Apparently suppressed by his distress of the moment, the make of the “old beat-up car” now eludes him. But virtually every other aspect of an episode Lovie Smith considers pivotal in his childhood, if not his life, remains vivid.
With his father, Thurman, in the hospital, Lovie, then a sophomore at Big Sandy (Texas) High, was entrusted with repairing the thermostat on the family car.
As he kept “turning it and turning it,” Smith said, his mother, Mae, beseeched him: “Don’t tighten it too much. You’re going to break it. If you break it, we can’t afford another one.”
He kept tightening.
It broke.
They couldn’t afford another one.
“I’ll never forget the sound of that clicking,” he said. “I was just devastated. We did a lot of walking for a long, long time.”
But the lesson wasn’t “do what your mother says … or else.” Or, “you broke it, you bought it.”
“She just let me know right then that you don’t really have time in life to feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Eventually, you’re going to get back to reality, and you’ve wasted time feeling sorry for yourself. You don’t have time for that.
“And that has really kind of motivated me. So any time there’s something bad that happens, it’s, `OK, this happened. Now what can I do about it? I’ve got to make it better.”
As life-changing anecdotes or rallying cries go, Smith recognizes this one suffers from a lack of pizzazz.
But such understatement is part of the dignity that gives him what might be termed a presence.
A rich poor family
Had Smith conducted his life with a passive type of mind-set, he probably still would be in Big Sandy, where one caution light maintains order. In a town where it seemed like everybody was his cousin, where his graduating class had 34 students, nobody teased him about the name he was given as an adaptation on that of his Aunt Lavana when he turned out not to be a girl.
His six siblings still live in the area, about 100 miles east of Dallas.
But Smith played for three state champion football teams and earned a scholarship to Tulsa. He and a younger sister were the only children to graduate from college, something his parents wanted for all of them–and something they pushed for despite their lack of means.
“We were the richest poor family you would ever see,” Smith said. “They wanted to do everything to give us a better life than they had.”
His father held numerous jobs, the last of which was in the laundry department of the hospital at the University of Texas at Tyler. He died a few years ago after being ill for several months, but he was contending with a disease for many years.
“I am a child of an alcoholic father,” Smith said. “He had a sickness he couldn’t lick by himself. But I say in the same sentence that this was a great man, one of the best people I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t have traded him for anything.”
In many respects, Smith absorbed from his father’s struggles the very lesson his mother had sought to teach after the car incident.
“I learned about the ups and downs you can go through, from seeing him high and, of course, seeing him low,” said Smith, who spoke with his father by telephone after every game he coached. “From seeing him have a job to seeing him lose a job.
“If anything has molded me, that has been it. Coaching is like that (with ups and downs). I don’t want to hear excuses. Nobody really wants to hear how bad you have it. Get yourself back up again.”
And if he couldn’t get back up again then?
“No matter what came up, you knew that my mother could deal with it,” said Smith, who noted that his mother has been just as resilient since losing her sight to diabetes more than a decade ago.
Her example has been of use to him as the father of three boys, too.
In 1999 Smith’s oldest son, Mikal, then 22, was diagnosed with what Smith cryptically referred to as “a growth” in his brain. As a matter of family privacy, he declined to elaborate on the prognosis for Mikal, a former football player at Arizona, other than to say he is not believed to be in imminent danger.
In 1987 Smith’s teenage son Matthew legally drowned. He turned blue and had no pulse, Smith said. But he recovered. With both sons, Smith wouldn’t comment further.
Though Smith won’t linger on those struggles, he acknowledged the last few years have been draining for him and his wife, MaryAnne.
“We have strong faith. We really believe God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” he said. Smiling, he added, “Sometimes He knows you can handle things that you don’t know you can handle.”
An urge to coach
Even as an adolescent, even as he hoped to play football for as long as he could, Smith had an urge to be a coach. Perhaps not coincidentally, he said: “I wasn’t the best athlete around, but I was one of those kinds of guys who did everything the coach told me to do.”
That was reinforced at Tulsa, where he became an admirer of head coach John Cooper and his defensive backs coach, Larry Marmie, now a former Arizona Cardinals defensive coordinator.
So taken with Marmie was Smith that to this day, Smith said, he calls him on Father’s Day.
“That really choked me up. I couldn’t even talk,” said Marmie, who added that Smith never was a person who could take over a room but that people gravitated to him anyway.
At Tulsa, Smith also became smitten romantically. He met MaryAnne Ford on a blind date. They were drawn to each other, he said, probably because they were such opposites. He’s black and she’s white, he said as an example, and she does the talking and he does the listening.
It all made for an instant sense that she was the one. Sounding a bit like London Fletcher, Smith said, “You know when it’s that special person.”
For a brief time, Smith didn’t know about this special career of his. After two years of coaching high school football, he took a job manufacturing airplane parts to make more money. It didn’t work out.
“I don’t miss the sound of punching that clock,” he said.
He returned to high school coaching but got his major break when Cooper read an article in which Smith expressed his desire to coach at the collegiate level.
Shortly thereafter, Cooper called: “Hey, my outside linebackers coach is getting ready to leave. You want the job?'”
Presto, Smith was a collegiate assistant coach, a role he’d play with increasing ability and reputation from 1983-1996 for Tulsa, Wisconsin, Arizona State, Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio State before being hired by Tampa Bay. Though he loved college coaching, he always believed the NFL was the pinnacle.
By the time he got there, he had made friends and impressed many observers, including Rams coach Mike Martz, with whom he worked at Arizona State.
Martz knew all about Smith’s character and technical abilities and exceptional communications skills, and knew Smith was “the type of guy you want to be around on a day-to-day basis.”
What he came to learn from watching Smith’s linebackers flourish for Tampa Bay, even against the Rams high-voltage offense in the 1999 NFC title game, was that he also was an exceptional NFL coach.
And when it came time for Martz to find a defensive coordinator, it took only moments of one conversation for him to confirm that they were in harmony on what they wanted for the Rams defense: speed and aggressiveness within a fundamentally sound zone defensive base.
Smith at a glance
Age: 45 (May 8, 1958)
Birthplace: Big Sandy, Texas
College: Tulsa
Years in NFL: 8 (3 with Rams)
Personal: Married (Mary-Anne), 3 sons (Mikal, Matthew and Miles); twin grandsons (Malachi and Noah).
Coaching career:
2001-03: Defensive coordinator, St. Louis
1996-2000: LBs, Tampa Bay
1995: DBs, Ohio State
1993-94: DBs, Tennessee
1992: Outside LBs, Kentucky
1988-91: LBs, Arizona State
1987: LBs, Wisconsin
1983-86: Linebackers, Tulsa
1981-82: Cascia Hall Prep, Tulsa
1980: Big Sandy High, Texas
