The Full Biography
Emmitt Smith. Running back. The Pensacola kid who made a Cowboys offense a decade and then outran every professional who had ever carried a football for a living.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a star on a helmet, a leap over the pile, a man who did not look like a sprinter and still owned the edge. The NFL’s all-time rushing leader. What the still cannot show is Emmitt James Smith III of Pensacola, Florida, a University of Florida workhorse, and a second life of real estate, a dance-floor trophy, and a man who has had to live next to a record that every new back is hired to threaten.
He was born on May 15, 1969, in Pensacola, the son of Mary and Emmitt Smith Jr. Escambia High School was the first field. He rushed for more than a hundred yards in a game so often the local papers ran out of adjectives; as a senior he was the National High School Player of the Year, a Parade All-American, a boy who stacked yards like a man stacking bricks. The University of Florida took him in 1987. In three seasons in Gainesville he ran for 3,928 yards, made All-America, and left after his junior year as the program’s career rushing leader at the time. He was not a sprinter in the Olympic sense. He was a back who saw the hole before it opened and was still there when it closed on other people.
The Dallas Cowboys took him seventeenth in the 1990 draft, which is a joke in every draft argument now and was, that April, a slight. Other teams wanted a different shape. Jerry Jones had bought the club. Jimmy Johnson was building a roster that would offend people and win. Troy Aikman was the quarterback. Michael Irvin was the wideout. The line — Nate Newton, Erik Williams, Mark Tuinei, John Gesek, Kevin Gogan, and the men who spelled them — could move a city. Smith was the brick. He won Offensive Rookie of the Year. In 1991 he took the first of four rushing titles. In 1992 the Cowboys won Super Bowl XXVII, over Buffalo, 52–17, and the offense the country had argued about became a climate.
1993 is the year the ledger and the hymn met. He held out through training camp and the first two games in a contract fight Jones did not want to have in public. Dallas started 0–2. He signed, came back, and the club did not lose again in the regular season that mattered. He led the league in rushing. He was named NFL Most Valuable Player. In Super Bowl XXVIII, again against Buffalo, he ran for 132 yards and two touchdowns and was named Super Bowl MVP. He is the only running back to win the rushing title, the league MVP, a Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl MVP in the same season. The hymn resumed. The holdout remained a business decision in a city that had wanted only the hymn.
He played a Super Bowl with a separated shoulder. The toughness talk is not invented. The medical file is the proof. In January 1994, in the NFC Championship against San Francisco, he separated the right shoulder and stayed in; the Cowboys went to Atlanta and won Super Bowl XXVIII the following week. In 1995 he took a fourth rushing title and a third Super Bowl, XXX, over Pittsburgh, 27–17, a last title of the Jones–Johnson–Barry Switzer weather. He was a Pro Bowl back eight times, an All-Pro four times, the man who got the ball when the season was on the table. He was not the fastest man in the backfield. He was the one who was still upright at the two-minute warning.
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On October 27, 2002, at Texas Stadium, against the Seattle Seahawks, he passed Walter Payton. The record was 16,726 yards. Smith went past it on an eleven-yard run in the fourth quarter and left the field with the ball and with Sweetness’s name still in his mouth. He has always talked about Payton as a standard, not a victim. He finished his Dallas years that season and, in 2003, signed with the Arizona Cardinals. He played two seasons in the desert, a little slower, still professional, under Dennis Green and then others, in a stadium that was not Texas Stadium. He ran for 1,193 yards in 2004, a last thousand-yard weather the Dallas highlights skip. Arizona is where the record finished, not where it was born. Dallas still runs the highlights. The individual seasons under the rings are the clerk’s file the bar conversation skips. In 1991 he ran for 1,563 yards and the first title. In 1992, 1,713. In 1995, 1,773 yards and twenty-five rushing touchdowns, a single-season mark that stood until LaDainian Tomlinson and then others passed the touchdown column; the yardage title was the fourth. He had eleven seasons with at least 1,000 rushing yards, a durability the highlight of the leap does not show. He caught passes out of the backfield because the offense asked him to, 515 of them, and he blocked when the play was a pass. He was not a specialist. He was a back who stayed on the field. He retired in 2005 with 18,355 rushing yards, still the most in the league, and with 164 rushing touchdowns, also a record. He added three Super Bowl rings. The Cowboys retired his number 22. In 2010 he went into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on the first ballot, a Canton afternoon that treated the bricks as a climate and the holdout as a preface.
He married Patricia Southall on April 22, 2000. She had been a first runner-up at Miss USA; she had a daughter, Rheagen, from a first marriage to Martin Lawrence. Their son, Emmitt James IV, called E.J., was born in 2002; their daughter, Skylar, in 2003. The public family has mostly stayed out of the wreck. Friends from the Cowboys years describe a quieter star than Irvin, a man who studied the line the way a clerk studies a ledger. The real-estate voice is the same clerk.
I want to be the best running back to ever play this game.Emmitt Smith, on the job as he understood it
The turn is the record and the refusal to become only the record. He has not spent the years after Canton begging for a statue’s polish. He has spent them on deals, on a family, on the occasional Cowboys Sunday as living infrastructure. The argument about who was the greatest back is a bar conversation. The yards are a ledger. He keeps pointing at the ledger.
