January 16, 1982

Red Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist for The New York Times and one of the nation's most admired sports commentators, died at Stamford (Conn.) Hospital yesterday of heart failure after a brief illness. He was 76 years old and lived in New Canaan. The last column in Mr. Smith's 55-year career, ''Writing Less - and Better?'' appeared Monday and told of his plans to cut back his writing from four to three columns a week. In the column, he recalled years past when he had written seven columns a week and added: ''Between those jousts with the mother tongue, there was al ways a figh t or football match or ball game or horse race that had to be covered after the column was done. I loved it.'' Pulitzer Prize in 1976 In the college textbook ''A Quarto of Modern Literature,'' between an essay by Winston Churchill and a short story by Dylan Thomas, there is an example of spot-news reporting by Red Smith.It is a column on a heavyweight fight between Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, written on deadline. It is the only piece of journalism in the anthology, and the only sports story.

Mayor Koch, outlining his spending plans for the next fiscal year, said yesterday that New Yorkers could expect fewer improvements in services than he had promised in the election-year budget he put forth eight months ago. Mr. Koch's program for fiscal 1983 included $171 million in new taxes that he called ''inescapable'' and $213 million in spending reductions that he said were needed to help close an impending large budget deficit. He said, however, that despite these cuts the effect on services would be ''minimized'' through an ambitious productivity program. In contrast to last year, when he asserted that ''the worst pain isbehind us,'' the Mayor acknowledged that his goal now was simply to ''hold the li ne.'' As a result, after a burst of hiring before fiscal 1982 ends on June 30, the city expects that the work force will have shrunk - with 1,244 fewer police officers, 225 fewer street sweepers and 4,019 fewer schoolteachers and paraprofessionals - when fiscal 1983 ends 18 months from now.

Negotiators for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and trucking concerns reached a tentative agreement today on a contract reported to include major concessions made by theunion in the hope of protecting the 300,000 j obs in the troubled industry. The agreement was announced in Washington and Kansas City by Roy L. Williams, president of the union, and Arthur H. Bunte Jr., president of Trucking Management Inc., the industry's principal bargaining arm. The details of the pact were not disclosed, but both sides hailed its terms, saying they were confident that it would preserve the jobs of those still employed and would help return to work some of the 120,000 drivers and warehousemen laid off in the last year. Ford Asks Union Sacrifices In another labor development, the Ford Motor Company said that it was asking the United Automobile Workers to make substantial sacrifices in fringe benefits in return for job protection and profit sharing for its members. (Page 10.)

The highest-ranking Solidarity leader who is still at large has declared in an interview that the union is continuing its activities underground and is prepared for a long struggle to fight for democrac y and to overcome what he called military ''di ctatorship.'' The union official, Zbigniew Bujak, insisted that the struggle must be conducted through peaceful resistance. ''I see that the current situation lends itself very much toward the organization of terrorism, and I fear that very much,'' he said. ''Our country has never known terrorism, and it would be better if it didn't come to that.'' Mr. Bujak, the 27-year-old head of the Warsaw chapter of Solidarity and a man whose popular appeal has made many unionists think of him as a successor to Lech Walesa as the union's leader, is in hiding somewhere in Poland. The interview, the first he has given since the military crackdown began, was conducted by submitting questions through a complicated chain of intermediaries so his whereabouts was not revealed.

The Federal Trade Commission, in a 3-to-1 vote, decided today to dismiss the 1 0-year-old antitrust case againstthe nation's three biggest breakfast cereal makers, Kellogg, General Mills and Gen eral Foods. The commission thus accepted the recommendation of an F.T.C. administrative law judge that the agency's staff had failed to prove the original charges. These had accused the three companies, whose products are consumed by tens of millions of Americans every day, of having operated a ''shared monopoly'' that limited competition among themselves and prevented new competition from entering the market. The judge, Alvin L. Berman, called for dismissal in a recommendation issued last September.