to The Philadelphia Bulletin, where she mostly covered college basketball and football. When that paper folded in 1982, she was hired by The Hartford Courant. By mid-season that year, she was put on the New York Yankees beat, making her the first woman to cover a Major League Baseball team, full-time. Claire covered the Yankees for five years before serving as the Courant’s national baseball columnist for three years. She became the New York Times’ first national baseball columnist in 1990 and held that role for eight years. In 1998, she moved to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she was a columnist and assistant sports editor until 2007. Claire left newspapers in July 2007 to become a coordinator editor and baseball remote news editor at ESPN. She worked for the “Sunday Night Baseball” crew and the production team on MLB game broadcasts until November 2021.
In December 2016, Smith was named the 68th recipient of the Baseball Writers Association of America’s Career Excellence Award (formerly known as the J.G. Taylor Spink Award) – the highest honor a baseball writer can receive. She was the first woman to win the award, and the fourth African American, joining Sam Lacy, Wendell Smith and Larry Whiteside. Claire was honored at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual induction in July 2017. She was also presented the 2017 “Robie Award” for Lifetime Achievement by the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
Smith was named the inaugural winner of the Sam Lacy-Wendell Smith Award for the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland in 2013. Other milestones: Sports Journalist of the Year from the National Association of Black Journalists (1997); the Mary Garber Pioneer Award from the Association for Women in Sports Media (2000); the Sam Lacy Award at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (2010); and SAbR’s 2021 Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award. Smith was a member of the NABJ Hall of Fame’s Class of 2021.
Claire was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was winner of three New York Times Publishers’ Awards.
A 1979 graduate of Temple University, Smith returned to her alma mater in July 2021 as an assistant professor with Klein School of Media and Communications. With the assistance of the Black Women in Sports Foundation, Smith has long awarded Temple students The Bernice A. Smith scholarship, named after her mother, a Jamaican immigrant and Temple alum. In 2014, Temple honored Claire with a Lew Klein Alumni in the Media Award and inducted her into the School of Media and Communication Hall of Fame.
In October 2021, Temple announced the creation of The Claire Smith Center For Sports Media. Claire co-directs the center with John DiCarlo, managing director of student media at Temple.
Smith was the New York chapter chair for the BBWAA in 1995 and ’96 and has served on three Hall of Game Era committees.
She co-authored Don Baylor’s autobiography, “Nothing But The Truth, A Baseball Life” in 1988. She was also a contributor to the compilation, “A Kind of Grace: A Treasure of Sports Writing by Women” in 1994.
Smith was the subject of “A League of Her Own,” a short biographical documentary that was narrated by Jackie Robinson's daughter Sharon, and screened in 2018 at the Baseball Hall of Fame’s annual Baseball Film Festival.
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Claire Smith part 1 edited transcript
Todd James (00:02):
Claire, welcome to Press Box Access. It's a real honor to have you on our show.
Claire Smith (00:07):
Well, thank you for having me, Todd. It's a pleasure to be here and nice to put a face to a name that I've heard so often for so many years.
Todd James (00:19):
Well, they're all lies about me, so don't believe what you've heard.
Claire Smith (00:24):
Okay.
Todd James (00:25):
I want to begin with a quote that I know is special to you. It's from Jackie Robinson who said, "A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other lives." Why is that so special to you?
Claire Smith (00:42):
Well, it reminds everyone that no matter how much fame you have in this day and age, celebrity, famous for being famous - there's a whole lot that's bigger than you. And if you don't make an effort to remember that and try to make something better for someone other than yourself, or look past your nose, as I used to tell my boys, then you've wasted a lot of time and space on this planet.
Claire Smith (01:23):
Jackie certainly had every right to put that on his gravestone because he did try to make such a huge difference in this country and this world.
Todd James (01:36):
Well, Jackie's quote certainly applies to you, Claire. You've impacted a lot of lives of young journalists, especially of color and other women in the business while covering baseball for nearly 40 years.
Todd James (01:49):
And you're impacting young reporters now as an assistant professor at a practice at Temple University, where you are co-director of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media. I love it, the center is named after you, that's amazing.
Claire Smith (02:03):
Oh, no! What were they thinking? I have no idea what they were thinking. But just being with the students and seeing their enthusiasm, it gives me such hope that even though the journalism world that we knew for most of our lives seems to be drifting away where the 8-track tapes of journalism, I know they will keep the ideal alive because they'll invent new ways to get the word out, literally get the written word out.
