The B.M.O.C.
It’s Pretty Good to Be Me
Finlay MacKay for The New York Times
By BRYAN CURTIS
Published: August 20, 2006
Here’s a typical lunch for Troy Smith, 22, star quarterback of the Ohio State Buckeyes: Smith and his best friend, Ted Ginn Jr., the team’s star wide receiver, go to one of the fast-food restaurants in Columbus, Ohio — like Chipotle, a Tex-Mex chain, or Popeyes, purveyors of fried chicken. In Columbus, a blue-collar, football-fixated city where more than 100,000 fans turn out for Buckeye games in the fall and more than 64,000 turned out for this year’s scrimmage, Smith’s sudden appearance in a fast-food restaurant is like a televangelist materializing in the living room of one of his parishioners. The folks who work behind the counter at these places have been known to offer him free food, and when Smith resists (out of modesty, and because free burritos constitute an N.C.A.A. violation), customers will try to give him money (also, of course, a violation).
Playing quarterback at a football power like Ohio State — a school that has won seven national championships and that had five of its players chosen in the first round of the N.F.L. draft in April — requires Smith, who is naturally sweet and outgoing, to take a highly selective approach to human interaction. “Me and Troy have a saying,” Ginn says. “Don’t pick up the private calls.” A great deal of the calls Smith has been receiving lately originate from mysterious sources. “You don’t know who it might be,” Ginn explains. “It might be a chick, and you’re with your lady, and she’ll think you’re cheating. It might be an agent. It might be some kid from campus saying” — here Ginn’s voice takes on a lilting quality — “‘How y’all doin’? What’s your schedule?”’ N.F.L. quarterbacks are sequestered by clutches of agents and security guards, but college quarterbacks, who can inspire much more fearsome levels of devotion, are comparatively easy to reach. Smith’s e-mail address, for instance, is listed publicly with those of Ohio State’s 50,000 other students, few of whom are candidates for the Heisman Trophy. During the season, his in-box fills up with messages from women offering revealing portraits of themselves or, more subtly, parents offering him dates with their daughters.
There’s something terrifying about so much unfiltered human contact, and on the increasingly rare occasions when Smith ventures out to Columbus nightclubs, he recruits other Buckeye players to form a protective perimeter around him. They include wide receiver Roy Hall (6-foot-3, 240 pounds) and offensive lineman T.J. Downing (6-foot-4, 305 pounds). In a packed club, fans will try to slip past Hall and Downing and ask Smith for his autograph or regale him with their peewee football exploits or just exclaim, apropos of nothing, “Troy, you the bomb!” Anthony Gonzalez, a junior wide receiver, says, “It’s just so strange sometimes, how important Ohio State football is to a lot of people. A lot of people don’t necessarily want to bother Troy. They just want to come over and, I don’t know, spend some time with him.”
Smith and Ginn have known each other since Troy was 7 and Ted was 6, when the boys were required to appear at Sunday services at the Morning Star Baptist Church in Cleveland. Neither boy being much for sermons, they would excuse themselves to go to the restroom, and then meet up in the hallway for a surreptitious game of tag. These secret moments — goofy escapes from the complicated adult world — are a reasonable metaphorical starting point for describing Smith’s life heading into his final year at Ohio State. Despite quarterbacking one of the best teams in college football, an honor that has resulted in cover stories in college football magazines with headlines like “Troy’s Task: National Title,” Smith finds himself spending more and more time indoors. He spends part of his day playing football and the other part playing at home with Ginn. The frenzy of Columbus, and the autocratic presence of Ted Ginn Sr., Ted Jr.’s dad and Smith’s de facto father, has pushed him into a state of splendid isolation. “Troy doesn’t go out much at all,” says the Buckeye quarterbacks coach, Joe Daniels. “He’d rather sit around and play video games. It’s a little boring, but that’s his whole life right now.”
Last year, Matt Leinart, the Heisman-winning quarterback at the University of Southern California, used his senior season as a kind of public victory lap — dating starlets, becoming a fixture at Hollywood parties and soaking up the kind of sybaritic pleasures that only a 22-year-old would have the audacity to dream up. Smith’s life is comparatively monastic. He graduated in June with a communications degree, and his coursework for the fall could be minimal. Jim Tressel, Ohio State’s head coach, compares him to a medical resident: part intensive study (in the film room, with the coaches), part thrilling on-the-job training (in Ohio Stadium, in front of 100,000 scarlet-and-gray-clad fans).
