Mr. Smith Goes to Tampa

TAMPA, Fla. —  Remember the old high school annuals where the class wits would scrawl under a graduate’s name, “Fate tried to conceal him by naming him ‘Smith’? “

Well, fate tried to conceal Bruce Smith by shuffling him to Buffalo.

It was very frustrating to Bruce. Like a Shakespearean actor playing a butler, Caruso singing in a barber shop quartet, Pavlova giving lessons for Arthur Murray. Bruce thought he deserved better.

You see, Bruce Smith was a Star with a capital S . He knew he should be playing the Palace, the Old Vic, the Met, as it were. He was a cult hero long before he became a public hero. Everybody in the National Football League knew about him long before the man in the street did. I remember once, when I found myself in Indianapolis and went out to the Colts’ camp, where I sat in on a news conference with the coach, Ron Meyer, who was preparing for a game against Buffalo, he asked what the Raiders thought of the Bills. “Well, I’m told they think this end they got, fellow named Smith, is one hellacious football player,” I told him. “They’re right,” the coach agreed.

This was small comfort to Bruce Smith, who didn’t want to be known only in the better locker rooms and hankered for a bigger stage than Delavan Avenue. Buffalo is ordinarily thought of as America’s refrigerator, that funny little town on the other end of the state from the action. It’s hard enough for a defensive end to get recognition anywhere. But Deacon Jones forced his way into public consciousness some years ago, head-slapping his way to the passer and giving the sport a new word, sack . Deacon became the Secretary of Defense, gave new dignity to the position and introduced the phrase pass rush to the lexicon.

The first name that comes to hand when someone is asked to define Bruce Smith is that of Deacon Jones. Smith’s own coach, Marv Levy, brought it up before the house when he was asked who Smith reminds him of in his past coaching career. “Well,” Levy began, “I told him when I first saw him, ‘You can be as good as Merlin Olsen and Deacon Jones.’ And he said, ‘I want to be better.’ ”

That sums up Bruce Bernard Smith, who yearns not only to be the best but to have the world know it.

The first time you look at Bruce Smith, you’re surprised he’s a mere 6-feet-4, 270 pounds. You listen to rival coaches and players discussing his exploits, and what comes out in your mind is a 350-pound mastodon who goes around lifting the backs of trucks for exercise. Bruce Smith is big, but his reputation is bigger.

We are all familiar with the story of the 97-pound weakling who got picked on by the neighborhood bullies until he built himself up by subscribing to a magazine’s body-building program and, pretty soon, he was bench-pressing the people who kicked sand in his face.

Bruce Smith took the opposite tack. He was the neighborhood fat boy, the blubbery kid the other boys picked on and stole his lunch. Once, he confessed, he sat on another schoolmate’s sunglasses. “He beat me up,” Bruce Smith admits with a wry smile.

“I was 35 pounds overweight all my life, and all the guys used to make fun of me and laugh at me. I loved to eat, and my mama loved to see me eat.”

He didn’t do pushups. He did pushaways. He pushed himself away from the table. “I haven’t eaten red meat in years,” he says. “Just chicken and fish.”

Defensive end is a position where height and weight may be essential but speed is critical. You can browbeat your way to the quarterback, but the ball may be gone by the time you get there. Unless you can put a quick move that a 290-pound tackle can’t get in front of, you arrive late and out of sorts. Big Daddy Lipscomb once described the position as one where “you pick up and throw people around till you come to the one with the ball. Him, you keep.”

Bruce Smith can do that, too. But the onetime fat boy of the old neighborhood usually has two to three monsters to intercept him. Guile is as important as power. You have to have a bit of the faro dealer in you, or the carnie con man. Make the suckers go for the wrong card.

Most quarterbacks with any agility left figure to dodge and outrun the average defensive end. Ability to change direction is not usually given to a 270-pound man. Bruce Smith can cut and change like something with spots on it. “I pride myself on my pursuit,” he says. For Bruce Smith, quarterbacks leaving the pocket do not hold the same dread as they do for most defensive ends. Deacon Jones used to hate a Fran Tarkenton. It was like chasing a mouse with a broom. Bruce Smith loves it when they leave the pocket. They are coming into his parlor. They are singing his song.

The New York Giants know they are not going to win Super Bowl XXV unless they head off Mr. Smith at the pass. A New England offensive coordinator, asked what it would take to stop Smith at the line of scrimmage, replied: “A high-powered rifle and a scope sight.” In college, at Virginia Tech, it was considered a moral victory for a running back on an opposing team to make the line of scrimmage. Smith had 71 behind-the-line-of-scrimmage tackles.

At the media sessions this week before Super Bowl XXV, some star players come like kids going to the woodshed or hunting dogs to a shampoo.

Not Mr. Smith. As Levy remarked, “Here comes Bruce Smith. He never met a microphone he didn’t like.”

After years of getting the kind of private accolades the best ones do--double- and triple-teaming, their names featured on the blackboards--Bruce Smith hopes to be finally treading the boards his virtuousity deserves: prime time. He heads for the red light.

Everyone in the game knows Buffalo couldn’t have gotten here without him. But Bruce wants everyone in the country to know it. He wants everyone to know Buffalo has something besides Niagara Falls and the highest snowfall south of the Yukon. He’s tired of being a player’s player. He wants to be America’s player. The Giants’ quarterback, Jeff Hostetler, may wish by the third quarter that fate hadn’t concealed Bruce by naming him Smith and retiring him to Buffalo. He may decide Smith is already a household name. By the end of the game, Bruce Smith plans to be just that, the most famous Smith since Al.