Claire Smith (02:44):
And they're so anxious to do it, they don't see danger signs flashing the way we probably did on my last days of journalism. I can't say that it applies to you, you're still going strong, but it gives gives me a lot of hope.
Todd James (03:11):
Well, they're lucky to have you, that's for certain, as a shepherd. And I wanted to take you back to those 8-track days, back to the days of covering baseball in the eighties and nineties and onward. But I wanted to start with, first of all, why baseball?
Todd James (03:28):
Sports writing is an interesting gig and baseball writers, they're like a different ilk, the seam heads. I used to spend a lot of time around the baseball writers, but I was just on the fringe of the pack. I wanted to see why at some point in your life you thought, "You know what, I want to cover baseball."
Claire Smith (03:50):
Well, you kind of hit on it when you opened the show with the quote from Jackie, because Jackie had everything to do with my love of baseball. And when I finally figured out what I wanted to do, which was write and write for a newspaper, I had two goals.
Claire Smith (04:13):
One was either to be the next combination of Woodward and Bernstein, having grown up in that era. And the other was you mentioned Jerry Izenberg being a guest prior to my silly appearance here. I write a book in college written by Jerry called The Roar of Sneakers.
Claire Smith (04:39):
And I was just enthralled with his storytelling abilities and the stories he told in a collection of essays. I put that together with my love of baseball,
Claire Smith (06:22):
To get a degree in public relations at that time, back in the day, you needed to take at least one journalism course and I did that. And I have to tell you, the light bulb by the millions went on, and it dawned on me that I'd much rather write about baseball than be in the industry of baseball.
Claire Smith (06:50):
I could write my own thoughts. I thought at the time, I could pick my own subjects, I could be Roger Angell, I could run all around the world writing as brilliantly as Red Smith and Dave Anderson, and so on and so forth, so I switched to journalism.
Todd James (07:14):
Well, it was a good switch. Think about this, all these years later in 2017, you're standing at a podium in Cooperstown, New York with the Hall of Fame inductions. You got baseball dignitaries around you, you got fans sitting out there in front of you, and you're awarded the Baseball Writer's Association of America's Career Excellence Award, the Spink Award, the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, it's the highest honor of baseball a writer can get.
Todd James (07:39):
What is it like standing at that podium at the hollow grounds of Cooperstown?
Claire Smith (07:48):
Well, it was otherworldly, to be up on that stage with a parcel of Hall of Famers, first of all, I was sitting next to Rachel Robinson because she was there to receive the Buck O'Neill award for long and meritorious service to the game. And right behind me, Sandy Koufax, and Joe Morgan, two Hall of Famers, who were very, very dear to me.
Claire Smith (08:31):
Sandy, without knowing it, was a hero of mine since the 1960s, and I finally got to meet him. And you couldn't ask for a kinder, sweeter, gentler, gentlemanly person on this planet. If you can find one Todd, let me know, but he is an amazing gentleman. Joe Morgan, my friend, I can't tell you how many times I think of all the people that I covered in baseball that I miss him the most, this side of Don Baylor, they were amazing.
Todd James (09:22):
You worked with Joe, many, many years at ESPN doing the Sunday Night Baseball telecast. You worked as an editor. So, what was it about Joe that was so special for you?
Claire Smith (09:33):
Joe was so honest and so caring about the game, he cared about it on every single level. But he cared about the young African American men and the women in the game who came after him, and were just trying to embrace a game that didn't always embrace them.
Claire Smith (10:04):
They wanted to stay, they loved the game, why would you want a 13-month-year game if you didn't love it? If you didn't want those hours, if you didn't want the night shift for every single day of your career? And many in the front offices obviously start at nine in the morning and don't leave until the night game is over.
Claire Smith (10:31):
So, Joe cared about every single person in the game, and he really cared about the preservation of legacies such as Negro leaguers and the underserved and underappreciated stars like Frank Robinson, he worshiped Frank. He grew up watching Frank, and he knew that Frank was undervalued by the game, under - I don't know if you want to say idolized, but Frank deserved much, much more.
Claire Smith (11:12):
He deserved so much, same with Roberto Clemente, Little Joe, he was a captain of every team. He served on even the Board of Directors at the Hall of Fame, he saw himself as captain as a spokesperson. As for covering him and then working with him, Joe could break it down, he really could. And by the time we did work together, we had this pact.
