Adverse Conditions

Our first hurdler jogged around the corner to the neighbors with a bullet in her hip just after her husband shot her one night in 1986. Uncertainty pushed her heavy legs; his face gave no clue whether he’d shoot again.

She wore the bullet maybe a few weeks, and he’d call the hospital to check on her. She finally supplied instructions:

“Next time, tell him I’m dead.”

Joyceline Smart never competed in track hurdles, but let’s not dwell on technicalities. Even at 48 as she watches the second of her five children, Ian, ring up storybook football yards for C.W. Post on New York’s Long Island ... even as she cheers with the $20 horn she bought at a reggae show in Manhattan ... even as she knows her son will thrive as a teacher or maybe even an employee of the NFL ... she’s every bit a hurdler.

Has life thrown you this much distress?

Born the second of 14 children in Jamaica, she spent weekends of youth washing and ironing siblings’ clothes. But first she’d have to heat the iron. In a coal stove.

As a 16-year-old, she weathered appendicitis.

In 1986, she left her husband -- with ample cause.

One night in 1990, right there in the kitchen, she drank some milk, got something like a cramp in the gut and crumbled to the floor. “I could not move,” she said, “and it was getting worse.”

It wasn’t just that she had given birth six weeks before. Nor that she had to spend seven days in the hospital for hernia surgery. It was that she came home to an eviction notice, the last thing you’d want after hernia surgery.

So she rented a U-Haul, loaded it up, retreated to a friend’s place in Brooklyn and spent the next two months slogging across a long island taking three children to school.

Money remained scarce, so the power company visited her house in North Babylon one morning in August 1998. She pleaded; they proceeded -- to shut off the switch. She spent a fruitless afternoon explaining her situation at various offices. As she lay on the living room floor that night for a rare nap, she woke around 11:30 to the holler of a house guest.

“Mrs. Smart! Mrs. Smart! Fire! Fire!”

A candle had toppled; “the whole place was orange,” she said. She snared her 6-month-old daughter and scurried down the stairs to the front yard. “I could hear windows popping out and fire going up through the roof.” She stood and watched, then realized Ian remained in the house. She began screaming until her friend assured her he had left much earlier with a friend while she slept.

Almost everything burned: photographs, clothes, Ian’s football and track awards from North Babylon High. “Even my car keys burned up,” she said. “I couldn’t move the car. My pocketbook. My license. My green card. Everything.” Soon she began the wrenching process of sifting through burnt belongings, saving photographs by snipping burned edges.

Her friend Peggy offered refuge. But Joyceline Smart couldn’t bring herself to invade someone else’s house or go to a shelter, so for two months she lived in her green Nissan Maxima.

The house guest, a friend from childhood, often rode with her. Her 6-month-old daughter, Zenobia, would sleep in the back seat. One daughter and one son stayed at a neighbor’s house. Ian slept for a while in his yellow Hyundai. North Babylon raised some money for the family. And Mrs. Smart would park at a 24-hour laundromat to get her sleep.

Well, try to. Matter-of-factly, she says, “I don’t think I sleep. Ever. The last time I fell asleep, my house burned down. I never sleep.”

She moved to Wyandanch, N.Y., but one recent Sunday morning, Ian found her on her cell phone in nearby Patchogue.

“Patchogue?” Pause. “Mom, why are you killing yourself?”

She had found weekend work at a nursing home -- nurse’s assistant -- to complement her other job at another nursing home.

She’ll come home after midnight and sit up nights sorting mail and dozing off for a few minutes -- and then it’s daybreak and time to take her father for his cancer treatments.

Sometimes she forgets to eat. One day, she sat first in line at a red light in Central Islip. When she awakened moments later, she watched the light turn from green to red, all the cars still behind her.

“Sometimes I say, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ I always ask myself that question. I say, ‘Am I doing something wrong?’ because I always work so hard, I always try, and I’m not getting anywhere. It doesn’t make sense. So I just leave it alone. If I worry about it, I just have a headache.”

Holding on to Hope

Our second hurdler is listed at 5-9, built as enviably as an Oregon tree, eight years after showing up for North Babylon track practice as a ninth-grader and saying, “Coach, can I hurdle?”

“No” was Kurt Langer’s answer, and that was that, except that moments later, a senior walked up and said, “Coach, he can three-step,” a reference to the magic path to hurdling.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s over there three-stepping.”

Langer revised: “Son, you’re a hurdler.”

The evidence does suggest: Look now. Here’s a football Saturday at Post. Fans wear Think Smart buttons, touting Ian for the Heisman Trophy. The Pioneers drill another victim, and the public address announces that Smart, who was a redshirt his freshman season, has advanced to 20th on the all-time college football rushing list.

