Seeing Bright Side of Life, and USC

For a man once derided by USC fans for harboring what they believed was a defeatist attitude, Larry Smith is relentlessly optimistic in his battle against cancer.

The former coach, who presided over the Trojans’ football fortunes for six seasons before his New Year’s Day dismissal in 1993, has not backed down from chronic lymphatic leukemia -- even though the disease threatened to level him last year and continues to exacerbate his other major medical issue: melanoma.

CLL, diagnosed in 10,000 to 15,000 Americans each year and most common in people 55 and older, is a slow-progressing cancer of the immune system. Though incurable, it is not imminently life-threatening if treated properly, oncologist Gary Schiller of UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center said.

Smith, 66, is determined that it not be life-altering, either.

He even coached at Missouri for two seasons after getting the diagnosis in 1999, retiring to the Arizona desert only after he was fired in November 2000. In 24 seasons at Tulane, Arizona, USC and Missouri, his teams had a 143-126-7 record.

“It’s just one of those things,” he said matter-of-factly, relaxing recently in the living room of the spacious home he shares with Cheryl, his wife of 40 years, at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains. A large bandage covered a soon-to-be-removed cancerous growth on his left shin. “I’ve read a lot of books about it -- you can take a negative attitude toward it, or you can take a positive attitude.”

Clearly adopting the latter, Smith said, “My lifestyle hasn’t changed. I work out three or four times a week and play golf three or four times a week.”

He also finds time for his greatest joy: his six grandchildren, ages 14 months to 7 years and all living in Tucson or two hours away in Phoenix.

Being around them “has been phenomenal for him,” said his wife, director of a community diaper bank. “Besides grandkids being the greatest thing since peanut butter, it’s also fun for him to enjoy a lot of things that he missed with his own kids ... when he was working from 6 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night.”

Football, though, hasn’t been fully zapped from his system -- and the melanoma is a constant reminder of his former life. Until the final two years of his coaching career, Smith said, he never wore sunscreen or a cap to protect his skin.

Smith, who now lathers up regularly and wears a floppy hat outdoors, sits on the board of trustees for the local chapter of the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame and twice a year organizes weekend instructional clinics -- for high school coaches in the spring and youth league coaches in the summer.

He votes in the Harris Poll, part of the BCS equation, and works as a color commentator for Fox telecasts of several Arizona games each season.

An avid follower of the college game, Smith has seen USC reclaim its former glory in recent years after a long fallow period that included the last three years of Smith’s tenure, near the end of which he said in response to the Trojans’ struggles, “Names and logos don’t mean anything. You don’t beat someone just because of your name and logo.”

Longtime USC followers were aghast, reading Smith’s seeming repudiation of Trojan heritage as nothing short of heresy. What really upset them, though, was the Trojans’ loss to Fresno State in the 1992 Freedom Bowl.

Within days, Smith was fired, replaced by John Robinson.

Fourteen years on, he defends his “names and logos” theory.

“You look around,” said Smith, 17-17-1 in his last three USC seasons after reaching the Rose Bowl in each of his first three. “Penn State’s had their turmoils. Notre Dame’s had theirs. Ohio State. Michigan. You can go up and down. Alabama, Texas A&M.; I mean, all of them. Nebraska. There hasn’t been a single school that hasn’t had its problems. That’s the way college football is now....

“It’s so doggone close.”

So how has USC returned to dominance under Pete Carroll?

“I don’t know, really, because I haven’t been there,” Smith said. “I know this: They’re recruiting very, very well.... When we were there, we had academic standards [above and beyond] the NCAA standards. It really hurt us. I don’t know if that’s still holding true or not. My guess is, probably not.”

Smith said he loved coaching at USC and still felt an affinity for the program.

“Mack Brown’s a friend of mine, a very good friend,” he said of the Texas coach, “but I was rooting for USC in the Rose Bowl. My son’s two oldest boys, all they wear is SC stuff. They want to play at SC. I have no bad feelings toward SC at all.”

