Troy Smith doesn't want it known, because that's not why he did it. But on the day before the titantic game against Michigan, with the whole college football world focused on Columbus, the Ohio State quarterback slipped into Children's Hospital in Columbus and visited the pediatric cancer ward. Friday hospital visits by Buckeye players are a tradition dating to the Woody Hayes Era. The popularity of the team during the Jim Tressel Era has made the logistics of the visit more problematic, because employees and other adults swarm the players when they arrive, according to the hospital employee who e-mailed me. Sports information director Steve Snapp said the visits have continued unabated.
The point is that Smith slipped in, visited the sick children, and slipped out. "It was noticed," wrote my e-mailer, who wished to remain unidentified. "There was simply a sense of awe." When Hall of Fame coach Bo Schembechler died on that Friday, there was a feeling that some perspective had been restored in a rivalry that had worked itself into a feverish state.
Smith, apparently, never lost his perspective.