Ian does yet another TV interview. Lately his mother has noticed a gap in his teeth she never saw before, just from watching his TV interviews.

It’s some unusual football-watching, where you follow one guy’s statistics even more than the score. A long Post play by somebody other than Smart brings a sigh, because it diminishes the number of yards Smart can attain on the next play. A Post penalty on offense causes salivation because it means he might go 90 pretty soon.

You note the bolting speed and the can’t-teach-it capacity to set up blocks, but mostly you count up the yards, which seem to pile up obediently, all the way to 5,661 in his career, and the points, which reach 480.

Here we are, in the senior year, in a patch in which his coach, Bryan Collins, pretty much eats, sleeps, works and fields questions about why he removes Smart in fourth quarters. He answers yet again: He recalls being on the other end of somebody running up the score. He doesn’t want Smart amassing a bunch of “empty yardage.”

Here we are, and Smart’s sister Tameka calls from Utica College, raving that she saw him on “SportsCenter.” And Collins loves Smart’s refusal to hang out at the corner of prima and donna. And the people at the federally funded Higher Education Opportunity Program love the way he’s an emblem for their program.

Because, well, look now. Here’s a Wednesday in the little gym at Drexel Avenue School in Westbury. Degree already in hand, Ian Smart helps teach daily from 8 to 2:15. Children from third grade to fifth line up to learn the soccer toe-trap. One class files out. Another files in. Teacher Ron McKay motions to “Mr. Smart’s corner,” a wall of clippings and numbers.

“How did Mr. Smart’s team do on Saturday?” he asks the students. He points to a piece of construction paper: 43-0. Another: 5-0 (Post’s record).

“How many yards did Mr. Smart have?” He points to another piece of paper: 231. “How many touchdowns?”

The answer comes in various blurts: “Two.”

Then McKay points out a newspaper picture of Post linebacker Joe Gangemi scoring a touchdown. He wants to know why Gangemi scored a touchdown. Nobody knows. “ ‘Cause you know why?” McKay says. “Mr. Smart, he doesn’t want to score all the touchdowns. So he lets somebody else score the touchdowns sometimes.”

Mr. Smart beams from the back in his sweat pants, a whistle around his neck.

The Smart Corner in Westbury is not to be confused with the Wall of Fame at North Babylon, even though they’re both rife with Smart. The Wall of Fame, a bulletin board, stands in Langer’s classroom, harbor of European history, economics, football and track. The board remains immaculate, unbothered even by teen chaos, as if the students don’t want to mar it.

The football successes under Coach Terry Manning, the track highlights under Langer, the hurdles title three days after Joyceline booted him from the house in a spat both readily discuss with forgiveness ... it’s all up there in news clippings. One clipping notes the murder of his father in 1995 -- shot by a girlfriend’s son -- and how Ian misses him, proof that sons are good at forgiving.

So look now. “He’s now on his way to becoming a successful citizen; there’s just no two ways about it,” Langer says.

They’re past a time when Smart showed up in Langer’s room with “just like, tears on the ground,” Langer says. Past a time when Langer told Smart he absolutely should not postpone college, should not get a job, because then he’d never go to college. Past an age when Smart would hurry to Langer’s classroom to borrow a dollar, then scamper out, and Langer would hear the sneakers squeaking away, then hear them brake to a halt, then hear them pounding back, then see the head in the doorway: “Oh. Thank you.”

They’re to the festive point where Ian Smart wants to buy dinner for his offensive linemen, and Joyceline Smart wants to cook them some of her curry goat, curry chicken, peas and rice, dumplings and oxtail.

They’re in this patch where Langer needs help moving his air conditioner and Smart pops right over. Where Langer says, “He’s the kid that if I went away for a while, I’d say, ‘Here’s the keys to the house; keep an eye on it for me.’ ” Where Langer worries because Smart worries -- about his mother and siblings. Where they’re all so close -- to potential college all-star games, to potential scouting combines, to the thought that many NFL things have happened that are stranger than a 5-9 Division II phenom latching on. The Cardinals and Dolphins have called, Collins says, but haven’t visited.

They’re where at the very least, Smart will teach -- hardly a least at all.

“Yeah, I’m very amazed,” Smart himself says.

Because, see here, last Mother’s Day, Hurdler No. 2 got his college degree, with Hurdler No. 1 in attendance. Various family members commended her. Not once did she ask herself how she’d gone so wrong.

The rain fell without remorse, the chill wouldn’t quit and she forgot to bring a jacket, yet she ranked it among the most gorgeous days of her life.