Six things most people never knew
- Seventeenth overall is the draft fact Dallas prefers to treat as destiny. 1990. Other teams passed. He stacked the bricks anyway.
- The 1993 holdout was a business decision in a city that wanted a hymn. Two games. Then the MVP and Super Bowl XXVIII. The hymn resumed.
- He played a Super Bowl with a separated shoulder. The toughness talk is not invented. The medical file is the proof.
- Payton’s record was the one he cared about. October 27, 2002, Texas Stadium. He has always talked about Sweetness as a standard, not a victim.
- Arizona is where the record finished, not where it was born. 2003–04. A professional ending. Dallas still runs the highlights.
- The dance-floor trophy is a second audience, not a joke he has to live down. Dancing with the Stars, season 3, 2006. He treated it like a season.
Patricia and the children have had a husband and father who is an all-time ledger and a man in a commercial-real-estate meeting. E.J. played football at Stanford and then for the Cowboys on a practice-squad and depth chart the city treated as a sequel. Friends from Gainesville describe the same clerk. The Cowboys of the 1990s were a loud room. He was the quiet brick in it.
The later years
Home is Dallas as a past tense that still pays, and a business that does not require a helmet. He founded ESmith Realty Capital and related commercial-real-estate shops that do the unglamorous work of raising debt and equity for projects the highlight reels never see. He has talked, in interviews that are fewer than the columns would like, about the line first and the brand second. That is the correct professional sentence. He has been a studio analyst when the network wanted a 1990s voice — ESPN, NFL Network, the usual desks that hire a Hall of Fame back to explain a hole. He has not become a weekly argument. He shows up on Cowboys Sundays as living infrastructure — a man the franchise can still put in a suite and a man the record book still has to print. He has done commercials that use the leap and keynotes that use the ledger. He has written, with Donald T. Phillips, Game On: Find Your Purpose — Pursue Your Dream, a book that is a locker-room grammar applied to rooms without helmets. He treats the book the way he treated the dance floor: homework, not a joke. He has put his name on youth football camps in Texas and Florida that treat vision as a drill, not a slogan. Pensacola still gets the first weekend when he can give it.
In 2006, on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, he and the pro Cheryl Burke won season 3. People who did not know the NFC East learned a man in tails. People who knew the NFC East learned that he treated a mirror-ball trophy like a fourth-and-one: homework, repetition, a refusal to be embarrassed by a new grammar. He has said he trained for it. He did not treat it as a joke he had to live down. It is a second audience, and it is in the file next to Canton, not instead of it. He has done other television when the television was a job. He has not tried to become a celebrity who used to carry a football. He has tried to become a businessman who used to carry one.
Canton, 2010, was the civic inventory. Jimmy Johnson presented him. The speech pointed at the line, at Payton, at Pensacola, at Patricia. He did not use the occasion to reopen a career. He used it to close a file and open a door that is not a locker room. The Cowboys have put him in the Ring of Honor. Escambia and Gainesville have put his name on the usual civic objects. He has sat on corporate boards and on the kind of Dallas civic committees that want a Hall of Fame name on the letterhead. He has talked, when asked, about the concussion weather the league spent a generation denying, without making a second career of the medical file. He has not become a crusader and he has not become a denier. He has been a professional about a sport that used the body. He is in his fifties. The leap over the pile is a clip. The 18,355 are still the number. Younger men — Frank Gore came close in longevity; Adrian Peterson in a single season’s violence; the next back the draft will name — keep taking a run at it. None has taken the career pile. He seems less interested in explaining the number than in using the name on a door that is not a locker room. ESmith Realty Capital has done deals in Texas and beyond that the sports pages do not cover. Patricia has built her own public work. The household is a firm of a different kind. That is the remaining plot.
There is no death date on this life. There is a present tense: a real-estate shop, a Hall of Fame bust, a family that has mostly stayed out of the wreck, a son who has worn the same helmet, and a Pensacola kid who stacked bricks until the ledger ran out of other people’s names. The bar conversation about the greatest back will outlive him. The yards are a clerk’s fact. He keeps pointing at the clerk’s fact. Dallas still sells the triplet — Aikman, Irvin, Smith — as a climate. He still puts Payton’s name next to his own. That is the remaining professionalism.
After the spotlight moved
It moved to the next back and then came back every time someone got within shouting distance of 18,355. The Cowboys still sell the triplet. Payton’s name is still the one he puts next to his own. Pensacola still claims the bricks. Gainesville still claims the three years. Canton has the bust. Arizona has two seasons the highlight shows skip. The dance-floor night is a clip people who never watched a fourth-and-one can still hum.
He came out of Pensacola, stacked Florida, went seventeenth, won three Super Bowls, passed Sweetness, finished in Arizona, and learned a second life that does not require a hole to open. If you only remember the star on the helmet, you have the still. If you remember the holdout, the shoulder, and the ledger, you have him.
Portrait: John Trainor · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons