Document View Help Basic Advanced Topics Publications My Research 0 marked items Interface language: Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Deutsch English Español Français Magyar Bahasa Indonesia Italiano Japanese Korean Norsk Polski Português Russian Thai Türkçe Databases selected: Multiple databases... Document View« Back to Results < Previous Document 34 of 56 Next > Print | Email | Copy link | Cite this | Mark Document Translate document from: Select language English to Chinese (Simplified) English to Chinese (Traditional) English to French English to German English to Italian English to Japanese English to Korean English to Portuguese English to Russian English to Spanish English to Turkish Other available formats: Abstract Find more documents like this: Subjects: Professional football Coaches & managers Tournaments & championships People: Smith, Lovie Author(s): John Branch Companies: Chicago Bears NAICS: 711211 Document types: News Publication title: New York Times More options ↓ SearchClear close ↑ One Man's Journey John Branch. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jan 28, 2007. pg. 8.1 Abstract (Summary) In the one-block downtown, a window was covered with painted messages: Big Sandy 3/5sheart 4/5's [Lovie Smith] and Lovie is #1. Inside the door to Texas Checks, an employee-screening business, the owner, Susan Hubbard, helped plan a Super Bowl pep rally and party. ''All of our little boys want to be football players or coach,'' said Patti Rozell, a schoolmate of Smith's who teaches elementary school students. ''And Lovie has taken it to the top. And he's still Lovie.'' Lovie Smith as a high school freshman. He helped Big Sandy (Tex.) to three state football titles. (Photos by above, Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press; top right, Mike Fuentes for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Coach Lovie Smith with John Tait after Chicago's playoff victory against Seattle. The Bears are in the Super Bowl for the first time in 21 years. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images); A storefront in Big Sandy, Tex., hometown of Chicago Coach Lovie Smith, reflected the residents' Super Bowl spirit. (Photo by Mike Fuentes for The New York Times)(pg. 7) » Jump to indexing (document details) Full Text (1740 words) Copyright New York Times Company Jan 28, 2007 Lovie Smith was a million miles from here when he realized just how far he had come. Smith had coached the Bears to a berth in the Super Bowl a couple of hours earlier Sunday, at Soldier Field in Chicago. Confetti had flown, cameras had flashed and tears had fallen. But it was not until Smith was insulated from the significance of the moment, surrounded by his wife, MaryAnne, and their three sons, that the events of his life had caught up and gang-tackled him. Driving toward home in the well-groomed Chicago suburbs, Smith reflected on how broad the distance was from there to here, his hometown in the hilly woods of East Texas. To him, the distance was not filled with hurdles. Only life. ''You start reminiscing a lot about where you've come from,'' Smith said Monday night, sitting in a leather chair in his office at Halas Hall, the Bears' headquarters in Lake Forest, Ill. The next day, Lovie Smith Drive in Big Sandy (population 1,288) was silent. The three-bedroom house where Smith was reared burned down years ago, after the family had moved on. There is little left but pieces of a chain-link fence and concrete, a water heater split open like a clam and some charred wood. The thick tree that stood sentinel in the front yard now blends with the overgrown brush. The driveway is a narrow rut covered in bushes. What used to be called Church Street is a short, skinny lane lined by a swampy thicket. There are churches at both ends, but a street sign on only one. There is no evidence that anyone lives on Lovie Smith Drive anymore. It is in the heart of the Flats, a hollow on the poor side of the railroad tracks where the black children went to a tiny school until the late 1960s, when Smith was in the fourth grade. The white children went to a big school at the top of a hill, under the town's water tower. Smith, named for a great aunt named Lavana, spent his childhood summers hauling watermelons and bales of hay. He was the third of Thurman and Mae Smith's five children. His father, an alcoholic, supervised the laundry operation at a hospital. His mother worked as a hospital cook, then in a chair factory and at the Levi Strauss plant. She has diabetes and lost her sight years ago. ''If I don't make it,'' Lovie Smith said in his office, ''it's going to be on me. It's not going to be about color or where I came from, how much money we had growing up. It's about what I wanted to do. There are no limits to what I can do. ''My mother constantly preaching, my family constantly preaching: 'You can do it, Lovie. You're special. Whatever you want to accomplish, you can.' When you hear that over and over, there's no hurdle that's going to make you say, 'Hey, I can't do that.' '' When town officials approached Smith about naming a street after him, they offered more regal drives. ''But I didn't live on those streets,'' Smith said. He and MaryAnne attended the dedication last June. In the one-block downtown, a window was covered with painted messages: Big Sandy 3/5sheart 4/5's Lovie and Lovie is #1. Inside the door to Texas Checks, an employee-screening business, the owner, Susan Hubbard, helped plan a Super Bowl pep rally and party. A street will be blocked off, although it probably does not need to be. The Big Sandy School band and cheerleaders will perform. A church is setting up a big-screen television for the game. There will be a potluck supper, with deer chili as the main course. ''The only thing I can think of that was bigger than this was when the oil truck flipped over and nearly burned the town down,'' said Hubbard, Big Sandy class of 1972, four years ahead of Smith. The accident was about 30 years ago. ''It burned the drugstore down, and nearly the bank, too.'' That corner now has a stoplight, the only one in town. A blond-brick City Hall was built where the drugstore used to be. The Interstate System bypassed Big Sandy decades ago -- I-20, linking Dallas and Shreveport, La., runs about 10 miles south -- and left the town in perpetual sleepiness, a middle-class bedroom community. Socially, the town revolves around