Last fall, when the Trojans played Fresno State for the first time since the infamous Freedom Bowl, Smith praised Carroll in an interview with the Fresno Bee, allowing that it “wasn’t easy” coaching at a school “where you’re expected to win every game.” Smith told the Bee he hadn’t handled those expectations well.

Elaborating during this recent interview, he said, “When you’re under the gun, you can put it out of your mind and just go ahead and coach. I think that’s pretty much what Pete does. I didn’t do that. I let it get to me. I knew I was on the hot seat and when we played Fresno State, nobody wanted to play Fresno State....

“We did everything in our power to motivate the team to get ready for Fresno State after finishing up the season with [losses to] UCLA and Notre Dame. We were a dead team and I’m the head coach, so I’m fully responsible.

“But I swear to God: I always thought I was a pretty good motivator and our staff were pretty good motivators, but that one time I never got through.

“Our guys didn’t give a damn about being there.”

Smith said, though, that his fate had been sealed before the game. A few weeks earlier, as he tried to determine where he stood with USC administrators, Smith said a vice president told him, “Change is good.”

“I said, ‘Well, OK, I guess I’m a dead duck,’ ” Smith said.

Out of coaching for a year, he surfaced at Missouri and coached for seven more seasons, posting a 33-46-1 record and twice taking the previously moribund Tigers to bowl games.

Fired in 2000, after a 3-8 season, he knew that was the end of the line.

He was only 61 but “totally drained and empty,” he said.

“I knew I was completely burned out, that I couldn’t go back and do it again, even if I wanted to,” he said. “I didn’t have it inside me to be able to go back and really do justice to the job of being a head coach.”

Still, he occasionally considered giving it another go.

“I miss coaching a lot,” he said. “There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t miss coaching. But coaching on the college level, it really takes 24-7, 365. I don’t think I could keep up that pace anymore....

“For me to get back into something like that full-time, I could never do that. I could do it on a consultant basis or maybe a part-time basis but not full-time.

“But I miss it, sure. The game’s been great to me and I had some tremendous experiences. The game owes me nothing, and I owe it nothing.”

And so he relaxes here in Tucson, content in retirement.

His illness seems to have smoothed out his rough edges.

“Nobody, including a grizzled defensive-side football coach, can go through cancer and not be changed by it,” said Dave Sitton, Smith’s broadcasting partner and himself a cancer survivor. “Larry’s always been a very decent man, but I think even more so now. He appreciates the little things a lot more.”

Increasingly, though, reminders of his mortality intrude.

Leukemia has weakened his immune system and, Smith said, has left him susceptible to infections and other cancers.

Early last year, the former Bowling Green two-way end, 6 feet 2 and 220 pounds during his coaching career, dropped 35 pounds when he was hospitalized because of a severe lung infection.

“That was the scariest time,” he said.

Last month, doctors ordered him off his feet until the middle of this month after removal of the cancerous growth on his left shin. A seemingly harmless scrape had become infected and developed into cancer.

His melanoma is “more of an inconvenience than anything,” Smith said, but it continually presents itself. All told, several dozen squamous cell and basal cell carcinomas have been removed from his forehead, cheeks, neck, shoulders, back, legs and ears. About one-fourth of his lower lip was removed -- “Cut out just like a piece of pie,” he said -- and his left ear required a skin graft after a quarter-sized chunk was removed. A piece twice that size was taken out of his back.

At one point, Smith said, his white blood cell count was an alarming 165,000 per microliter of blood. The normal range is 5,000 to 10,000.

Medicine has brought it back down into the normal range.

Though the original leukemia diagnosis “scared the heck out of me,” Smith acknowledged, the doctor treating him told him it was not a death sentence.

“I asked him, ‘How long do I have to live?’ ” Smith recalled. “And he said, ‘I’d guess that you’d probably die of something else, either a heart attack or stroke.’ ”

Until that time, Smith plans to remain active and vital.

His grandkids will demand it.