Bubba Smith bears scars, but no hatred

Press, 27 January 1988, Page 40

Bubba Smith bears scars, but no hatred

By

DAVID ZIMMERMAN

NZPA-Reuter New York

The branding iron that burned the letters K.K.K., for Ku Klux Klan, into a friend’s chest when he was eight years old still sears Bubba Smith’s memory.

So does the bullet that hit his father and the hospital that turned away his sister, leaving her to die three days after she was born.

But whatever pain the former professional American football player felt growing up black in Texas after World War II was cushioned by a family that taught him to love thy neighbour — except on the sports field. At Michigan State University, and later with the professional teams the Baltimore Colts and the Oakland Raiders, the 6ft Bin 130 kg defensive player tossed opposing quarterbacks around like rag-dolls. “Kill, Bubba, kill!’ was the fans’ war cry, and he obliged until a knee injury forced him to leave the game in 1977. Then came widely televised beer commercials ' where Smith tore beer cans in half with his bare

hands. Then came movies.

Smith stopped making the beer commercials in 1984, after a visit back to college, he explained to Reuters during a recent visit to New York to promote his movie, “The Wild Pair,” in which he and Beau Bridges play police hunting a white racist drug gang. He said he went to Michigan State for “homecoming,” a day on which former students return and which is marked by a football game, and the students were so drunk “that I couldn’t believe it.”

“And I looked at the situation and said to myself we’re living in a society where these groups of kids are going to be running our country, and I’m contributing to the one thing that’s failed us all along — and that’s alcohol and drugs.” Sometimes he wonders if football can give the wrong values, too. “In playing ball, you’re dealing with a mentality that says, ‘lf you do something wrong, I can hurt you, I mean really hurt you physically.’ It’s like having a gun,” he says. Smith, aged 42, (now a

taut 110 kg thanks to an exercise routine made famous in a video workout, “Bubba Until It Hurts”), grew up in Beaumont, Texas. He talks reverently about his mother, a teacher, his father, a school football coach, and two brothers, both- of whom also became professional football players. “You know, we had so much love in our house, and it was so negative outside that I didn’t even care about going out,” he says.

He says he tried to avoid situations where he could be subjected to racial abuse. But he couldn’t avoid it completely.

“When I was real young, I remember laying behind some bushes and a kid got caught and they put the K.K.K. on him,” Smith says.

“I ran home afterwards and I couldn’t talk and my father asked me what was wrong and I kept smelling the skin.”

He says he did not feel rage over the branding. His father had taught him not to harbour hatred over such things. It was a

lesson his father, deliberately shot by a white man while a child, had learnt first-hand.

“Somebody thought he was a deer,” Smith says ironically.

His brother and agent, Tody, who is doing research for a film about the family, says their sister, the eldest child, became ill three days after she was born.

“But the hospital wouldn’t treat her because she was black, so she died,” Tody says. Smith says that up to the time he was 18 he never associated with whites because of the colour bar.

“When I went to Michigan State I had never talked to a white person before, so I asked to have a white room-mate who didn't play football.” Smith got 1.5 metre Wayne Tromblin, whose initial fear of the giant melted as soon as Bubba helped him deal with a broken heart by lending him a record of “Hurts So Bad.”

“People are all the same under the skin,” he says.