Perfection Is Always His Game : College football: Former UCLA assistant Homer Smith, now with Alabama, is one of the keys to a 10-1 record for Sugar Bowl-bound Crimson Tide.

In the wee, silent hours of Dec. 1, Homer Smith, his face flushed with fever and sweat, awoke from a troubled sleep. The alarm clock read 4 a.m.--only 33 hours before his Alabama offense would face Auburn in a game that would have national championship ramifications. For Smith, the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator, it might as well have been 33 seconds.

His mind raced. What had he forgotten? What key detail had he inadvertently ignored?

X’s and O’s swirled about. His head ached. His skin was hot to the touch, but yet, he wasn’t really ill. In essence, Smith had worried himself sick.

His wife, Kathy, whom he had met 42 years ago at Benson High in Omaha, Neb., knew what had happened. Nerves. And the obsession. Her husband didn’t just strive for perfection, he craved it. It was both his blessing and curse.

She took Smith’s temperature. It was 101 degrees.

“Oh, my gosh,” she said.

Then she thought of Norman Cousins, an author and lecturer whose works detailed the use of laughter and humor as a healing therapy. Cousins is on the faculty of UCLA’s School of Medicine. It was during Smith’s stay as an assistant coach on Terry Donahue’s Bruin staff that he had come to admire Cousins’ writings.

“You know what Norman Cousins says about the mind,” Kathy Smith told her husband. “You just tell your mind to make you well.”

So he did. Two hours later, his temperature had returned to normal. Anxiety had lost this one. But when would the obsession come calling again?

For as long as anyone can remember, Smith has been infatuated by football’s reluctance to be tamed by any one system, coach or player. He searches for the perfectly played game in a sport that features an oblong ball and imperfect bounces.

His boss, Alabama Coach Bill Curry, calls Smith “the finest offensive mind in the country.” And perhaps the most driven, too. Curry, who earned a pair of Super Bowl rings as a player for the Green Bay Packers and Baltimore Colts, can name only one other coach who rivaled Smith in the mental preparation for a game: a gap-toothed, former offensive lineman named Vince Lombardi.

Frank Gansz lured Smith from UCLA to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1987. He offered the prestige of the NFL, a title of offensive coordinator and a $35,000 raise. And even though the Chiefs struggled, Gansz said it was some of the best money the franchise ever spent.

“(Smith is) the type of coach who really sets the standards for people who want to be coaches,” said Gansz, who now coaches the Detroit Lions’ special teams. “He’s committed to the highest standards of excellence in the profession.”

No wonder Smith can send the mercury zooming toward thermometer’s tip. How would you like to be the standard bearer of a business that majors in paranoia and insecurity? Then again, Smith has been preparing for the honor, whether he knew it or not, since his days at Benson High.

ATTENTION TO DETAIL

Smith, who has helped Alabama earn a 10-1 record and a bid to the Sugar Bowl where it plays 10-1 Miami, always has been a detail man. His closet at home looks as if a butler had spent the weekend tidying it up. His shoes are set just so. His shirts and pants hang an inch apart. His garage is, as garages go, neat and ordered. His coaching attire--Alabama sweatshirt, Crimson polyester pants--looks pressed. Smith figures that if he preaches exactness, he must live it, too.

And about that preaching . . .

Smith may be the only major college coach to include on his resume a degree from the Harvard Divinity School. In a perfect--there’s that word again--world, Smith said he would like nothing better than “to coach football in the afternoon, be a professor in the morning and take my wife out in the evening.” One dimensional, he isn’t. A stickler for exactitude, well, there you’ve got him.

“It’s an obsession,” Kathy Smith said. “When things don’t go right, it upsets him terribly.”

At UCLA, his players called him “My Favorite Martian,” a reference to his slightly eccentric ways.

On one occasion, Smith walked into a quarterbacks meeting with his shirt buttoned wrong.

“Uh, Coach, I think you missed something,” a player said.

As the players giggled nervously, Smith fumbled about, trying to figure the best way to correct the mistake. Then he turned to his captivated audience and offered a lesson.

“The reason the buttons are out of order at the top is because I got started wrong at the bottom,” he said. “If you get started wrong at the base, then you can’t do anything about correcting it at the top.”

Silly, simple, but effective. Smith’s players got the message.

And it was no coincidence that when Smith met his Alabama players in 1988, he arrived with his shirt buttoned wrong.

During the first workout he conducted at Alabama, he replaced a quarterback in a drill simply because the player didn’t properly enunciate his words. Smith wants his quarterbacks to make two syllables out of one. “Down, set,” becomes “Dow-nnn, se-eeet.”

And pity the player who doesn’t line up exactly where Smith’s formation requires him to be. In ballet, it is called first position, a term Smith now uses to describe where and when a tailback might go into motion, how a quarterback will stand under center, where a wide receiver will settle into his stance.

“I believe it is important to give them no choice in certain fundamentals,” he said.

He applies the same standard to himself. After watching game films with his players, Smith often retires to the privacy of his office and watches them again, this time to grade his own efforts. More times than not, he leaves the screening unsatisfied.

HITTING THE PERFECTA

Occasionally, though, there are moments when performance flirts with perfection. Earlier this season, Alabama scored 62 points against a bowl-bound Mississippi team. It gained 644 net yards against LSU. It passed for 379 yards against 10-1 Tennessee. It did all of this with a quarterback, Gary Hollingsworth, and a running back, Siran Stacy, who were second-stringers at season’s start.

