Smith’s journalistic career spanned over five decades and his work influenced an entire generation of writers.

He attended Green Bay East High School, which was the site of home games of the National Football League's Packers until 1957.

In 1971, at the age of 66, he was hired by The New York Times and wrote four columns a week for the next decade, sometimes devoting 18 hours a day to them.

[2] Smith was honored (along with Harold Kaese) with the J. G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) in December 1976.

Smith's writing abilities and command of the English language made him much sought after as an editor or adviser by dictionary and thesaurus publishers.

In 1946, sportswriter Paul Gallico wrote, "It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader."

In April 1949, columnist Walter Winchell wrote, "Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn't quite a chore. ...

This was because when Ali refused to serve during the Vietnam War, claiming his case as a conscientious objector, Smith, who had never served in uniform himself, wrote: "Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up, Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war",[5] and berated Ali for being a "draft dodger" and a "slacker".

Red's son, Terence Smith, went on to be a journalist at The New York Times, CBS News, PBS, The Huffington Post, and NPR.

President Jimmy Carter announced a few weeks later that the US would not attend the games that summer, in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Also named in his honor is the Red Smith Handicap, a Thoroughbred horse race annually run at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York.

The people we’re writing about in professional sports, they’re suffering and living and dying and loving, and trying to make their way through life just as the bricklayers and politicians are.” He also said "It is no coincidence that the largest surviving monument of the ancient Greeks and Romans is the Colosseum in Rome, the Yankee Stadium of its time."