There are two competing theories to explain Smith’s isolation. If you listen to the quarterback and his Ohio State coaches, you’ll hear that he is tuning out the world to focus on his craft. (“With great power comes great responsibility,” Smith says, quoting “Spider-Man,” a favorite movie.) If you listen to Ted Ginn Sr., you’ll hear that Smith’s life is the successful result of a decade of ruthless parenting. Ginn has taken an easy-trusting kid and slowly stripped away everything around him — his friends, his relatives, his nonfootball hobbies. He stripped it all away until Smith was Ginn’s singular creation, until his life was playing football for the Buckeyes and calling Ginn from his cellphone to report in. Smith’s life is now so basic that when he comes back to his apartment at night, there’s really nothing for him to do but call Ted Jr. to come over and play video games. “We ain’t about going out,” Ted Ginn Jr. says. “We just bond with each other. It’s more about the brotherhood, you know? If he’s bored, I’m bored.”
Smith seems small for a quarterback. He stands 6-foot-1, tall enough when he’s padding around in Air Jordan sandals, but when he drops back to pass, behind the mammoth Buckeye offensive line, he can look like a little boy trying to throw a rock over a fence. One afternoon this summer, he was relaxing on a couch at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, reflecting on his on-campus celebrity. It’s fair to say that Smith’s reputation at Ohio State — both good and bad — is based on a few key moments rather than a consistent body of work. Tressel plucked him from Cleveland’s Glenville High School — “a good player,” Smith says now, “but not one of the elite.” (Ginn, an elite recruit if ever there was one, would receive his Ohio State scholarship two years later.) Smith took a redshirt his freshman year while his Ohio State teammates won the national championship, and the next season, when he joined the active roster, the coaches tried him out at wide receiver. Smith, who fancied himself a quarterback and nothing else, was insulted, and after practice one day, he stormed over to a group of sportswriters and expressed his displeasure in frank terms.
This was the first of several signs that Smith — voluble, impatient — faced a steep learning curve for college football. One way in which the college game differs from the pro game is this nebulous idea, repeated by fans and college administrators again and again, called “class.” Class can mean a lot of thing, from playing fairly on the field to staying out of jail, but it’s largely a matter of perception and is most useful for its karmic quality. For example, if Ohio State beat archrival Michigan, but Ohio State’s quarterback was later found to have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. or the local Police Department, Michigan fans could take solace in the fact that Ohio State, while victorious, was “classless.” On Internet message boards, fans of Ohio State’s rivals tabulate Buckeye transgressions to measure the program’s collective depravity, and Smith in particular has provided them with a great deal of psychic satisfaction.
Smith’s college career began with a parking-lot brawl that also included other Buckeye players. (He pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct and paid a $100 fine.) During his sophomore season, after he claimed the starting quarterback job and beat Michigan — a feat that cinches your celebrity in Columbus — he walked into a local health-care provider looking for a summer job and came out carrying an envelope with $500 in it. The cash was given to him by an Ohio State season-ticket holder named Robert Q. Baker, who bragged to co-workers that he owned Smith. For taking money under the table, Smith was suspended for the 2004 Alamo Bowl and the next season’s opener against Miami of Ohio. (Robert Baker lost his luxury suite at Ohio Stadium.) While he was serving that suspension, Smith skipped a class so he could serve as an instructor at a football camp run by the N.F.L. quarterback Steve McNair. In the Buckeyes’ second game of the 2005 season, against the University of Texas, Tressel refused to start him, partly as punishment, partly because Smith was not yet at full speed. When he entered the game late in the first quarter, he played unevenly and the Buckeyes lost, killing their hopes of winning a national championship. In college football, which still trumpets the staunch morality of amateurism, Smith’s goofs, though negligible by the standards of other undergraduates, made him something of a pariah. As one Ohio sportswriter wrote, with disgust, “Trouble is an old coat he keeps taking out of the closet, refusing to throw away.”
Tressel, who like most college football coaches is a great believer in the power of euphemism, calls this period Smith’s “shift in momentum.” Tressel has close-cut gray hair, favors sweater-vests on the sidelines and wears a stolid expression indicating that he is fighting a victorious battle against any stray thought that could escape from his mouth. The word most frequently used to describe Tressel — the only one that’s really appropriate — is “senatorial,” and at the right angle he looks a bit like Claude Rains in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
Here’s what Tressel will allow himself to say about Smith: “I’m sure that he often thinks about the fact that he wasn’t at the level early in our season last year that he knows he could have been. And it was his doing.” In July 2005, at the height of his ignominy, Smith sat down for a meeting with Tressel and Ohio State’s athletic director. The coach told Smith that if he incurred one more infraction of any kind he would be kicked off the team for good.
