Now that he has reached the end zone of his career, maybe Rod Smith will do what he refused to do during all his years in a Broncos uniform. Maybe he’ll break out a dance.
“I’ve got some of the best end-zone dances you’ve ever seen,” Smith once said. “I’ve got some great ones — in my head.”
But not on the field.
Smith, who will make his retirement official this afternoon during a Dove Valley news conference, caught more passes for more yards and more touchdowns than anyone else in Broncos history. But he never danced. Not once. It wasn’t who he was, how he played, what he stood for.
“I didn’t have any dances, I didn’t spike the ball, I didn’t say ‘Hey, look at me,’ ” Smith said. “And the reason is I knew those other 10 guys had more to do with it than I did. I was just the end result.”
Those other 10 guys, along with everyone else in the Broncos’ locker room and on their sideline were what Smith was all about. The team. The faces and winning percentages changed through the years, but Smith’s commitment and devotion remained the same.
“He embodies what this organization is all about,” safety John Lynch said. “There are guys you play with in your career who become close friends, but there are special teammates who really have an impact on your career. Even as a veteran coming in here in my 11th year, I learned a lot from the guy.”
Said Broncos owner Pat Bowlen: “There’s no way anybody who didn’t live inside this organization could appreciate what Rod has done. He was very inspirational. A leader by example. He was a superstar, but he felt he had to prove it to everybody every day.”
There’s an unmistakable irony to Smith’s career. He put up huge numbers, numbers that will put him in the Broncos’ Ring of Fame and perhaps the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But he never was about the numbers. You could argue that, for all he did for the Broncos on Sundays, his biggest impact was felt on the other six days of the week.
That’s when he set the standard, when he provided the reality check, when he showed all those younger players what it took. And he did it day in and day out — spring, summer, fall and winter. When he finally added it up last year, he had sweated his way through 600-plus offseason workouts without missing a single session.
Numbers? Stats? No. Smith is that rare athlete who can honestly say it wasn’t about the numbers.
“It was never the stats with him,” said Smith’s agent, Boulder-based Tom Mills. “To Rod, stats were the by-product of everything else. We used to have bonuses in his contract based on individual performance. But Rod was like, ‘I don’t really care about that.’ So we ended up setting up incentives triggered by team performance, by wins and playoff appearances. It was fitting because that’s how he was motivated.”
Surviving an early injury
To know how motivated he was, you have to go back to Smith’s roots. You have to realize how much of an NFL afterthought he was. You have to go back to when he was a no-name player at a no-name school, long before he took up 17 pages in the Broncos’ media guide. Even before he pocketed his first check from the Broncos: a $5,000 signing bonus, most of which he spent on dental work.
Smith played in a 7,000-seat stadium at Missouri Southern. To this day, the school has produced three NFL draft choices, none higher than the seventh round, and none named Rod Smith. It wasn’t until 1992 that the football team had its own orthopedic surgeon.
As things turned out, the timing of Dr. Brad Reeves’ hiring couldn’t have been better. Three games into that 1992 season, Smith was in desperate need of his services. That’s when his NFL career could have ended before it started.
They still talk about the play at Southern. It was that ugly, that horrific, that sickening.
“No doubt about it, we thought he was done playing football,” former Missouri Southern athletic director Jim Frazier said. “The scouts were starting to come around, but they disappeared after that. It was a very tragic moment in Rod’s life. It all could have ended right there.”
Missouri Southern was playing Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Mo. Smith was getting some run as a Harlan Hill candidate, the Division II equivalent of the Heisman Trophy. So when Smith dropped back to catch a punt early in the game, Wesley Maurice Drummond was going to hit him, lay him out, send him a message.
He hit him, all right. With the ball still 10 feet in the air. A split second later, penalty flags started flying and Smith started screaming. His left knee was gone. The ACL, the MCL, the cartilage . . . you name it and Smith tore it.
“I was madder than heck,” Frazier said. “This kid came down and never hesitated, just wiped out his knee. We thought for a while he was going to lose his leg.”
“It was a vicious hit and an intentional hit,” Reeves said. “The kid had nothing in his sight but Rod’s knee. I still have the video, it was that bad.”
We would tell you Drummond’s side of the story, but we can’t. He was killed soon thereafter in a St. Louis gang shooting.
Won’t take no for answer
Smith? He was sentenced to several months of intense rehab. Forget the chronic hip problems that ended his career all those years later. The turning point in Smith’s football career came when he got back on the field after blowing out his knee.
“I think that’s probably where Rod learned his work ethic,” Reeves said. “Prior to that, he was head and shoulders above people as far as God-given talent. When he blew his knee out, he was back to zero with everybody else. That just set him on fire. That’s when he took the attitude, ‘I will not be defeated.’ ”
But he wasn’t going to be drafted, either. The Chiefs had a scout in the press box that day in Warrensburg, but he left at halftime. So did all the others, with one exception.
