Bruce Smith named to Pro Football Hall of Fame

He was the insecure fat kid at Booker T. Washington High who could run, somehow, some way, like one of God's sleek creatures.

The forceful Virginia Tech Hokie who so controlled college games that he was named the nation's best lineman and picked first in the NFL draft.

The brassy pro, for 19 seasons fueled by will and ego, who sought greatness and found it in a record 200 quarterback sacks, four straight Super Bowl appearances with the Buffalo Bills and enduring company with the best ever.

And Saturday, Norfolk's Bruce Smith, the most accomplished pass rusher in NFL history, was voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Since 1972, Portsmouth's Clarence "Ace" Parker, at 96 the oldest living hall of famer, has been the only South Hampton Roads member of the Canton, Ohio, shrine. That brotherhood will double when Smith is inducted in August.

"There will be folks that will have a biased opinion," Smith, 45, said as announcement day neared, "but the fact of the matter is, the best defensive end and pass rusher to play this game came from Norfolk, Virginia."

Other opinions lean toward the late Reggie White, whose 198 career sacks Smith surpassed in December 2003, his last of four seasons with the Washington Redskins. Or to David "Deacon" Jones, who retired in 1974, eight years before sacks became officially tallied.

But those are biases not shared by coaches Cal Davidson, Bill Dooley or Marv Levy, who traveled the critical miles of Smith's journey from discovery to enlightenment to radiance.

Start with Davidson, who represents the beginning of Smith's athletic education at Booker T. Washington High School. Certainly, Smith had his mother, Annie, a basketball player, and father, George, a former boxer who implored his youngest of three children to strive to be the best and to never quit.

Smith, though, honors Davidson - Booker T. basketball coach Zeke Avery, as well - for committing to an oversized kid too large to play in Norfolk's weight-based recreation football leagues. A kid, sensitive by nature, vulnerable to neighborhood bullies despite his girth.

"They saw this shell," Smith said, "but they saw much more than that inside me."

Davidson had spied Smith in summertime basketball games in Booker T.'s gym, glimpses that jumped to mind the day he saw Smith and his mother shopping at a department store before Smith's sophomore year.

"I told his mother, 'We've got to get him out to play football,' " Davidson said. "She said, 'I can't let my baby go out there!' I said, 'He's no baby. He'll be the biggest kid on the field.' "

Strongest and fastest, too.

"For some reason, he always had speed and quickness," Davidson said. "He had baby fat on him, but he could run. Just to see him run, we knew he was going to be something special."

Raw to football's nuances, Smith didn't play varsity until 11th grade, but by his senior year he was helping diagram plays and plan strategy.

"They talk about his athletic ability, but Bruce was smart," Davidson said. "He attacked the game with a lot of intelligence, not just brute strength and speed."

Smith attacked so much that Davidson often had to protect the Bookers from his man-child, grown now to 6-foot-3 and 270 pounds.

"A lot of times I wouldn't let him practice because he would break up the team," Davidson said. "He used to get upset about that. But he was so far advanced over the other guys we had. He would crumble those running backs up."

And so, the college coaching world beat a path to Booker T.

Virginia Tech's Dooley got there first, but he wasn't lonely for long.

"The head coach at Michigan, Bo Schembechler, I had him, Bill Dooley, about five or six of those head coaches back there in my office," Davidson said. "I just gave them the camera and the film. They could all see that Bruce was going to be great.

"The only thing I said to Bruce was, 'You can be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond.' "

Smith, already huge, chose to stay that way and attend Virginia Tech. He liked his home state, and he liked the idea of being relatively close to his father, who had heart trouble.

"Ultimately, Bill Dooley told me, 'Bruce, I know you have the opportunity to go anywhere in the country, but if you can play, they will find you.' " Smith said. "And by 'they,' he meant the NFL."

Dooley's pitch worked, as it had a few years earlier when Dooley, then North Carolina's head coach, came to Williamsburg and lured Lawrence Taylor to Chapel Hill. Taylor entered the Hall of Fame in 1999.

"Not very many of those guys come along," said Dooley, who moved to Virginia Tech in 1978. "I remember when I first saw Bruce play basketball, I said, 'My God, what a talent!' He was big, but he could run like a defensive back or a linebacker."