Tressel says Smith nodded sullenly and apologized. When you talk to Smith today, he’s likely to reflect on his “past” — that would be last season — as if it were some separate personality that he has long since stripped away. Rather than complaining to the sports media about his role on the team, he now speaks in rote phrases like “I think the film room is exhausting.” He lived a military-style schedule through the summer: up every morning around 6:15, workouts and team meetings until noon, then lunch and sleep, then more football, then a bit of social time, then sleep. The social time, the only unstructured and intriguing part of this schedule, he passed mostly with Ginn.
Smith spent much of the 2005 season shaking off the rust from his suspension, rounding into form, conveniently enough, for the November game against Michigan. “I don’t know that there’s been any quarterback that’s played better against Michigan than Troy Smith,” says Archie Griffin, a former Ohio State running back who won back-to-back Heisman Trophies in the 1970’s. Smith’s first victory against Michigan was a 37-21 drubbing in Columbus in 2004, and his second made him into a kind of folk hero. Trailing by 2 in the fourth quarter of last year’s game, Smith shuffled backward to dodge a Michigan defender, then sprinted to his right and threw a stunningly difficult pass across his body to Anthony Gonzalez. Ohio State scored the winning touchdown in two more plays.
Six weeks after that, playing in the Fiesta Bowl, Smith heaved a first-quarter pass that seemed to rise up and out of the television screen. Ginn, who was at full sprint about 20 yards behind the nearest Notre Dame defender, maneuvered under the ball and scored easily. Two series later, Smith took a snap from center and rolled right, then pitched the ball to Ginn, who was running left. The slow-footed Notre Dame defense stared in apparent amazement, and Ginn ran 68 yards into the end zone. Ohio State won by two touchdowns. Seeing that Smith had just won the two biggest games of his career, and noting that he hadn’t been charged with wrongdoing in nearly four months, a USA Today writer announced that Smith had earned his “redemption.”
Back in Cleveland, Coach Ginn does not subscribe to this reassuring redemptive arc. He has known Smith since he was 7 — his biological father was never part of the boy’s life — and has more or less adopted him as a son. (Smith lived with his mother, Tracy, before college but calls Ginn “Dad.”) For Ginn, Smith’s maturation can be traced to the fact that he gave his life over to the ruthless prescriptions of the coach, equal doses of football and strategic isolation. Ginn is the head football coach of Glenville High School, where his son and Smith played ball. He works out of a mildewed basement office decorated with an autographed copy of Ted Jr.’s Sports Illustrated cover from last September. Ginn speaks in a slurry rasp, and when he’s excited, his eyes open wide and nearly every proclamation curves to a fine point and is followed by the preacherly sounding imperative “You know what I’m saying?”
Smith initially snubbed Ginn’s Glenville team to attend a mostly white private school called St. Edward High School. (Ginn blames a group of would-be advisers that surrounded Smith at the time.) At St. Edward, Smith elbowed a boy in the head during a basketball game (he said the boy was singing racial taunts), was kicked off the team and, by the start of his senior season, had transferred to Glenville to re-establish himself under the tutelage of Ginn. For Ginn, this was a crucial turning point. Not only had he secured another star player — Smith and Ted Jr. and Donte Whitner, a safety drafted this spring by the Buffalo Bills, formed an amazing combo at Glenville — but he had, in his words, “saved Troy’s life,” and he was determined not to let him stray from his authority again.
These days, Ginn calls his son and Smith every afternoon and delivers to each a telephonic sermon that consists of “whatever’s on my mind.” Asked to estimate the length of these calls, Ted Jr. says, without humor, “until your battery goes dead.” Neither young man may make a big purchase without consulting Ginn first, and his son is forbidden to withdraw any money from his A.T.M. account — not even $20 — without a fatherly business consultation. (One afternoon, Ginn was able to tell me that Ted Jr. was currently $90 overdrawn; he had reviewed the bank statements moments before.) Thanks to Ginn’s involvement, the lives of his son and Smith have been sanded down to utter simplicity. On the Fourth of July of this year, Ginn brought nearly 50 family members down to Columbus so that his son’s and Smith’s isolation wouldn’t be disturbed by a two-hour drive north to Cleveland. That weekend, Ginn spotted Smith wearing a pair of sunglasses — Coach Ginn hates sunglasses — so he took them away.
