Bills’ Smith on Stairway to Greatness

There will be talk today about the quarterbacks and how far they can throw, or about the other backs and how far they have run or about the Buffalo coach with the postgraduate degree from Harvard and the Denver defensive player who doesn’t consider his deafness a handicap and about how far they have come since somehow determining that there was a future for them in professional football.

But the real subject of today’s game is Bruce Smith.

How is he? How’s his leg? Has he been doing his daily workout on his stair-climbing machine, stepping off the equivalent of 150 floors of a make-believe Empire State Building? Is Smith fit, or will he be hopping on one foot like a man in a sack race at a company picnic, the way he did during much of last Sunday’s Buffalo victory over Kansas City, when the Bills had the luxury of being able to rely more on his soul than his body.

Say what you will about the skill of Jim Kelly or the sheer force of Thurman Thomas or the ingenuity of Ivy Leaguer Marv Levy. The fact of the matter is that the Buffalo Bills, who fancy themselves the best team in football and eagerly await another chance to prove it, are one sort of team with Bruce Smith and one sort of team without him. When he is at full strength, so are they.

Here stands the man who brazenly labels himself the greatest defensive player in football; the man who virtually looked the Midtown Manhattan media right in their Giant-sized eyes and asked: “Lawrence Who?”

Is he favoring that bum leg? Yes, he surely is.

“Guess you can call me Hopalong Bruce,” said Smith, a bare-backed Buffalo Bill, as he prepared himself for an engagement against the Denver Broncos that could take him back to another Super Bowl. “Don’t you go worrying about me. Wild horses couldn’t keep me off that field Sunday.”

There was once a time when it would have taken larger animals to pull him anywhere. Smith was a chatty 300-pound fatty when he played college ball for Virginia Tech, and even after he joined the Bills and started playing for Levy, who frankly acknowledged that the only thing that outweighed Bruce’s self-confidence was his staggering self-indulgence.

Chickens died dozens upon dozens of skillet-related deaths when Smith went on a binge. His mother drove a Norfolk, Va., city bus by day and cooked for her son by night, fattening him up with biscuits and gravy and chitlins and enough sweet potato pie to leave Bruce with a caboose bigger than her morning transportation. Bruce is 6 feet 4, Smith’s teammates would say: six high, four wide.

But a player?

They could see that from the start. Smith had something about him that solidified the Buffalo line, and not just his incredible bulk. Yes, his jutting rear end, once he took his stance, made him resemble a centaur. But Smith also had mobility, with a first step that sometimes beat the snap the way a sprinter out of the blocks jumped the gun, too close to call.

With linebacker Cornelius Bennett working from a standing start and Smith doing so much sacking that he might as well have asked the quarterback, “Paper or plastic?” it was no coincidence that Buffalo suddenly became a power in the league that once considered it a patsy. Only 28 today and having had a career interrupted by injury and incident, Smith nonetheless is the Bills’ all-time sack leader, has been for two years now.

Levy calls him “the first genuine force I’ve ever coached,” not just a strong and gifted football player but a natural wonder, one that rushes harder than nearby Niagara Falls.

Darryl Talley, another linebacker, compared Smith more to someone from Lake Placid, to speed-skaters who stoop humpbacked and willow-like, low to the earth, until suddenly they reach a corner and accelerate and come curling around the bend, picking up speed, pumping at the arms.

Talley said he can hardly take his eyes off Smith when they are on the field, so amused is he by the swarm Smith draws on every pass rush, starting with a tackle, then a blocking back, then eventually even the center, to the point that: “It’s like they’re bees and Bruce has got sugar on him, like he’s dipped in honey.”

We are talking about a bigger-than-life football player here, one who sculpted away the chicken fat by becoming practically obsessed with his step-climbing regimen, walking and walking and walking as though searching for the stairway to heaven. The emphysema and series of heart attacks Smith’s father suffered definitely got his attention. Bruce weighs 265 now, watches his diet and prefers healthful things to what he once digested, including one substance that was illegal and cost him four weeks without pay.

“Football’s all I care about now--not food, not junk, just football and my family and our future, both my family’s and my football team’s,” Smith says. “God got me to the Super Bowl last season and got me close enough to sniff (the title). Now I want to go back. We all do. Fact, it’s more than wanting to. We’ve got to go back.”

Go back for what?

“For seconds?” Bruce is asked.

His laughter is as strong as he is.

“Yeah, I hear you,” he says. “Had dinner. Goin’ back for dessert.”