But it was at UCLA that Smith’s system came closest to achieving what he had in mind.

“When Rick Neuheisel hit 25 out of 27 passes (against Washington in 1983), that was close,” he said. “That was a great day. And there have been quarters. The second quarter against Michigan in 1982 was a highlight film. All of a sudden it all happened, everything happened. Oh, yes, there have been times.”

But never enough to satisfy him. During his two- and seven-year stays at UCLA, the Bruins won a total of 76 games, including five consecutive bowl games, three of which included the Rose Bowl.

Tom Ramsey led the nation in passing efficiency in 1982. Neuheisel set an NCAA single-game record for completion percentage in 1983. Steve Bono led UCLA to a wacky, memorable victory over Miami in the Fiesta Bowl the following season. David Norrie helped beat Iowa in the 1985 Rose Bowl. Matt Stevens gave the Bruins a 1986 Freedom Bowl win over BYU.

Five winning seasons, five different quarterbacks, five bowl victories, dozens of school offensive records, one coach.

But despite a string of heady successes, Smith wanted out of Westwood. Rumors persisted that he and Donahue were at odds with one another, that Donahue resented the attention Smith received.

If so, it’s news to Smith, who said he left because the Chiefs’ offer was too good to refuse--and because the Alabama offensive coordinator position was filled in 1987.

Donahue was unavailable to comment.

“Miss (UCLA)? Of course, I do,” Smith said. “I’ve got blue and gold all over the place. I miss it very much.”

Smith rummaged through a pile of papers on his desk and found a photograph of Neuheisel. “See? It’s just a shot of him making a good fake,” he said.

Donahue also did his part to quell the reports of ill will. When asked if he could dispel the gossip once and for all, Donahue said it wasn’t necessary.

“I don’t need to put it to rest,” he said. “You need to have truth or credibility to have a rumor. This one had none of that. I think Homer Smith left because he had a chance to go to the NFL and make a lot more money than I was paying him.

“But when he was here, he did a real good job.”

CHANGING ADDRESSES

After a 4-11 season at Kansas City, Smith decided that a change in venues was in order. Maybe so, but Gansz insisted that Smith wasn’t to blame for the Chiefs’ dismal showing.

“What can he do about it?” Gansz asked. “We had it going, we were 1-1 and then the teams went on strike. When players go on strike, they don’t come back with any of the same enthusiasm.”

Without benefit of a 16th game and 104 fewer plays from scrimmage, Smith’s offense managed to surpass the 1986 Chiefs’ offense in first downs, rushing yards and total yards. Still, the Chiefs finished 24th in total offense.

“I thought he did an outstanding job,” Gansz said. “He did a real top-notch job.”

Mr. Perfection didn’t think so. In fact, in a letter he recently sent to Gansz, Smith apologized, again, for his work in Kansas City.

“It was extremely frustrating for me,” Smith said. “I did not do a good job for Frank Gansz and I wanted to and will regret, every day that I live, that I did not do a better job.”

Curry came calling with an offer shortly after the 1987 season was completed. But he had first heard of Smith 19 years earlier, when he was a center for the Colts.

In training camp that summer was a Davidson College quarterback named Gordon Slade. Slade didn’t have much chance of making the team, what with Johnny Unitas and Earl Morrall on the roster, but he did impress Curry with his knowledge of the game. Curry asked him who his coach had been.

“Homer Smith,” Slade said.

In 1976, Georgia Tech Coach Pepper Rodgers gave Curry, then an assistant, a large, thick text book.

“Study it and memorize it,” Rodgers said.

Curry examined the cover. It was a tome on the intricacies of the wishbone offense. The author was Homer Smith.

“I can still quote it,” Curry said. “I remember all of it.”

Years later, when Curry had a chance to hire Smith, he hesitated just long enough to listen to a recommendation from, ta-da, Donahue.

“(Donahue) said some amazing things about Homer’s work with him, shocking things which I don’t have his permission to repeat,” Curry said. “They were all positive. When I learned that we might be able to attract him . . . I jumped at it.”

Said Donahue: “I just told Bill Curry that Homer Smith had done a fabulous job for us here at UCLA and that he was more capable of getting the most out of a football player than anybody I’ve been around. I thought if he could hire Homer Smith, he would really be happy with him.”

The courting process was unabashedly direct.

“I begged. I recruited. I was so excited that he would even consider us that I flew to Kansas City,” Curry said. “I would have done whatever I had to do, as long as it was legal, to get him here because I knew what he could do.”

Since Smith arrived at Tuscaloosa, Alabama is 19-4. Do we detect a pattern here?

Curry, as you might expect, spread the praise among his other coaches when he listed the reasons for the Crimson Tide’s success. Still, he admitted that Smith’s value to his staff has been “incalculable.”

Smith said he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. His methods aren’t revolutionary. He stresses discipline. He demands concentration. He believes a point is best learned by repetition. What’s so hard about that?

“It has nothing to do with me seeing something that has not been seen previously by other coaches,” he said. “I can almost remember when and where I stole each of the ideas that I use. In business, they would call it stealing. In academics, they would call it plagiarism. In coaching, they would call it research.”

Whatever it is, it works for Smith. It had better work. Smith isn’t one to accept failure gently.

And as you might remember, Auburn beat Alabama that next day. The loss not only ended the Crimson Tide’s hopes for a national title, but deprived Smith of what he wants most--a perfect season.