The fact that Smith is 22, nearing full-blown adulthood, does not come as a deterrent to Ginn. When Smith is drafted into the N.F.L. next season, Ginn says the nature of their relationship will transition from “dad to business.” He will attend to Smith’s finances in the same miserly way he inspects his son’s A.T.M. statements. The Cleveland-based voices that might otherwise find their way into Smith’s ear — old “friends” who will find themselves with the good fortune to be on a first-name basis with an N.F.L. player — will have long since been tuned out, reduced to unfamiliar numbers on the cellphone that Smith doesn’t answer. “It’s down to nobody,” says Ginn, by which he means it’s down to nobody but him. He thinks of Smith’s state of isolation as the result of a winnowing process, from a point where Smith would trust nearly everybody, like a friendly man bearing an envelope with $500 in it, to a point where Smith trusts no one but Ginn. And what Ginn is preaching — nearly every day, on Smith’s cellphone — is to take off the sunglasses, stay indoors, shut out the universe. “We’re not shunning nobody else,” Ginn says. “But right now, this is a major, major time that can set him up for the rest of his life. You know what I’m saying? That goes for him and Ted. They don’t do nothing.”
The apartment where Troy Smith does nothing is a 20-minute drive from the Ohio State campus, down wide-lane suburban roads, in a sprawling complex that backs up to a pond filled with geese. Smith’s apartment has a charmingly undergraduate ambiance: white walls with almost nothing hanging on them, a 57-inch big-screen television (a gift from one of his older brothers) and a large area rug with a print of a lioness. Smith’s glass coffee table offers a complete selection of neatly arranged college-football magazines that feature Smith’s photograph on the cover.
Ted Ginn Jr. comes over. He and his live-in girlfriend, Krystle, own two Yorkshire terriers, and when he turns them loose in the apartment, they run around in large, interlocking circles, pausing every so often to snarl at each other. He is wearing a T-shirt that has an image of an AK-47 on it and says, “Welcome to the Hood.” Smith — who, by the way, says he doesn’t have a girlfriend — is wearing a shirt that announces his membership on the 2006 Playboy all-America team. The video game they have chosen to play tonight is NCAA Football, which features a virtual Ohio State starring virtual likenesses of Ginn and Smith. Ginn plays Ohio State, and a friend named Ray plays Texas, at least until Smith, who has been cooking an organic steak on his George Foreman grill, can take over.
This Ohio State-Texas matchup forces Smith into the unusual position of having to harass his virtual self (“I’ve got five interceptions!”), and puts Ginn in the enviable position of throwing the ball to Virtual Ginn on every play. The meta nature of this exercise — the existential gap between a man and his video representation — does not seem to vex them at all. Ginn takes an early lead, in part, it needs to be said, because Ray was mostly manning the controller. When Smith takes command, he mounts a furious comeback, much like he did in the Michigan game last season, to cut Ginn’s lead to 2 points. One of the Yorkies now has his nose up against the window and is growling at the geese outside.
“What would he do if I let him go out there?” Smith asks.
“He’d work them,” Ginn replies.
The two pour themselves into the video game, saluting their virtual teammates for good plays (“Who got the pick-off? Nate-dog?”) and taking short breaks to discuss weighty matters like whether Ginn has any A.1. steak sauce back at his apartment. Playing with virtual likenesses of themselves and suspended in a kind of childlike animation, they seem happier than they’ve been all day. In Smith’s and Ginn’s stripped-down lives, football — the practices and the film study and the endless media interviews — is a thing to endure. Video games are a thing to do. Bragging rights will be achieved by a cumulative record over the next few months and, for tonight, Ginn wins. For the first time today, Smith seems slightly disturbed.
It is just after 9:30 p.m. Ginn, after offering the necessary handshakes, scoops up his Yorkies and heads out the door. Smith grabs a blue trash bag and wanders out behind him. Tomorrow he will be up at 6:15 a.m. to run drills, then he will study more film, then he will come home and maybe sleep for a few hours, then he will go to a football camp put on by Mike Doss, a former Buckeye who plays for the Indianapolis Colts. That cycle will roll on through the summer, with telephonic inspiration provided by Ted Ginn Sr., and if Coach doesn’t talk all night, then Smith will get Ted Jr. to come over and play some more video games. Soon the routine will include the occasional class and will be punctuated by Saturday trips to the stadium in Columbus, or places like Austin, Tex., and East Lansing, Mich., where tens of thousands of fans will chant for Smith to fail.
Smith is standing outside his garage door wearing an expression that looks like a mixture of sleepiness and bemusement and, I think, a little sadness, and he is saying, “I’m telling you, man, this is what we do all the time.”
