Legal Enforcement Ethics class was the toughest. Sammie Smith woke at 5 a.m. each day for a daily devotion, then to study. He never wavered this past year even though, at 52, it felt odd at first entering University of Mississippi classrooms full of, well, college-age students.
Some were football players he counseled. His life is a rich tapestry of lessons, good and bad, to tell them. This return to college ending with his graduation on Thursday becomes part of those lessons, right down to taking this Legal Enforcement Ethics class that was so tough.
“I had some background in that class, too,” he said, chuckling softly over his seven years in prison. “That’s part of why I took it. I let people know what it’s like to be involved in a federal case. I let them know what it’s like to be charged, to go through all the preliminary hearings. To going to prison. I was passionate about sharing my story.”
Everyone has a story. But not many have a journey like Smith’s to graduation day. Even this last step coming 35 years after his first Florida State class plays into his larger theme of not following a perfect script. It even arrives in this odd time of the coronavirus. A triumphant walk for the diploma and celebration with his family will be a virtual affair.
But no matter. The success is real. He can handle life’s twists. They started in a troubling way after he was an All-American running back at Florida State and was the Miami Dolphins’ hope as their first-round pick — until he wasn’t anymore. He can pinpoint the day it happened. Maybe you can, too.
After football, after prison, he mentioned the day at a breakfast talk before the 2013 Orange Bowl that Florida State played in. It came in his third Dolphins season. He fumbled at the goal-line for a second-straight week. A stadium full of Dolphins fans began chanting, “Sammie sucks!”
He already was vulnerable, as his 2-month-old son had died that year in his crib of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Now, this.
“I was hurt,” he said in that talk of the chant. “It took me years — years, to get over that hurt.”
He was struck by what happened next at that breakfast talk. Several people approached afterward, shame in their faces, and said they were part of that chanting crowd. They apologized. They didn’t think of the effect, of pro athletes having human feelings. Others told him they, too, had a baby that died.
“All that meant something to me,” he said.
Smith was traded to Denver the next offseason for another burdened back, Bobby Humphrey. A year later, he was out of football. Two years after that in 1994, he was arrested for distributing cocaine in his hometown of Apopka.
This is the cautionary story he counsels youth about these days. Life is full of crossroads. He took the wrong one.
“I’m transparent telling my story and, first and foremost, that was an ethical decision to get involved with lifelong friends — even though I knew in my heart it wasn’t how I was raised and wasn’t my character,” he said. “The road that took me down, how that impacted me and how it took years to overcome, changed my life.”
He found God in prison. He decided to do something meaningful when he got out in 2003. A divorced dad, he married Shalonda in 2004. They began working with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in central Florida, with Smith using his varied experiences and hoping they helped others.
After talking to a men’s club at the First Baptist Church in Ocala in 2012, a businessman and Mississippi alum asked Smith to tell his story at an event in Oxford, Miss. That led Smith to meet Mississippi coach Hugh Freeze and begin helping his players.
“I didn’t know anything about Ole Miss football,” Smith said. “I’m a Florida State guy. But it looked like the right situation. God was pulling me there.”
Shalonda works for FCA with Mississippi’s female athletes. Smith, five years in Oxford, has had the chance to return to Tallahassee where he’s in the Hall of Fame. But it felt right in Mississippi. It felt good, even if something kept tugging at him.
He’d counsel players on making right decisions, on seeing the big picture and on completing their education. But he had never completed his. He was 24 credit hours short. He started to correct that by enrolling at a junior college near Oxford, but then his father died and that caused another break. Life not following plan again, right?
Last fall, he began taking classes at Mississippi. He was struck by more than the surprise of other students in seeing him. He realized simply by attending class, taking notes and studying he could succeed. He got A’s in all his classes toward a multi-disciplinary studies.
“I had to get A’s to keep up with my son,” he says of Creshawn, a mechanical engineer major at Mississippi.
He also has a 13-year-old daughter, Sania and a 32-year-old daughter, Airas, who has a baby due in June. Yep, Smith is about to become a grandfather. And a graduate.
It’s all a long way from 1989 when he was the Dolphins’ hope, from 1994 when he was arrested on federal drug charges and from 2003 when he got out of prison. But that’s the point here.
“It’s never too late in life,” Smith says.
It never follows script, either.
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