Claire Smith (11:43):
I told him that I couldn't ever tell him anything about baseball, and I learned something new every time we spoke, but I asked him to view me in the same way. When it came to journalism, I would do everything I could to help him with the information that he took in front of the camera. But as I trusted him to always lead me in the right direction, all I asked of him was to trust me that I would never let him down.
Todd James (12:20):
Well, that working relationship certainly showed and his willingness to learn, and he obviously became one of the great announcers that we've ever had in baseball.
Claire Smith (12:29):
Right. And he was that before I got there. So, when you come in the middle of a 25-year run that he and Jon Miller had, it's asking them a lot to listen to a new voice and he was willing. Joe was willing as well, Orel Hershiser, so many people who were there, but Joe was just special and I miss him every day.
Todd James (12:54):
I think we all do I always thought Joe, would've been a great commissioner of baseball.
Claire Smith (12:58):
Yes.
Todd James (13:00):
You mentioned love of the game, and I know your father was a painter, told you, "Hey, what are you going to do?" Your mother Bernice was a chemist, but she taught you the love of Jackie Robinson, she was an immigrant from Jamaica who listened to sports back home when she was in Jamaica living with her grandmother.
Todd James (13:20):
She taught you about Jackie, the nuns at St. John's Catholic Elementary School in Philly, suburb of Elkins Park, they showed you the Jackie Robinson movie when you were a kid, so you were all in on baseball from the start. Do you need a love of the game to be a baseball writer of almost 40 years?
Claire Smith (13:40):
I think you better have it because the alternative is to be cynical and bitter, and I think that if you start to feel that way, if you start to take out any frustration or anger or despondency over your lot in life, you're going to take it out in print, and you're going to perhaps be harsher than you should.
Claire Smith (14:12):
If you're a beat writer, you're supposed to be objective. If you're a baseball analyst or national baseball writer, you're supposed to be learnedly analytical, not use words as weapons. And if you're a columnist, you have an even greater responsibility because you have been given the right to go to war, if you will, with a billion barrels of ink and how to use those billions of barrels matter, because the people you cover are human beings, that's the way I always looked at it.
Todd James (14:52):
Right. Sometimes you forget that, sometimes it's easy to sit back and make all these judgements, and you forget the human aspect of it.
Claire Smith (15:01):
And you do get frustrated, you're there, you have no life off the field. As a single mom, I'm trying to raise my son knowing that it's - what did I do? Why am I doing this? You ask yourself why, why all the time and the frustrations hit you.
Claire Smith (15:23):
And then you see something on the field that's just wondrous, or you see something that really, really needs to be held up to baseball's mirror, and you ask the question, "Why are you doing this? Why aren't you doing this? Why is there in 2023, why are there only two African American managers?" And one of them (God bless him) is 73-years-old, so who knows how long Dusty's going to stay?
Todd James (15:58):
But Dusty Baker, the great Dusty Baker.
Claire Smith (16:00):
The great Dusty Baker, he has been in the game over 50 years. So, why is this still an issue especially since Jackie's last public appearance, he asked about managers and general ...
Todd James (16:14):
'72 World Series when he threw out the first pitch, a few days before he died.
Claire Smith (16:18):
Exactly, he wanted to know why there weren't any third base coaches who were African American, because that used to be the steppingstone into the manager's office. But we're still asking those questions, only it's a different generation.
Claire Smith (16:35):
And I think that we're on the verge of seeing African Americans just throw up their hands and say, "Obviously, the game doesn't want us." If you had a couple years ago, I believe it was 11 teams with one or fewer African American players, well, where are the coaches and managers going to come from?
Claire Smith (16:59):
Where's Bob Watson, the general manager going to come from, or Kenny Williams in Chicago - where are they coming from if not up through the ranks?
Todd James (17:12):
Well, that's why I think it's so important that we do have more perspective of people of color in sports media. And we certainly didn't have enough of that when you started, we didn't have many women, we didn't have many people of color.
Claire Smith (17:25):
But you started in '82 and with baseball, you had worked previously Bucks County and at the Philly Bulletin. But the Hartford Courant decided in 1982 that they wanted you to cover baseball and not just cover baseball, but cover the New York Yankees. And not just the Yankees, but the end of the Bronx Zoo Yankees.
Claire Smith (17:50):
Oh, they were pretty ...
Todd James (17:51):
So, what was that like showing up when George Steinbrenner was at the height of his chaos with the Yankees in 1982, it was quite a season, wasn't it?
