football player
Personal Information
Born Emmitt Smith III, May 15, 1969, in Pensacola, FL; son of Emmitt, Jr. (a bus driver) and Mary Smith.
Education: Attended University of Florida, 1987-90.
Career
Running back for Dallas Cowboys, 1990--. Selected by Cowboys in first round of 1990 professional draft; signed with team September 4, 1990. Also runs football camp for boys ages 8-16.
Life's Work
The history of Emmitt Smith's life can be summed up in three words: he plays football. The three-time National Football Conference (NFC) rushing champion has been consumed by his game since early childhood, and now--as the premier running back for the Dallas Cowboys--he has attracted the notice of an entire nation. Smith's arrival in Dallas in 1990 neatly coincided with that team's resurgence as a football powerhouse. The wily running back's talents proved immensely valuable--indeed, indispensable--as the Cowboys won back-to- back Super Bowls in 1993 and 1994.
In recognition of Smith's accomplishments and his potential, Cowboys ownership has made him the best-paid running back in the history of the National Football League (NFL), with a 1993-97 contract worth $13.6 million in salary and bonuses. The old adage says, "you get what you pay for." With Emmitt Smith, the Cowboys get a back who has won the National Football Conference rushing record three straight years in a row (awarded in 1992, 1993, and 1994), the only league-leading running back who played for a Super Bowl championship team at the time he won his rushing titles, and the NFL's 1993-94 Most Valuable Player. Smith also capped a stellar 1993-94 season with the Super Bowl Most Valuable Player award after performing through the playoffs and the Super Bowl with a serious injury to his shoulder. As Peter King put it in Sports Illustrated: "The thing that turns Smith on the most is his desire to be a tremendous player, and that's refreshing. He wants to make a mark on this game that few players will ever equal." Few would argue that he is well on his way to doing just that.
It almost seems as if Smith had been born a football star. At every level--high school, college, and professional--he has ranked among the very best. His consistent achievement as a running back has come not from blinding speed or extra strength, but rather from an instinctive feel for the game and an uncanny ability to read and respond to every shift in the defense he faces. "I know I'm not the fastest guy around," Smith told Sports Illustrated. "And I know I'm not the strongest guy, either. It doesn't bother me at all. I see myself as being able to get the job done." He added: "If you want to get through a hole bad enough, you'll get through it." Former Cowboys offensive coordinator Norv Turner told Sports Illustrated: "Emmitt rarely makes a play that makes you go, Wow! It's his total package. His great games are games where he just wears you down, play after play, over and over. This is what great runners do. They dominate games. And nobody dominates games in the NFL like Emmitt has recently."
When Emmitt Smith III was an infant in Pensacola, Florida, his mother could calm him by turning on televised football games. In Sports Illustrated, Mary Smith recalled watching her oldest son "just sort of rocking in his little swing, but watching everything" as the action unfolded on the screen. Smith was born in 1969, one of five children of Emmitt Smith, Jr., a Pensacola bus driver who spent his weekends playing semi-pro football with a local Florida league. Gifted with athletic potential from an early age, Emmitt III spent hours of his youth playing backyard football with the neighbor children and his older cousins. Sports Illustrated contributor Rick Telander noted: "Little Emmitt always played with older kids because of his athletic skills; he had the balance to walk forever on neighborhood fences and curbs without falling off; he was the Gale Sayers of the local youth league."
At the tender age of seven Smith joined an organized football program, the mini-mite division of the Salvation Army Optimists League. While other children experimented with various hobbies and extracurricular activities, young Smith stuck to football. In Sports Illustrated, Paul Zimmerman observed: "When you ask [Smith] the standard questions about how he avoided getting involved with drugs and street gangs and the usual teenage trouble, he gives you a strange look and says, 'It never occurred to me.'" Gangs held no appeal for Emmitt Smith. He was too busy keeping in shape and building his strength and endurance.
The public high school nearest to the Smith home was Escambia High, a school whose football program had fallen into permanent doldrums. Before Smith arrived, the Escambia Gators had not compiled a winning season in 21 years. Coach Dwight Thomas, who arrived the same year Smith did--1983--described the program in Sports Illustrated as "the most negative, apathetic, losing environment I've ever been in, ever." That was about to change. Thomas vividly recalled his first encounter with then-freshmen Emmitt Smith: "All the other kids were acting like kids, fooling around, taking nothing seriously. Then a boy in neat, pressed clothes walks up to me and shakes my hand. 'Hi, Coach Thomas,' he said. 'I'm Emmitt.' So confident, so gracious. I have three children, and I just hope they can be like him. And I don't mean anything about athletics."
Coach Thomas described the game plan he developed for Smith at Escambia. "For four years we did three things, and won two state championships doing them," the coach said. "Hand the ball to Emmitt, pitch the ball to Emmitt, throw the ball to Emmitt. It was no sacret. Everyone knew we were going to get the ball to him. It was just a question of how." Smith led Escambia to a four-year record of 42-7 while rushing for a phenomenal 8,804 yards.
