A shadow falls across the field
07:22 AM CDT on Tuesday, August 10, 2004
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you, shoulder high.
— A.E. Housman
Andrew Smith was one of those young athletes who come along every so often to remind us of what sport is really about. As a quarterback for the University of North Texas Mean Green, Smith tasted glory and frustration in equal measure, but was never corrupted by the former or defeated by the latter.
Smith was an all-around student at Bay City, where his father is a respected educator. He quarterbacked Bay City to a Class 4A Division I state championship as a senior, and was an honorable mention All-State selection.
He came to UNT on a football scholarship and sat out his freshman year as a redshirt. As a sophomore, he began the season as the second-string quarterback, but was thrust into the limelight when the starter, Scott Hall, was injured.
Hollywood could not have scripted the ensuing story any more spectacularly. Smith stepped in at quarterback the second game of the season and led UNT to a Sun Belt Conference championship and a victory over Cincinnati in the New Orleans Bowl.
Andrew Smith had it made at that point. He, like Housman’s young man in "To an Athlete Dying Young," had won his town the race, and had been carried triumphant through its streets.
Reality reared its head four games into the 2003 season, when Hall won back his starting job and fashioned a storybook finish of his own, leading the Mean Green to a third straight conference championship.
Almost any jaded sportswriter would have predicted that Andrew Smith was long gone from UNT at that point. It is, after all, almost a college football cliche by now: The prima donna QB isn’t getting his propers from the powers-that-be, so he departs for greener pastures, where he’ll get the playing time — and the adulation — he thinks he deserves. It’s all about PT, and catching the eyes of the scouts.
Except it wasn’t that way for Andrew Smith. Yes, he said later, he was disappointed at losing the starting job, and he thought briefly about transferring to another school. He was, after all, a football player, and he loved to play.
But he was also a member of the UNT Eagles football team, and he had discovered, perhaps to his surprise, that being a member of that team meant something to him, too, meant as much, in fact, as playing on the first team.
It was one of those rare times when an athlete becomes a teacher, showing his teammates and reminding his coaches that there is more to sport — and life — than leading the parade. Smith had helped create something very special in that glory season of 2002, and he had received something very special, too, something too valuable to give up for something as ephemeral as a starting spot. He had become part of something larger than himself, and he liked the way it felt to work for the good of his teammates as well as for his own benefit.
Coaches spend entire seasons — entire careers — trying to inculcate this concept into their talented but immature charges; this second-string quarterback did it by simply showing up for practice.
Andrew Smith, 21, was killed at about 5 a.m. Sunday when the pickup truck he was driving veered across the center line and struck a tractor-trailer rig.
He was returning to Denton, to the University of North Texas, to be with his team.
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