Claire Smith (18:01):
It was. I didn't get there until June. So, they were already on their, I believe second manager in Gene Michael. And by the end of the season, they had gone - our roster had hosted 54 different players. Now, that's kind of tough on a 25-man roster. And I believe they ended up employing six pitching coaches that season.
Todd James (18:34):
They had three managers by the end of the year.
Claire Smith (18:37):
Three managers, three pitching coaches, 54 different players and it was a zoo, it was crazy. The Steinbrenner era was amazing, and the chaos lasted for so, so long. I think the person maybe most responsible for calming it down and making it livable for the players was Joe Torre in '94.
Claire Smith (19:11):
Because he basically, after being second-guessed by the boss in print, he called the writers together and basically, Joe's message was, "You can talk to him or you can talk to me." And it shut off the faucet, if you will, of the anonymous quotes as Mike McAlary once wrote, an anonymous owner, once told me this or that, because George would call you back. It didn't matter, your circulation or whatever, if you put in a phone call, he'd call you back.
Todd James (19:57):
Give us your favorite George Steinbrenner moment.
Claire Smith (20:09):
Well, the one time he lost his temper with me, he said something to the effect of, "You and the other idiots." I'm sure that he might have used harsher language if I wasn't a woman, but George liked to use the idiots unless the idiots wrote something that he disagreed with.
Claire Smith (20:35):
And then he could go off on you, but he wouldn't cut you off because he just lapped up the attention. He might have been the first Donald Trump in that he loved the media, he loved the attention. My goodness, imagine George on social media.
Todd James (20:59):
Oh, that's quite a thought.
Claire Smith (21:03):
It's scary to think of how far we've come and even scarier to think what if George had come along with us, he could be charming, he could be incredibly generous. When Steve Buckley, the baseball writer who stepped in for me when I became a national baseball writer for the current, Steve became the Yankees beat writer.
Claire Smith (21:35):
And in his first trip to Fort Lauderdale, his plane lands, he goes to pick up his car, and he has a message waiting for him from our editor that his brother had been killed in a car accident. So, Steve has to go back to Boston, obviously, his brother left young children. And when George heard about this, George took it upon himself to assure that the children had college education funds.
Todd James (22:12):
Really?
Claire Smith (22:13):
That's the other side of George, and then there could be the funny side of George watching him trying single-handedly to get a rain soaked baseball field together in Fort Lauderdale, because it was going to be a good game, and maybe it was the Red Sox, who knew which team was coming through Fort Lauderdale that spring training night.
Claire Smith (22:43):
But he was out in waiting boots, I guess the kind of boots you used to stand in a stream in fish, and he had a squeegee, and he had a helicopter above him trying to use its blades to blow the water off the field, but there was George out there trying to squeegee the right field.
Todd James (23:09):
That's an image.
Claire Smith (23:11):
It was him and we just sat in the press box, like, this guy is a lunatic.
Todd James (23:20):
Well, he had his foil too in Billy Martin. And Billy, I think he was manager several times when you were on the beat in the eighties. Their relationship was, let's say, complex.
Claire Smith (23:36):
It was combustible, it really was. And the fuel that served as the fire spreader was alcohol. Sadly, Billy had issues with alcohol. He'd arrive back on the scene, I covered number four and as a national writer, number five, his fourth and fifth terms there.
Claire Smith (24:05):
But whenever George started saying things like, "Have you seen Billy lately, he's looking tanned and rested?" That became the notice that he was thinking in terms of bringing Billy back, so that became one of our catch phrases: "Billy's looking tanned and rested, oh, no ..."
Todd James (24:28):
Here we go again.
Claire Smith (24:30):
Here we go again, and Billy would come in tanned and rested, and it was like watching the picture of Dorian Gray. Billy, would literally sell his soul if he could, to be the manager of the team he loved the most. It was where his heart was broken when he was traded away, blamed for corrupting Mickey and Whitey and the whole group, when he was the kid, how could he corrupt the stars? But he was the one they shipped away.
Claire Smith (25:08):
And all he ever wanted to do was be back with the Yankees and manage the Yankees. So, he'd come back and then the madness of the circus as it was called with Reggie and all his inner personalities, George with all his hands and feet on management, and Billy leaning into his comfort space, which was usually late night bar or what have you. It was just a combination doomed from the moment he walked back in: "I didn't punch that doggie, I didn't do this, one's a liar and the other one's convicted."
And Reggie saying all the stuff that he would say, whichever Reggie showed up that day. I came in in '82, and it was the year after Reggie had moved on to the Angels, so I didn't actually cover him as a Yankee. I just saw the residuals of his stay there. So, his return prompted the infamous chant from the crowds. I don't know if you're allowed to say this.