high school football. Smith, a tight end and middle linebacker, helped the Wildcats to three consecutive state championships from 1973 to 1975. Big Sandy football has not won a state title since. ''I'm so happy to see him make it,'' said Smith's former teammate Bobby Mitchell, now a technician at a collision-repair shop in nearby Longview. He wore coveralls and a high-watt smile. ''It's the biggest thing to happen in Big Sandy since the championships.'' Others consider Smith's success a sort of karmic bookend to the death of David Overstreet in 1984. He played with Smith in Big Sandy, starred as a running back at Oklahoma and was a first-round draft choice of the Miami Dolphins. At 25, he was killed in a car accident outside town. A glass case in the main hallway of the sprawling Big Sandy School honors him. That hallway is lined with photographs of each graduating class. There are 34 members of the class of 1976. Smith is the one with a white suit and a two-inch Afro. Children unfamiliar with Smith are learning about him now. In a character-development class, students recently wrote a three-page paper on Smith. Last Tuesday, a boy told the teacher's assistant Wanda Harper that he was going to quit basketball. ''I told him, 'What if Lovie had quit?' '' she said. Smith's success -- he and the Colts' Tony Dungy are the first black coaches in the Super Bowl -- fosters a colorblind mix of pride and reverence. Smith was always well liked, a modest and hard-working child from a nice family. His sisters were cheerleaders and played in the school band. ''All of our little boys want to be football players or coach,'' said Patti Rozell, a schoolmate of Smith's who teaches elementary school students. ''And Lovie has taken it to the top. And he's still Lovie.'' Jim Norman played tackle in the 1970s, and his father was the coach. Now a machinist, Jim is a bear of a man whose jolly eyes grew glassy as he recalled his teammates and how well they got along, regardless of skin color. ''What we accomplished in the '70s, as far as bringing the town together, Lovie is doing all over again,'' said Norman, who is white. Smith, 48, tries to get to Big Sandy twice a year. His mother lives in nearby Tyler. In 1983, when Smith took a job coaching linebackers at Tulsa, his alma mater, she had a dream that he would coach the Dallas Cowboys. [''That was the only team I knew then,'' she said during a telephone interview Thursday.] In 2004, Smith was on the side of the road in St. Louis, waiting for a tow truck. His son had wrecked a car. The Bears called his cellphone and offered him a job as the coach. Smith's first call was to his mother. ''She has a direct line to God,'' Smith said with sincerity. Thurman Smith died about 10 years ago. He had been sober for years, but alcohol never seemed to strain his relationship with Lovie. ''When everybody else was mad at him, Lovie was still with him,'' Mae Smith said. She punctuated her sentences with a laugh. ''He was crazy about his father.'' Smith does not curse -- Jiminy Christmas is as blue as his language gets -- because he never heard his father do so. ''Everything I ever did was perfect,'' Smith said. ''I may do a few things wrong, but my dad only talked about the things I did right. The glass was always half-full. Always positive -- you can do it, you can do it, you can do it. After I got older, I'd say, 'Dad, I'm thinking about changing jobs.' The advice my dad always gave me, 'Lovie Lee, do what you know is right.' '' It is the core philosophy Smith uses in coaching, and it has led him to Super Bowl XLI on Feb. 4. All of that rushed through him Sunday night -- but not when the confetti fell, or cameras flashed, or the tears fell. In the car sat his middle son, Matthew. When he was 2, and Lovie Smith was coaching at Arizona State, Matthew slipped through a back door of their house. Smith did not realize that he had left the door open until he saw Matthew's limp body facedown in the swimming pool. MaryAnne Smith performed CPR. Lovie Smith called 911 and prayed. Now Matthew is a sophomore at Northwestern, ''the brains of the family,'' Lovie Smith said. ''There are days when it just hits me,'' he said. ''You go through it again. Some days, Matthew, I just look at him. I just look at him and say: 'Hey, man, I'm sorry. I let you down.' '' On Sunday night, the car headed north, into the Chicago suburbs. A big city reveled around them. A tiny town celebrated a million miles south. ''Most of the time when major things happen, we think back to that, and just different times when things can easily go one way or the other,'' Smith said. ''That's why we live in the moment, knowing that God has a plan for our lives. We're just going along for the ride. Once you get to that point in your life, it's easier. You're calmer. You know that everything eventually is going to be O.K.'' [Photograph] Lovie Smith as a high school freshman. He helped Big Sandy (Tex.) to three state football titles. (Photos by above, Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press; top right, Mike Fuentes for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Coach Lovie Smith with John Tait after Chicago's playoff victory against Seattle. The Bears are in the Super Bowl for the first time in 21 years. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images); A storefront in Big Sandy, Tex., hometown of Chicago Coach Lovie Smith, reflected the residents' Super Bowl spirit. (Photo by Mike Fuentes for The New York Times)(pg. 7) Map of Texas highlighting Big Sandy: Smith was reared in Big Sandy, which has a population of 1,288. (pg. 7) Indexing (document details) Subjects:Professional football, Coaches & managers, Tournaments & championships People:Smith, Lovie Companies:Chicago Bears (NAICS: 711211 ) Author(s):John Branch Document types:News Dateline:BIG SANDY, Tex., Jan. 23 Column Name:Pro Football Section:8 Publication title:New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jan 28, 2007. pg. 8.1 Source type:Newspaper ISSN:03624331 ProQuest document ID:1204113591 Text Word Count1740 Document URL:http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1204113591&sid=20&Fmt=3&clientId=3851&RQT=309&VName=PQD Print | Email | Copy link | Cite this | Mark Document Publisher Information ^ Back to Top« Back to Results < Previous Document 34 of 56 Next > Copyright © 2007 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Text-only interface