Jimmy Smith began writing about sports as a 16-year-old in 1972, with stories published in the weekly St. Bernard News about the St. Bernard Ladies Softball League, Chalmette High School athletic events, and the St. Bernard semi-pro baseball league whose representative, sponsored by Gruns Drugs, won the state championship and participated that year in the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita, Kansas. In September 1973, while a senior at Chalmette, Smith began what would become a 42-year career in the business at the city’s once-daily paper. His journalism work has taken him across the country and around the globe, covering some of the world’s premier sporting events. His work has appeared in a number of national publications and magazines, as well as on the syndicated Newhouse News Service. He was an incredibly average athlete at Patricia Park in Arabi three blocks from his boyhood home in St. Claude Heights, playing football, basketball and baseball, eventually learning that it was vastly more personally rewarding to write about others’ athletic endeavors.