At Tech, Dooley deployed Smith all over the defensive line to confound game plans designed to thwart him.

"People would say, 'Well, we'll just run away from Bruce,' but that didn't work because he'd just chase them down," said Dooley, living in retirement in Wilmington, N.C. "He was a natural, just a dominating football player."

Virginia Tech won 20 games in the four seasons before Smith reached Blacksburg, and 21 in the four after he left. While he was there, the Hokies won 31 times, Tech's most successful four-year run to that point.

Smith built momentum like a truck racing downhill. He battled weight issues - he'd leave Tech at some 300 pounds - yet as a junior he recorded 22 sacks and was a first-team All-American.

By the end of his final season in '84, Smith owned school records with 46 sacks and 71 tackles

for losses, was on every All-American team, and won the Outland Trophy as the best college lineman.

"With his ability, the only thing that could keep him from doing what he did would be his attitude, and he had a great attitude," Dooley said. "We kind of helped him along, but it was all Bruce. You don't coach that."

Maybe not. But Marv Levy gave it his best shot for a dozen years.

"I was delighted and honored to have coached him," Levy, 83, said from his home in Chicago. "In my opinion he's the greatest defensive end who ever played the game."

Smith went to Buffalo as the top pick in the '85 draft. Levy arrived in '86 as a midseason replacement for a woebegone team. He discovered in Smith a young player finding his way, overweight, sensitive to criticism, prone to showboating.

Ah, but Smith loved to play, loved to study his opponents and his own game. Soon, he even loved to work out; he became almost fanatical about making and keeping himself one of the NFL's best-conditioned players.

It all fueled an armor-like bravado that Smith, 6-4 and 265 most of his career, wore like his blue-and-red Bills uniform.

"You'd walk through that locker room on game day and most guys would have this hard look on their faces," Levy said. "Bruce always had a smile, like, 'I'm gonna like this. This is gonna be fun.'

"Bruce wasn't one to feign modesty, either. He'd tell you he was the best, and then he'd go out and prove it."

The evidence piled high as Smith passed landmark after milestone.

In 1987, his third season, he played in his first of 11 Pro Bowls and made his first of eight All-Pro teams.

Oddly, Smith never led the NFL in sacks in a single season. Yet starting in '86, he hit double digits in 12 of 13 seasons, even in '88, when he missed four games for violating the NFL's substance-abuse policy. He fell short only in '91 because one of his nine knee surgeries limited him to five games.

Although he played just 72 games in the '80s, Smith was voted onto the NFL's All-Decade Team. That was merely a prelude to the '90s: He was twice named the Associated Press NFL Defensive Player of the Year, and again made the All-Decade Team.

Of course, Smith also was in the middle of Buffalo's unprecedented run of four straight AFC titles from 1990 to '93 - and its unprecedented run of four straight Super Bowl defeats.

"That we didn't win one is somewhat a thorn in our side," Smith said, "but just look at the level of consistency that existed during that tenure. That should speak for itself."

Smith left Buffalo after the '99 season, when the Bills cut him as part of a salary-cap purge. He quickly signed with Washington, where he collected the final 29 sacks of his career.

Now, there's one important technical fact that Smith, who lives in Virginia Beach with his wife, Carmen, and teenage son, Alston, wants you to know: He had it harder than most.

Smith played in a 3-4 defensive scheme in Buffalo. That is, he was one of three down linemen supported by four linebackers, and so he was routinely double-teamed by blockers. Most of history's great pass rushers have come from 4-3 systems and have had teammates known as sack threats to draw blocking attention.

"I was determined to beat that double-team before that second guy came in, because I knew it was coming," Smith said. "It was just a matter of the lineman turning his head for that split second, and I was gone. Usually, the second guy was reaching for me, because I'd beaten the first guy so quick."

In his office high above Virginia Beach's Town Center, where he has begun a second career in commercial real estate development, Smith looks up from the laptop on which he has summoned the NFL's all-time sack list, and he clarifies.

"I'm not saying that I'm the best defensive end pass rusher to play the game just because I'm the NFL all-time sack leader," he said, "but because of the degree of difficulty I had to overcome to achieve that feat."

History's voices rise to agree.

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com