Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
LEGEND RETIRES
George Smith retires from St. Thomas Aquinas after 49 years at the school
St. Thomas Aquinas Athletic Director George Smith sits inside the school’s football locker room on Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale. The former football coach is retiring after 49 years at the school, where his face is synonymous with success.
George Smith began his legacy by flying down from Indiana, looking for a coaching job at Catholic schools across South Florida and leaving with a contract to start a wrestling program at St. Thomas Aquinas. A few days later, Miami Pace High called him to offer its football job. A 23-year-old wondered what to do.
“You gave your word,’’ said Monsignor Vincent Kelly, the St. Thomas principal.
For the past 49 years, Smith kept that word. And now he was finally saying goodbye. Now he sat in his office lined with photos of state-championship teams, in the spacious athletic building named for him, at the school where his face is synonymous with success and offered his reason for retiring as compactly as possible.
“It’s time,’’ Smith, 72, said.
There goes a legend. What will St.
Thomas do without him in this office?
How will local sports function without his daily guidance? Who will players and parents turn to for help as they have for decades, like when Smith went to visit the dying father of a high school senior named Michael Irvin in 1980 and was beckoned to come close for a faltering, whispered word?
“Take … care … of … Mike,’’ the father said.
Smith took care of hundreds of Mikes. There are too many “George stories,’’ as people call them, to repeat. One player,
Barry Robinson, class of 1988, calls every Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. Smith means that much to him. Another player, Nate Salley, class of 2002, read a poem at the team’s award ceremony to Smith that began, “What you mean to me, words will never explain …”
In the locker room before the 2018 Super Bowl, with quarterback Tom Brady in question, New England Patriots running back James White (class of 2010) received a text from Smith that read, “If Brady can’t go, run the Wild White.”
The Wild White was the offense St. Thomas ran deep into the 2009 state playoffs.
“LOL,’’ White responded. There goes a legend. Smith was loud and gruff and temperamental — his coaching hero was Ohio State’s Woody Hayes, after all. His nameplate on his desk is overlaid with a sign that reads, “And You Thought Lombardi Was Tough …”
It wasn’t always easy for him. His journey is laced with pain and sacrifice outside the normal boundaries those words are used for in sports. A student sat by a phone and ran out to the practice field to say his wife, Carol, was going into labor with their child, Mandy.
The day of his first game as head coach in 1975, Smith came home to find a note taped to the door, “Go next door.” The neighbors said his wife was in labor with their second child. Smith raced to the hospital.
“The baby died five minutes before I got there,’’ he said.
They were heartbroken. At one point, Smith said, “I can’t coach.”
“You have to go to the game,’’ Carol said.
He coached that game. He coached every game for decades no matter what. He couldn’t let the kids down, could he? Finally, after decades on the football sideline, he left coaching in 2011 but remained as athletic director.
What is Smith most proud of ?
“I’ll show you,’’ he says. He walks out his office and enters a larger athletic room. There’s a framed photo of each St. Thomas football team since 1978. Smith shuffles through them.
“This is what it all was about,’’ he said. “I wish I had photos of all the other teams besides football, too. These players, that’s what mattered.”
Sports, in Smith’s world, were a manner to teach high school kids. Some students like music. Others like math. Those who liked sports were the ones he taught. That’s why he stayed at St. Thomas all these years — the administration, he said, always understood the role athletics could have.
“It is another way, a different way, to reach young kids,’’ he said of high-school sports. “And when you reach them, you can educate them. A lot of principals at too many schools don’t understand that.”
He smiles. “Don’t get me wrong. I like to win, too.”
Smith learned from players, too. Sometimes they even were the teacher. He had a stroke in 2016. No one outside the St. Thomas community knew it. He was sitting at his desk one day typing at the computer and it was gibberish. He went to call for help. He couldn’t talk.
He had bleeding on his brain that affected his speech. So each day two players would come in and work on his speech with flash cards. It started with first-grade words by pronouncing, “Cat” and “Dog.” The players worked with him. And worked.
“By the end, the only words I couldn’t pronounce for a while were, ‘scissors,’ ‘hippopotamus,’ and ‘rhinoceros,’ ” he said.
Teamwork, you see? That’s what he preached all those years. It’s why when a former St. Thomas player, Kenny Bowman, died of a heart attack, it mattered that 45 of his teammates met to honor him. It’s why the Thanksgiving Day practice — when alums return to their stomping grounds — is his favorite time of the year.
This past year was complicated by COVID-19. Players were checked each day. They had to separate from the student body. The full student body wasn’t on campus each day, too. But they made it through — the football team, for instance, didn’t have one positive test of the virus.
Through the years, Smith’s teams won enough so his rewards run two, typed pages long. He was twice named the national coach of the year. His football teams won those six titles and finished runner-up seven times. The Miami Dolphins named their annual local high school award the, “George F. Smith Coach of the Year Award.”
All the while he did it one way. His way. Right to the end. Some wanted him to have a big sendoff, a news conference with cameras and questions and accolades. Smith didn’t want to be part of some “dog-andpony show,’’ as he said.
“I’m not comfortable with the word, ‘me,’ ‘’ he once said. “It’s about team. Not me.”
So he sat here Tuesday morning, eating his morning blueberries, drinking tea and quietly going through another day before retirement at the end of the school year. He planned to go to a softball game in the afternoon. And two lacrosse games on Wednesday followed by a baseball game.
He’s been married to Carol for 50 years. Mandy, his daughter, is married with two daughters and runs the academic tutoring program for Michigan State football. He’ll have more time for them in retirement. And other things. Did you know he’s growing his grey hair into a ponytail?
There goes our legend. He’ll leave the athletic director’s office. He’ll be connected to the school somehow, though. “Maybe they’ll give me my tiny original office,’’ he says.
Back then, 1972, Smith started the wrestling program by rolling mats each day on the drama stage. The team had to borrow Stranahan High’s uniforms for their first match. There was no weight room. No exercise room. Nothing like the everything now in the George F. Smith Athletic Complex.
Smith didn’t just keep his word by turning down Pace so long ago. For 49 years, he was the word at St. Thomas and much of high school sports in South Florida. There goes our legend.