I'm just kinda catching up on stuff on here now after being very busy and out of town for the last few days. Bit, my sincerest condolences on your loss. Sounds like your dad touched a lot of people's lives in a big way. You should be really proud of that especially at this point in time.

Here's what they ran on MSNsportsNET about the old man...

MSNsportsNET Wrote:Sportswriter Smith Recalled
Posted by John Antonik
February 9, 2010 (5:26 p.m.)


Bill Smith

I was saddened to read of the recent passing of former Daily Mail sports editor Bill Smith, 80, who entertained Charleston area sports fans for years with his one-of-a-kind reporting.

Our paths crossed briefly – I believe Bill’s last year at the Daily Mail was my first year working at WVU. What I remember most about Smitty was his referring to everyone as coach. I was coach. Michael Fragale was coach. Our sports information graduate assistants were all coaches.

What Smitty had was incredible access to all of West Virginia’s coaches – access which benefited Charleston Daily Mail readers until his retirement in the early 1990s.

Bill got access for two reasons. No. 1, the coaches knew Bill wasn’t going to take the privileged information he got and use it as rope to hang them. Secondly, and more importantly, Smitty got inside information because he was smart enough to understand what he was getting.

That doesn’t mean Bill always sat on his scoops.

A close friendship with Bobby Bowden gave Smitty the scoop of his career when he found out that Bowden was considering a move to Florida State the day before West Virginia’s Peach Bowl victory over North Carolina State.

Smitty told Bowden there was no way he could sit on what he was told, so Bobby agreed to let him use it as long as Bowden was cited as an anonymous source.

Smitty also took Lou Holtz to task when he saw one of Holtz’s assistant coaches jogging around a cinder track at West Virginia’s practice site in Atlanta before the 1972 Peach Bowl.

Smith cornered Holtz at a press conference the day before the game and asked him why one of his coaches was at West Virginia’s practice. Holtz said he didn’t know what Smitty was talking about.

Bill had seen the NC State guy with his own two eyes, and despite Holtz’s denial, he wrote about it anyway.

Smitty called the idiots idiots when they began pounding on Bowden’s locker room door after West Virginia’s 36-35 loss to Pitt in 1970. As only Bill could do, he explained in the most simplest of terms that it wasn’t as if Bowden was trying to lose the game!

A choked up Frank Cignetti (who would also battle his own health problems) dedicated West Virginia’s big win at Maryland in 1977 to Smitty, who was in the hospital recovering from his first heart attack. Cignetti's post-game tribute is a good example of what Bill Smith meant to West Virginia’s coaches.

Bill took the teams to task when they played poorly. When they stunk, he wrote that they stunk. If the coaches made boo-boos, Bill wrote that they made boo-boos.

“He was no cheerleader,” Don Nehlen told the Daily Mail’s Jack Bogaczyk. “If you played lousy, he said you played lousy, and he probably got to write that more than we'd have liked. But he played it straight.”

Smitty also didn’t care what his readers thought. He wisely understood early in his career that he wasn’t going to please everybody. He was grateful to those who appreciated what he wrote.

As for the rest of them? Smitty would say, to hell with them. That was the boxer in him.

Additionally, Smitty was one of the few reporters I ever knew who actually looked forward to covering football games at Syracuse’s Archbold Stadium - not so much for its Spartan conditions but more so because of the hot New England clam chowder and the stiff adult beverages Syracuse Sports Information Director Larry Kimball served after the games.

“Sometimes it took me a little longer to finish my stories up there,” Smitty once told me.

Rest in peace, Smitty.

Sorry for your loss Bit; thanks for sharing.

I gave the eulogy for my father yesterday. It was much more difficult than the eulogy I gave for my grandmother. But I got through, and afterward got the nicest compliment from several of the reporters my father used to work with. Almost to a man, they said they could close their eyes and hear my father in my words. We were always a lot alike, which is most likely why our relationship was so antagonistic as I passed puberty, and also why we became such good friends later in my life...

The service was unique, with the family doing all the singing and speaking, and was more of a celebration of his life, without his lifeless corpse decorating the chapel. It proved to be a catharsis for us all...