By the end of his senior season, Smith was ranked second- highest in yardage attained in the history of high school football. As Telander pointed out, "Smith was so unstoppable in high school that an entire defensive unit once showed up with his number, 24, taped on their helmets." During his senior year Smith was named National Player of the Year by Parade magazine.
It is quite possible that Smith could have emerged from high school as the all-time rushing record-holder at that level. However, the idea of holding a particular record--however impressive--was not uppermost in his mind or in the mind of his coach. Often Smith was pulled along with the rest of Escambia's first string when a victory was assured. Then he would sit on the bench and cheer the other players on. Thomas described his star player in Sports Illustrated as "unselfish, special, never complained about anything."
Ironically, for all the hype surrounding his high school career, Smith had not particularly impressed the college scouts. A few of them dismissed him as too small and too slow to perform well at the college level. One such scout told Sports Illustrated: "[Smith's] a lugger, not a runner. The thing is that sportswriters blew him all out of proportion." Not everyone agreed with that assessment. The young running back earned a full scholarship to the University of Florida, where scouts and coaches alike predicted a stellar career for him. He promptly proved their most spectacular predictions true.
In his very first game as a Florida freshman, Smith gained 224 yards on 39 carries, a single-game rushing record at that university. The University of Florida handily beat favored University of Alabama in that match, and the national "Emmitt watch" began. As the 1987 college season progressed, Smith became the only freshman in history to get as many as 100 yards per game in seven games. Telander wrote that Smith "displayed a running style that defies easy description. He darted, slithered and followed his blockers, and squeezed yard after yard out of plays that didn't have any yards in them. He didn't look especially fast or powerful or blindingly deceptive, yet he couldn't be stopped."
Smith conquered college level football just as he had high school level football. By his junior year he had been named All-America and All-Southeast Conference three times. He had also established 58 school records, including a career rushing mark of 3,928 yards. It is almost unheard of for a freshman to be in the running for the Heisman Trophy. Smith made the top ten in balloting his freshman year. Zimmerman described Smith as "an incredible yardage machine, having rushed for more than 100 yards in 25 of his 34 games at Florida, and in 70 out of 83 high school and college games combined."
One big question remained: could Smith take his success on to the professional ranks? Once again he was faced with a chorus of detractors. "Too slow," a scout for the Giants told Sports Illustrated. Others thought him too small or too weak to hold his own against professional defenders. Smith felt otherwise. In 1990, as a college junior, he declared himself eligible for the pro football draft.
One of the clubs that took immediate interest in Smith was the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys had just come off a 1-15 season under new coach, Jimmy Johnson, and were looking to rebuild the team from bottom to top, relying upon younger players. Joe Brodsky, a scout for Dallas, told Sports Illustrated: "You had to be an idiot not to recognize the talent there. What I did find out, though, was the kind of person [Smith] was: played in pain, never missed a workout, not a nick-and-bump guy who'd miss a lot of practice time, an extra-good worker and not a complainer." Brodsky added that he told Coach Johnson that Smith "will take your breath away, and you won't get it back until he scores."
In the first round of the 1990 draft Smith was still available after more than a dozen other players had been chosen. Johnson traded upward with the Pittsburgh Steelers to take the seventeenth pick and promptly chose Emmitt Smith of the University of Florida. Back home in Pensacola, Smith celebrated with his family and friends.
Reflecting on the 1990 draft, Dallas coach Johnson commented in Sports Illustrated: "Emmitt had been our fourth-rated player in the entire draft. Our owner, Jerry Jones, went on the radio that night and mentioned it, and when it was time to talk contract, Emmitt's agent reminded him of that. Which I'm sure is one reason why he held out for the whole training camp." The Cowboys' executives, including the owner, quickly discovered that Smith intended to fight for the very best contract possible. Negotiations with the rookie running back dragged on nearly until the beginning of the season, and Smith came to his new team without the benefit of summertime game preparations. Nevertheless, he became the starting running back just two games into the 1990 season.
Johnson was reluctant to use Smith at first. By mid-season the coach had discovered a new weapon in the Dallas game plan-- Emmitt Smith on the ground, Emmitt Smith on the short pass, Emmitt Smith for the touchdown. By the end of the 1990 season, Smith had compiled 937 rushing yards and eleven rushing touchdowns. He was named NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year by the Associated Press. As Zimmerman put it, "he wasn't quite the yardage machine he'd been in high school and college, but he was getting there."
Smith blossomed in his second year with Dallas, leading the NFL in rushing with 1,563 yards. Just 22 at the time of this accomplishment, he became the youngest player in the history of the NFL to gain more than 1,500 yards on a season. The 1991 Cowboys, a far cry from the lackluster squad of just two years earlier, finished the season with an 11-5 record and a playoff victory against the Chicago Bears. In that wild card playoff game, Smith rushed 105 yards against a team that had never in history allowed a running back to gain more than 100 yards in a post-season game. Dallas's 1991 season ended with a playoff defeat to the Detroit Lions.
