Now Smith Is Dying to Make a Difference

NEW ORLEANS —  Think being an NFL running back sounds like hard work? Try grinding it out on the 3-to-11 shift in a fabric-dying factory, unloading huge tubs of soaking cloth, getting so filthy that no amount of soap gets you clean, standing in place while the rest of the world passes you by.

Antowain Smith has been there.

Long before he reached the Super Bowl as the New England Patriots’ out-of-nowhere tailback, Smith was a young employee at such a factory, Gurney’s Manufacturing in Prattville, Ala. He postponed a promising college football career for three years in order to support his grandparents, John and Clara Smith, who raised him after he was born to a 16-year-old mother.

“To me, it wasn’t a sacrifice at all,” Smith said this week, preparing to play the St. Louis Rams on Sunday in Super Bowl XXXVI. “It was just something that I truly wanted to do for some very special people.”

Smith, pulled off the scrap heap by the Patriots shortly before last training camp opened, is a vital component of a team facing long odds. He’s one of the game’s better short-yardage runners, and the Patriots need a big game from him to keep alive their hopes of hanging onto the ball and keeping the Ram offense off the field.

“I want to see the ball in his hands,” left tackle Matt Light said. “When we give him a lot of carries, he has a lot of success. There’s a direct correlation there. When he carries the ball more than 20 times, we’re getting the job done.”

The Patriots are somewhat similar to the 1991 New York Giants, who had to find a way to derail the high-flying, no-huddle attack of the Jim Kelly-led Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV. The Giants kept the ball on the ground, maintained possession for more than 40 minutes--a staggering disparity--and won, 20-19.

The defensive coordinator for that Giant team was Bill Belichick, now coach of the Patriots, whose game plan from that Super Bowl now rests in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Belichick is ultra-secretive and protects innocuous details about his team the way most people guard their ATM code. So he made no hints this week about his Super Bowl strategy. It’s only logical, though, to suggest he wants to keep the ball out of the hands of Ram quarterback Kurt Warner.

The third-ranked Ram defense is ready for the challenge.

“Any time a team can keep our offense off the field, they feel that they’ve succeeded,” linebacker O.J. Brigance said. “But that’s been the key to our defense, making sure we get the turnovers. [Defensive coordinator] Lovie Smith’s always emphasized turnovers, turnovers, stripping at the ball, trying to make things happen, three-and-outs, so that we can get the ball back into our offense’s hands.”

Smith is just the man to do that. He rushed for 1,157 yards in 287 carries this season, a respectable 4.0 yards a pop, and gained at least 100 in four of the last nine regular-season games. At 6 feet 2, 230 pounds, he’s stout, powerful and--he hopes--overlooked.

“Hopefully, everybody will forget about me and the big boys up front,” he said.

Then again, Smith can’t forget about his costly turnover in the first game against the Rams, a 24-17 loss Nov. 18. Late in the second quarter, he fumbled at the St. Louis four, and the Rams recovered at the three. The Patriots argued he was down and asked for a replay, but they lost that challenge.

The Rams went 97 yards for a touchdown, a reversal some St. Louis players said was the turning point in their season.

“I took that very hard,” Smith said. “When I go out there to play Sunday, of course I want to redeem myself, but I don’t want to go out there and try to do too much to put myself in a bad situation.”

He has seen a few of those. Supporting his grandparents wasn’t easy, especially because their only other source of income was a couple of paltry Social Security checks that barely covered their medical bills.

Smith first played football as a high school senior, but he was good enough to garner interest from several schools. He turned them down, started working at the factory, and didn’t go back to school until after his grandmother died in 1993. He enrolled at Eastern Mississippi College, a junior college, and tried out for the team.

He quit after the first day of camp.

That might have been the end of his career, had he been able to arrange a ride home.

“But nobody would come and get me,” he said. “I didn’t have a car. Nobody would come and get me. That’s the only reason that I stayed.”

Good thing he did. He had a 1,000-yard season, was voted JUCO All-American, and earned an athletic scholarship to Houston. After two productive seasons there, he was selected by the Buffalo Bills in the first round of the 1997 draft. That came a few months after the death of his grandfather.

Smith led the Bills in rushing in 1997 and ’98. He finished second in ‘99, but fell off the map last season, logging only three starts.

The Bills released him in May and the Patriots, who weren’t expecting much, signed him a month later.

“When I first came to camp, they didn’t really know what to expect,” he said. “They just knew once this guy was pretty good. I had to prove myself all over again. Once I got into camp, my thing is I was going to get back to where I once was. They gave me the opportunity to do it. They put the football in my hands and it was up to me to go out there and produce.”

Every so often, when he’s running low on inspiration, he takes a look at the names tattooed on his right arm. His grandparents are never too far away.