“That guy from Denver came around now and then, but that was it,” Frazier said.
That would be Broncos regional scout Charlie Lee, who recommended Smith as a possible late-rounder after an NCAA medical exemption bought Smith another year of college eligibility. The 1994 draft would come and go, though, without Smith’s name being called.
“I don’t remember whether we thought about drafting him, but we didn’t like him enough to take him and neither did anyone else,” said former Broncos head coach Wade Phillips, now roaming the sideline in Dallas. “Everybody missed on a great player. If we knew then what we know now, he’d have been a first-rounder.”
Instead, he found himself on the Broncos’ practice squad in 1994. Phillips was fired after the season, leaving Smith’s career in limbo. Enter Mike Shanahan, whose first impressions of Smith came when he looked over the daily attendance reports for the team’s offseason conditioning program. Others came and went, but Smith’s name was there every day.
By the time Shanahan’s first training camp was winding down in 1995, Smith had secured a spot on the roster. By 1996, he was starting opposite Ed McCaffrey, with Shanahan unloading former first-rounders Mike Pritchard and Anthony Miller to make room for them.
“People forget those days,” Shanahan said. “It was like, ‘How could they go with these two guys? One’s an undrafted free agent and the other guy got cut.’ But with Rod, you could see how important football was to him. You don’t always have a Cinderella story like his, but you knew how important it was to him.
“The thing about Rod is he always handled himself like you would want a true pro to handle himself. He always put the team ahead of himself. He has influenced so many people through the years. I’ll always be indebted to him for what he did for this organization.”
An undrafted free agent from Missouri Southern, and with a bum knee, no less. From those humble roots emerged, by all accounts, the greatest wide receiver in Broncos history. There were 222 players selected in that 1994 draft, including 30 wide receivers. Smith outlasted virtually all of them, including all four wideouts taken in the first round.
He didn’t just outlast other players. He outlasted entire teams. The original Browns were in Cleveland when Smith entered the NFL. The Oilers were in Houston and the Raiders were in Los Angeles. There were no Titans or Texans or Jaguars or Panthers back then. Bill Clinton was winding up his first term in the White House and Art Modell was growing weary of those leaks in the ceiling in his Cleveland Municipal Stadium office.
How did Smith do it? How did he pull off one of the most amazing rags-to-riches stories in NFL history? The answer to the question is another question: Where do we begin? He worked hard. He remembered his roots. He never got complacent. He always put the team first. That’s a good start, but there are more reasons where those came from.
Leadership goes a long way
Smith was a man for all seasons in the Broncos’ locker room. To the No. 1 draft choices, he was a player who defied the odds. To the low-rounders and undrafted free agents, he was a hero, an example of how far you could go if you put your mind and heart into it. Either way, no matter where you came from, you respected Smith.
“You have to respect a guy who works for everything he’s got,” Broncos cornerback Champ Bailey said. “Nobody expected him to have 800-plus catches and go to a few Pro Bowls. Nobody even expected him to make the team.”
It wasn’t just what he did, though. It was how Smith did it. His leadership was so cherished by his teammates, he was voted a team captain last season despite being on the physically-unable-to-perform list. Shanahan, meanwhile, has offered him virtually any job in the organization.
How did he do it? Maybe, more than anything, Smith became the player he was by keeping his perspective. By being the same man, on and off the field, when he was making the league minimum and when he was making millions. By treating his career like a rare privilege, not a divine right.
“What am I most proud of? The opportunity,” Smith said late last season. “In life, a lot of times you don’t put yourself in position to have those types of opportunities. To me, a lot of it is based on the way people think. They don’t think they’re ever going to be in that position, so they never are. When I got that opportunity, I was ready to take advantage of it.”
And now, after doing the uniform proud for all those years, it’s time to walk away. Hobble is more like it. Two surgeries later, his left hip still isn’t right. Hasn’t been since 2004, for that matter. It’s time, all right. Truth is, it was time a year ago, but Smith couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“Honestly, I don’t even like walking on it,” he said in December. “It’s that bad right now. I have a hard time getting up in the morning.”
So why now and not then?
“Once you say it’s over, it’s over,” he said. “I don’t want to close that door until I know for sure that’s it’s a done deal.”
Finally, the deal is done, and so is Smith.
The Broncos will miss him, maybe more than any player not named Elway. But the good news is, given what he was and what he stood for, his voice will be heard at Dove Valley for years to come. As for the next Rod Smith coming along, though, Bailey isn’t counting on it.
“Rod Smith,” he said. “We’re not going to have another one of those.”
Jim Armstrong: 303-954-1269 or jmarmstrong@denverpost.com