In 1992 Smith and the Cowboys took all the marbles. Once again Smith led the league in rushing--becoming only the ninth player in history to win back-to-back rushing titles. The blithe runner set a new Cowboys record with 1,713 yards on the season as Dallas advanced to a 13-3 record for a first place finish in the NFC East. After trouncing both the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers in the playoffs, the Cowboys advanced into Super Bowl XXVII against the favored Buffalo Bills. By this time the nation was watching young Emmitt Smith, the first player to win the rushing title and go to both the Super Bowl and the Pro Bowl in the same season.
Super Bowl XXVII was an absolute romp for the Cowboys. They beat Buffalo 52-17, prompting sports writers to label the Dallas team a "new dynasty" and the "team of the decade" for the 1990s. For his part, Smith became the first Cowboys player ever to rush for more than 100 yards in a Super Bowl, with a 108-yard total on 22 carries.
Smith's first contract expired in 1993, and as the new season neared he clashed with the Cowboys' owner about how much he was worth. Once again he missed training camp, and still he did not have a satisfactory contract. The season began without him. Dallas played its first two games--and lost them both-- while Smith sat at home in Pensacola watching them on television. Finally, shortly after the second loss, Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones offered Smith a four-year, $13.6 million deal, including a $4 million signing bonus. Relieved that his long holdout was over, Smith eagerly rejoined the Cowboys and proceeded to help turn their season around. The contract made Smith, just 24, the highest paid running back in football history.
No football team has ever gone 0-2 and come back to win a Super Bowl, but Dallas was so improved after Smith's return to the offense that the Cowboys finished the 1993 season in a divisional first-place tie with the New York Giants. In the first week of 1994 the Cowboys met the Giants in a divisional showdown to determine NFC East first place (carrying an automatic home field advantage throughout the playoffs). This game, perhaps more than any other, highlighted the singular talents that have made Smith famous. Despite a serious separation of the shoulder sustained early in the second half, he was eager to play. "Just give me the ball and let me go until I fall," he was quoted as saying in an Associated Press release.
Smith earned 168 yards rushing on 32 carries, another 61 yards on 10 pass receptions, and handled the ball on 42 of Dallas's 70 plays in the game. Dallas won the game 16-13 in overtime. Smith became the fourth player in NFL history to win three straight NFL rushing titles, joining Hall-of-Famers Steve Van Buren, Jim Brown, and Earl Campbell.
Despite a nagging hamstring injury and the much more serious shoulder separation, Smith dominated the NFL 1994 post-season. In the Cowboys' 38-21 NFC Championship win over the San Francisco 49ers, Smith earned 88 yards rushing and 85 yards receiving with two touchdowns--and then left the game with ten minutes to play. Just a week later he swept both the regular season and Super Bowl MVP titles with a 30-carry, 132-yard, two-touchdown romp in Super Bowl XXVIII. The Cowboys had been trailing the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl at half time but rebounded to win the game with some timely defensive receptions and Smith's third- and fourth-quarter rushing. At game's end the new Super Bowl MVP was mobbed by his teammates, Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson, and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
"Who knows what kind of mileage Smith will leave behind him?" Zimmerman asked in Sports Illustrated. Chances are, if he remains healthy and injury-free, Emmitt Smith could become one of the most productive running backs in the history of the game. He would like very much for that to happen. "I think about it all the time," the player told Sports Illustrated. "I'm chasing after legends, after Walter Payton and Tony Dorsett and Jim Brown and Eric Dickerson, after guys who made history. When my career's over, I want to have the new kids, the new backs, say, 'Boy, we have to chase a legend to be the best.' And they'll mean Emmitt Smith."
Smith conceded that the biggest obstacle to his ambition is the threat of injuries. Still, he said, he doesn't care to dwell upon the negative. "I play with the hand dealt to me," he said. "I look at the future and wonder what it'll be like. Eventually, I'm going to have arthritis. Eventually, I know I'll have to live with pain. That's part of all this. I want to do everything in football--and in life--that I can. I still believe, no matter how many times I carry the ball, that I can be one of those guys who walks away from the game whole. If I stay healthy, I think I've got a great chance of accomplishing what I want to accomplish." Asked about his abilities elsewhere in Sports Illustrated, Smith concluded: "The way I see it, my talent came from God. What I add is my desire. I have great desire."
Awards
Named National High School Player of the Year by Parade magazine, 1987; named All-America and All-Southeastern Conference, 1987-90; named NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year by Associated Press, Football News, Pro Football Weekly, and Pro Set Trading Cards, all 1990; named to All-Rookie team by United Press International, Football Digest, Football News, Pro Football Weekly, and College and Pro Football Newsweekly, all 1990; member of Pro Bowl, 1991 and 1992; National Football Conference rushing leader, 1992, 1993, and 1994; National Football League Most Valuable Player, 1994; selected most valuable player of Super Bowl XXVIII, 1994.
Further Reading
- Ebony, October 1993, p. 50.
- Jet, January 31, 1994, p. 47.
- New York Times, September 17, 1993.
- Sports Illustrated, November 16, 1987; October 21, 1991; September 7, 1992; September 27, 1993; January 10, 1994, pp. 34-38; January 31, 1994, p. 14.
- Additional information for this sketch was taken from Associated Press releases dated September 17 and 18, 1993.
— Mark Kram