Todd James (26:49):
Go ahead, this is a podcast, we can say whatever the hell we want, Claire.
Claire Smith (26:52):
"Don Veller sucks," that way. Reggie wanted to make a statement with his return, and not just a statement at the pike, but a statement from the second he came into Yankee Stadium. So, he didn't go out of the tunnel until 6:44, noting the time so he could honor his own number that had not been retired.
Todd James (27:52):
That's tremendous when you're honoring your own number.
Claire Smith (27:54):
But that's when he was going out, Rod Carew laid out a white carpet of towels leading down the runway from the clubhouse to the dugout for Reggie, and the crowd just went wild. And correct me if I'm wrong, I believe Reggie hit a home run, and that prompted the chance to start.
Claire Smith (28:18):
So, it was always something. used to tell me about mid-game, he would walk by and say, "Claire, we haven't even seen what we're going to be writing about tonight," and he was always right. And often, what we were writing about had nothing to do with the game.
Todd James (28:44):
There was always some kind of side show to fill the notebook, to fill the column inches, and covering those Yankees throughout the eighties for the Hartford Courant, it must have set up a great base for you for the rest of your career when you went on to the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and then onto ESPN for the final stage of your career.
Todd James (29:02):
Just being around that scene, your news judgment and your antenna was always up. And that's why (correct me if I'm wrong) it probably set you up for success in terms of just how you approached your job, right?
Claire Smith (29:19):
Yes, when your first full-time beat is one of the toughest on the planet, this side of maybe covering a war or a famine or something where lives are literally at stake, it just felt like your life was at stake. And it was when you had the sympathy of beat writers from the 29 other baseball teams who just had to think about baseball and not cover a circus, as Graig Nettles said, he always wanted to be a baseball player and work for circus, and he got to do both.
Todd James (30:00):
That was one of the great lines from those days.
Claire Smith (30:02):
Exactly. So, it was a tremendous learning experience, it took its toll, I used to think my life was being measured in dog years, not regular years, because the burnout was real. And so, I was able to do it for eight seasons, and then I said to my boss, "I can't do this anymore but I want to cover baseball." And that's when I became the second national baseball writer in the country, second to Tracy Ringolsby of the Dallas Morning News.
Todd James (30:45):
Claire, when you showed up in 1982, you were the first full-time beat writer as a woman in baseball. There had been other women writers at the time, but nobody on the day-to-day beat like that. How were you received by the Yankee players, the coaches, the managers, and the other writers?
Claire Smith (31:09):
I never had a problem with the Yankees coaches, the managers, the players were fine, the other writers were extremely supportive. It's a sophisticated town. It's not even a town, it's city. It's urbane, it's sophisticated. It likes to think of itself and properly. So, I think as being progressive, I also came along in '82.
Claire Smith (31:45):
Well, the lawsuit that Melissa Ludtke in Sports Illustrated filed against the Yankees to open the Yankees clubhouse and Mets clubhouse filed against the city since those were public parks. That was in '78, so the two teams were used to seeing women reporters, Jane Gross covered home at home.
Claire Smith (32:13):
So, she had a fulltime beat when she would fill in the beat writers at home, and they could have some downtime at home. And she was brilliant, she was my friend, my mentor, I stood in her shadow, even though she was only five foot tall at the most, and maybe weighed 90 pounds.
Claire Smith (32:37):
But I stood in her shadow, and I was in awe of her and I'm really ... she passed away this year. So, it's nice to reminisce about Jane and remember how much she meant to so many. Helene Elliot, who's now in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Todd James (33:04):
We featured Helene on our show, she was great.
Claire Smith (33:07):
So, she was there, and it was not an unusual thing in New York City - what was unusual was the fact that I only knew maybe one other African American woman. So, that was evident that something unusual would occur when I walked in a clubhouse, if the player saw an African American woman walk in.
Claire Smith (33:36):
Today, maybe if there isn't 5 to 10 women going through clubhouses before every game, that would be unusual, but back then there were maybe 5 to 10 women period, covering. So, you would really look forward to getting to a town where there was another woman covering.
Claire Smith (34:04):
The telephone was very important because we had a support group that was beyond compare, especially if someone ran into some real difficulty, your obligation was to get in touch with that person as soon as possible and let them talk it out and there would be tears.
