Running back in no rush to break single-season touchdown records
By Mike Beamish,
Vancouver Sun
Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders, the greatest touchdown trotters in NFL history, celebrated their scores the way Lions running back Joe Smith does his. They did it routinely, handing the ball back to the ref as if they’d been there many times before.
Smith is one rushing touchdown away from tying Cory Philpot and Larry Key — who jointly hold the Lions’ single-season record of 17 — and he needs three more over the team’s final four games to match Mike Pringle’s CFL record. Pringle had 19 rushing touchdowns in the 2000 season with Montreal.
In his calmer moments — which amounts to every one of 1,440 minutes in Smith’s 24-hour biological clock — Curious Joe will just shrug and tell you it’s no big deal, even though he is turning on the city’s football fans yard by yard.
Stiff-arming opponents, kicking at the hounds nipping at his feet, Smith is paradoxically soft about his accomplishments — his 17 touchdowns (one of them came on a pass reception) and his league-leading 1,241 rushing yards.
The end zone may be his domain, yet Smith has selective memory loss when it comes to personal glory. Asked if he has ever scored 17 touchdowns before in a season of Little League, high school, college or pro ball, Smith delves no farther back in time than the composition of yesterday’s breakfast.
As the co-founder of Magic Memory Dog Tags — an Internet business he runs with his fiancee, Andrea — Smith apparently has a very corporate approach to his own “magical” football memories.
“I never played Little League, Pop Warner or anything,” he says. “I’ve never paid any attention to how many touchdowns I’ve scored. I’ve left it all in the past. College? I couldn’t begin to tell you. I could have had a year like this before. Maybe not. I just don’t remember.”
Running behind a dominating, intimidating line, to which Smith passes off most of the credit, he could march into touchdown history at his current pace. But he’ll be dragged there reluctantly, without a sense of occasion.
Should anyone be surprised? Smith is, after all, an assembly line worker with a number on his back. He merely packages the finished product.
Earlier this season, he punched out early, asking head foreman Wally Buono for permission to hit the showers three minutes before the end of a game so he could get to the airport. Smith had a late-evening flight to catch.
Anecdotal evidence might suggest that Smith is an automaton, a professional athlete who acts if he’s being directed by an Xbox controller, though he is, in reality, a complex individual not easily categorized. The love of his teammates is important to him, beating them at poker is an even greater joy, yet he never forgets his responsibility to the fans. When the rest of the team was whooping it up in the locker room after clinching the West Division title last season, Smith was dutifully and happily still in his sweaty uniform, reaching up to sign pennants, T-shirts and programs proffered by the ticket buyers at BC Place.
“He’s not a showboat. He’s a team player, as I was,” says Philpot, a two-time winner of the Eddie James Memorial Trophy as top rusher in the West (1994-95).
Philpot, whose CFL career ended in 2001 with Winnipeg, was known as “Quick Six,” alluding to the jersey number he wore and his facility for getting into the end zone. He scored 17 rushing touchdowns, four more on pass receptions and another on a kick return for a total of 22 in the 1995 season with the Lions, a CFL single-season record since broken by Winnipeg’s Milt Stegall (23 in 2002).
Philpot, who has settled in the Lower Mainland and coaches the Vancouver Trojans of the B.C. Junior League, wasn’t as perfunctory about celebrating his touchdowns as Smith, however. He loved to launch the ball into the crowd and watch people scramble for the valued souvenir.
“The franchise was going through ownership changes, financial instability and we had to keep people in the seats, buying tickets,” Philpot says. “That was definitely a motivation for me. I felt I had to do something extra to get fans to come out, to keep the faith.”
Philpot has never met Smith but he hopes to do so on October 20, when the Lions play Edmonton at BC Place in the second game of their back-to-back series with the Eskimos.
By that time, Philpot could be offering congratulations to the back who has deep-sixed Quick Six’s place in Lions rushing history.