Claire Smith (34:27):
There was crying in baseball, but we did it privately, and we did it until the tears were replaced with laughter. Those phone calls could go on for hours deep into the night once you heard that there was an issue somewhere with someone.
Todd James (34:44):
Well, you certainly ran into an issue, in October 2nd 1984. I know you've spoken a lot about this in the past, but as a history show here, I think it's really important to document this. So, if you don't mind, I want to take you back to that.
Todd James (35:01):
It's game one of the 1984 National League Championship Series, and it's in Chicago, the Cubs are hosting the Padres, and the Cubs win the game. And you go down to both locker rooms, and you first go to the Padres locker room, and you go in there and well, you tell us what the hell happened.
Claire Smith (35:21):
Well, to set this up, you knew that there were holdout teams in the National League. Lee MacPhail in the American League had a policy that clubhouses were open to any credentialed reporter. So, there was never a guard standing at the door of American League teams.
Claire Smith (35:49):
I covered an American League team, so I spent most of my time doing that and not having issues, while the reporters who covered National League teams knew that San Diego, Montreal, Atlanta, and maybe Cincinnati, depending on the manager or what have you could have a closed door policy.
Claire Smith (36:17):
And there was very little you could do about it because the National League president had a laissez-fare approach to it - let the teams make their own decisions, and he was hands-off.
Claire Smith (37:01):
So, my editor reached out to the league and said, "Look, we're sending Claire Smith to cover, are we going to have an issue with the Padres?" And the response was pretty clear. We got a letter back saying that during the 162-game season, it's the club's locker room.
Claire Smith (37:26):
During the post-season, the first rounds, it's the leagues locker room, and the leagues rules will apply and you have access. And then in the World Series, it's the commissioner's locker room and the same thing would be in effect that the commissioner's credentials would allow for access.
Claire Smith (37:49):
So, we went really confident that there wouldn't be an issue going for the post-game in game one, and get forcibly removed. Forcibly in that I was shouted at, cursed at, told to get out, and on my way towards the door, I was literally pushed in the back, someone's hand pushed me towards the door and I was pushed out.
Todd James (38:24):
Do you know who it was that pushed you?
Claire Smith (38:26):
No, I think it was a clubhouse attendant, if you will, someone that worked for the Padres. It wasn't a player, I don't believe.
Todd James (38:36):
So, let me set the scene here, I covered some games at the old Wrigley Park. The old clubhouses were right there underneath the stands, the writers are in there, the clubhouse doing what you're trying to do, your job, they push you out of the clubhouse door, which means you're out there underneath the stands, basically, by yourself.
Claire Smith (38:57):
The ugly dimly lit stands above you, and you're in a tunnel that was built maybe in 1917, so it's not a pleasant place to be. And the writers, well, I know they witnessed this, but they had deadlines and obligations, so as angry as they might have been about what was happening, they weren't going to leave, they weren't going to stop doing their jobs and-
Todd James (39:33):
But Henry Hecht at the New York Post did come to you, right?
Claire Smith (40:17):
And so, Henry is coming towards the clubhouse, I'm out in the hallway, and Henry, he figures it out immediately and asks me what he can do and what I needed. And I told him I needed quotes and, "Who do you need?" And I told him, "Well, please tell Steve." Before Henry came out, the media relations director for the Padres came out and asked me who he could get.
Claire Smith (40:52):
And each person I asked for the pictures who would be speaking to, I believe what was a nine nothing loss, they all declined to come out. So, I wasn't getting anywhere with this separate but equal access (that's what I call it) - because I knew what it was, I was being segregated out of the clubhouse.
Claire Smith (41:20):
So, Henry, I tell him tell Steve as in Steve Garvey. I knew Steve when he was a Dodger, I knew Steve when I was just a fan, loving the Dodgers and going to see them in Philadelphia, and Steve always came out to the bus and talked to fans.
Claire Smith (41:41):
And I would go as a high schooler, I would go as a college student, and we got to know each other. And he was always amazingly friendly. When I started covering baseball, nothing changed. So, he was someone what we call Todd, a go-to guy. We always could depend on those go-to guys.
Todd James (42:06):
He would talk after a bad loss or a tough moment, he would stand up. We call them stand stand-up, go-to guys like you said. So, Steve comes out at of the clubhouse, and you are alone ... set the scene for me there.
Claire Smith (42:20):
Well, I'm alone and it's starting the adrenaline that drives you to get down to your job, do it well, all that rush that keeps you going, it drained out of me. And I started to break down, I got really emotional when I saw him come out.
Claire Smith (42:44):
And Steve said to me that, "Basically, take your time, I'm here for as long as you need." So, I was able to blurt out a couple questions, get his responses, and he saw that I was very emotional and he said, "That was okay, but get yourself together because you have a job to do."
Claire Smith (43:14):
And that just made me pull myself together and go over to the Cubs. By the time I got there, the Cubs were well aware of what had happened and a couple of the Cubs coaches, players, what have you, I had covered in New York, with the Mets and Yankees, and they were furious.
Todd James (43:43):
They knew you, right?
Claire Smith (43:45):
Yes, George Frazier, Don Zimmer, I believe, was on the coaching staff, and they were just furious about what had happened in their ballpark.
Claire Smith (43:55):
The next day, the whole world knew, the Baseball Writers Association, they were really ready to go to bat for me (excuse the pun), go to war (excuse the phrase) and take on the Padres, and they were ready to take on the National League.
Todd James (44:21):
And the commissioner is Peter Ueberroth at the time.
Claire Smith (44:24):
First week.
Todd James (44:26):
First week, welcome Peter.
Claire Smith (44:27):
Coming off of the very sophisticated well-run Olympics that he had put together in Los Angeles and coming into baseball chaos and its 19th century approach, to the media. Peter, he wasn't one to tolerate this, and once he found out, he issued an edict saying that credentialed reporters are to be allowed in every major league clubhouse, period. Taking that responsibility out at the hands of the league presidents and team owners, managers, players, he just put his foot down. So, those were the headlines.
Claire Smith (45:27):
The lasting impact was when we show the movie to students today, let them wear towels where women recount their first experiences in clubhouses, recount the lawsuits and also, the ugliness that they faced in those early years. One of the questions the students ask is about what we did to see to our mental health.
Claire Smith (46:08):
And the answer is, back then, no one talked about mental health. No one talked about the psychological impact of these things, of the sleepless nights and those phone calls you needed with your friends just to be able to get through the night to the next day and keep doing your job.
Claire Smith (46:34):
Todd, I don't know of any other woman other than Katy Feeney and Phyllis Merhige, who stayed with this game as long as I have. Just goes to show you that it's probably a good idea to have more than one original thought in your career.
Todd James (46:57):
Yeah. And you were referring there to administrators in Major League Baseball there, with Katie and ... yeah.
Claire Smith (47:02):
Yes. The wonderful late, great, Katy Feeney and Phyllis Merhige, who basically, they oversaw the media relations for the commissioner's office. But as far as being on the beat or being national baseball writer, most women peeled off to go to other sports or to get out of the business altogether, or turned to news writing. Jane became an amazing news writer for The Times. But 40-
Todd James (47:42):
But you stayed with it, Claire, you stayed in baseball. And I'm curious, you said when Steve Garvey says to you, "I'll stay here as long as you need, but you get yourself together because you got a job to do." You have said that that was like a defining moment in your career. Why?
Claire Smith (48:01):
Well, it made me refocus in real time and realize he was right. There was an editor waiting for my game story back in Hartford. There was no time to run into the lady's room and cry or pack up and leave or go find a Padre's official to yell at, scream at. I didn't want to make a scene. Writers never want to be the story.
Claire Smith (48:38):
I did what I had to do and Steve helped me do that. And he was there reminding me that I had what I need to get through that moment. And I needed to go gather on the other side what I needed from the Cubs, then get upstairs and gather myself and write a game story.
Claire Smith (49:02):
I don't remember much about rushing upstairs and writing. And I think that you recognize that adrenaline carries you through those moments. Sometimes you go back and read a game story or whatever, and you don't even know if that's you. It doesn't sound like you, it doesn't ...
Claire Smith (49:25):
Anyway, that's what he was reminding me, that it was the job and everything that came with it. But the most important thing was to do the job. And-
Todd James (49:38):
Well, I think it's interesting that Garvey's daughter, Olivia, is a TV sports reporter in Palm Springs, California. And she's reached out to you, right? You've mentored her somewhat.
Claire Smith (49:49):
Yes. She's in D.C. now. She's a-
Todd James (49:52):
D.C., okay. Alright.
Claire Smith (49:54):
... big-time on-air reporter in DC and she's terrific. She really is.
Claire Smith (50:02):
And the fact that his daughter went into this field, shows that what Steve did in '82, it wasn't just a lark. He obviously, instilled in his sons and daughters the fact that they should have the right and the equal opportunity to do what they wanted to pursue.
Claire Smith (50:29):
Obviously, Olivia grew up in a baseball family and loved sports. And she carried that all the way through, as I did, to finding a way to cover sports, because that was her dream and with the support of her dad.
Claire Smith (50:52):
He kept me informed of every step she took and asked for advice along the way and what organizations should she join, like the Association for Women in Sport Media and things like that.
Claire Smith (51:10):
And it's been wonderful watching her grow into the powerhouse reporter that she is. She's a lovely woman, and both Candace and Steve Garvey, her parents, are just so proud of her. And I'm proud to know her. I'm proud to be in the same profession with her.
Todd James (51:30):
Well, I think it shows not just what Steve did in that moment, but more importantly, what you did. You did go do your job that day in a horrific moment, and you stayed with it. You stayed not just in sports journalism, you stayed in baseball. The culture that was trying to shoo you away. You refused to leave, and you made a career out of it.
Todd James (51:53):
And that led, I think, inspired so many young sports writers, sports reporters like Olivia Garvey to say, "I can do this too." And that must make you feel proud.
Claire Smith (52:06):
Well, it does. And you don't look at it as, "Oh, wow, look what I did." I didn't get to the point of reminiscing until 2017 when the writers decided to select me for the award once known as the J. G. Taylor Spink Award. And then people started asking the whys, the hows, when, who are you? That sort of thing.
Claire Smith (52:45):
And my son, Joshua, asked me probably the most important question in that year, and that was, "What does this mean, Mom." And that really started me thinking.
Claire Smith (52:59):
I also, Todd, was invited to go to a lot of campuses, to speak to journalism classes. I went to the Awesome Convention. I was invited out to the Kansas City, the Negro Leagues Museum. A Lot of places. Florida State, Columbia University, the University of Kansas. Places that I never dreamed would want to hear from me, but they did.
Claire Smith (53:37):
And it started to occur to me that over the 40 years that I thought I was just getting up every day and going to work, that there were actually people who were watching me get up and go to work and wanting that to mean something in terms of encouraging themselves to do the same or follow in the footsteps, or what have you.
Claire Smith (54:08):
So, I never looked at it that way. I never thought of myself as a role model. And in retrospect, I'm kind of glad that I behaved myself because there were people watching. And to hear them to this day, the youngsters come up and say thank you and things like that, it's humbling. And-
Todd James (54:35):
Well, I think about this, Claire, I think about you in that October day in 1984, being alone, standing out there, alone outside the clubhouse. And then I think about that day in December of 2016 when the baseball writers announced that you were going to be awarded the Career Excellence Award, and they asked you to come up the podium and say a few words in that moment.
Todd James (54:59):
And then you called up all the other women writers in the room. The writers came up. There's like 20 women standing around you. The contrast between being alone in '84 and sharing that moment with 20 other female writers, I think that shows a lot. Right?
Claire Smith (55:17):
It did. As I stood up there, I looked around the room and saw how many women were in that room. And there were maybe a couple hundred writers in there, because it's our winter convention, if you will, at the winter meetings every year.
Claire Smith (55:39):
And also, seeing how many writers I grew up with, and consider, not only sisters, but brothers. It takes a village. It really does. When you're on the road and closer to that group than you are with people that work for your newspaper. They're people I knew on the phone at newspapers that I never met.
Todd James (56:04):
Yeah, right.
Claire Smith (56:05):
But I knew the writers I worked with went to Bar Mitzvahs and Bat Mitzvah and weddings and sadly, some funerals for those brothers and sisters.
Claire Smith (56:20):
But I wanted the women to come up and share the award, because I know I didn't walk that path by myself. More and more joined along the way, and that was great. But to have Lisa Nehus there and so many of the pioneers, if you will, who had it so much worse out in the land west of the Hudson River.
Claire Smith (56:52):
Like I said, New York was never a problem, but I had one bad day. So many of those women, if they got through a week without one bad day, it was a triumph because they had it so much harder than I did.
Claire Smith (57:07):
So, I wanted to share that moment, but I also asked the women standing to my left and right to look out at the men in the audience and applaud them because without the baseball writers solid support, we wouldn't have been able to do what we did.
Claire Smith (57:32):
So, it was a terrific occasion. Again, humbling. And then it was the sprint to Cooperstown half a year later.
Todd James (57:46):
Right. Well, it does take a village. And thankfully, the village does include many more women, many more people of color, that village of sports writing, sports journalism.
-end-
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