LB Roquan Smith plans to earn his keep at UGA

The truth is, Smith’s real-life personality is not anything like what has been publicly projected. The hot-shot recruit in the tuxedo jacket with that bleached-white patch in his high-piled hair who told a national-TV audience he would take his talents to Los Angeles, that was an alter ego.

“He’s actually a very humble young man,” Macon County High principal Rickey Edmond said. “He realizes this could have happened to anyone else, but it happened to him.”

A trip to rural southwest Georgia to catch up with Smith confirmed that he’s about as far from Hollywood as one could be, physically and metaphorically. In following the Georgia linebacker day-in-the-life-of style, we ended up off a dirt road in the middle of a grass field on a 150-head dairy farm in the middle of nowhere. There, amid land mines of cow pies and smells unworthy of detailed description, our illustrious football star was getting dirty with work.

In an effort to raise a little capital before going off to college, Smith accepted a job with Roy Yoder on a well-drilling and water-pumping crew.

For three months before he left the halls of Montezuma for the halls of higher learning in Athens, Smith would spend his afternoons slogging through the type of mud, grit and grime only people in that line of work can truly appreciate. He was the low man on the totem pole of a three-person crew, which meant he got to do what nobody else wanted.

“We’re playing in the mud,” Yoder says playfully. “He enjoys it.”

On this particular day in late May, it’s 92 degrees, and the gnats and flies are just getting busy for the summer. Yoder, his left hand recently crushed in a job accident barks out orders over the screeching metal sounds of a vintage 1950s drilling rig as his son operates the heavy machinery. That leaves Smith to handle the dirtiest of the dirty work, like dead-lifting one end of a giant metal trough of water and carrying 50-pound bags of bentonite over his shoulder and hauling, pulling and tugging heavy hoses all over the place.

For such treatment, Yoder is unapologetic.

“You’ve got to show the young ones what it’s all about,” said Yoder, who paid Smith $10 per hour. “Get out, get dirty, go to work. Roquan’s a star football player, but guess how everybody else makes their living? It ain’t on the football field.”

It’s not something Smith necessarily wanted or expected to be doing. He’s here in this pasture because his path happened to cross Yoder’s this past fall.

Yoder is a member of Macon County’s booster club. Each year, he usually grabs a player or two from the football team to help him when work cranks up in the spring.

“I was looking around for a job to make a little money,” Smith said. “He heard and said he could use my help, so he brought me on.”

Smith describes Yoder as “a community man.” He’s a fireman, first and foremost, working as a captain in the county fire department and volunteer for the city’s volunteer group. In addition to being a pump-and-well man, he’s also an electrician, a plumber and a mechanic.

Yoder also owns a storage business. He’s a member of Montezuma’s chamber of commerce, its development authority and the high school booster club. He coached youth football. He cuts the grass and paints the field at the football stadium. He’s an elder at Word of Life Church.

“I like giving back,” Yoder said. “I like to see these guys excel. They’re student-athletes, and I support them as student-athletes. I tell them to go get their education and if they can play football, great. If football can get you an education, that’s even better.”

Yoder said he has known who Roquan Smith was the past couple of years as he starred at middle linebacker for the Bulldog. But it has been only over the past few months that he truly has been part of Smith’s life.

“I’m a Roquan Smith fan; I’m not a Georgia fan,” said Yoder, who said he never went to college. “I’d adopt Roquan now if I had a chance. He’s a super nice guy, a good Christian man, got a head on his shoulders, courteous, hard-working. I’d take him any day. This just gets him a little money and lets him know what the world is like outside of the classroom and the ball field.”

Smith said he has learned more than the well-and-pump business from Yoder.

“Not just with pumps and drills, but spiritually also,” Smith says. “I go to church with him pretty often. I’ve learned a lot about life from him.”

Says Yoder: “We talk about water and mud and we talk about life.”

Yoder and Smith had a routine this spring. Smith would get out of school right around noon every day. Smith would walk out to his car, change into his workout gear — including the Golden Cleats — then head to the football field to run at least 10 wind sprints every day.

When he was finished, he would text Yoder that he was heading to the house. Yoder would pick him up in the van and take him to wherever there was work to be done that day.

And that went on every day until Smith showed up at UGA the first of June.

Non-Signing Day

Of course, that hard-working, salt-of-the-earth kid is not the person most people think of when they hear the name Roquan Smith. They tend to remember signing day and the nationally televised debacle that took place in early February.

With ESPNU cameras focusing in close during a live broadcast, his family members standing behind him and the entire school gathered in the gymnasium to see it unfold, Smith announced to the world that he would attend “the University of California-Los Angeles” on a football scholarship.

The ceremony itself already was marred when Smith ducked underneath the table where he was sitting to slip on blue-and-yellow UCLA gloves for dramatic effect. Trouble was, Smith couldn’t get them on. For nearly a minute, Smith disappeared from view as he struggled to get them over his hands. It made for some awkward live TV.

Finally, he emerged.

“I just wanted to get out and do my own thing and experience something different,” Smith told ESPN’s Rece Davis when asked why he chose the Bruins over the home-state Bulldogs.

But soon we would learn, it wasn’t just the gloves that weren’t fitting. Only minutes after the ceremony concluded, the phones of Smith and coach Larry Harold lit up with text messages from Georgia coaches. Most of them were coming from assistant coach John Lilly, Smith’s primary recruiter for the Bulldogs, and he was imploring Smith to get in touch with UCLA assistant coach Jeff Ulbrich and make sure Ulbrich was going to be in Los Angeles when Smith arrived.

The Bulldogs knew Ulbrich wouldn’t be. The Bruins’ linebacker coach had already accepted an assistant’s position with the Falcons. And for Smith, that was a deal breaker.

So Smith didn’t sign with anybody. Since he hadn’t yet signed his national-letter-of-intent with UCLA, Smith was not bound to anyone. But he waited a week-and-a-half – until Friday the 13th — before announcing he would instead be attending UGA.

It’s something that Smith is reluctant to discuss.

“I don’t want to talk about UCLA,” he said as he sat in the bleachers in Macon County’s football stadium on a sunny afternoon. “Everything happens for a reason, and Georgia was where my heart was at all along. People always say follow your heart, and that’s what I did with Georgia. I had dreamed of playing there. Now I get the opportunity most kids don’t get. So I’m going to try to take advantage of my dreams and live them out in Athens.”

Smith unwittingly became somewhat of a trend-setter in the process. After getting burned by the Bruins, he declined to sign a national letter-of-intent and instead inked only a non-binding grant-in-aid with Georgia.

Technically, that meant Smith remained a free agent and could enroll anywhere he wanted. But, to the relief of the Bulldogs, he reported with the rest of the incoming signees June 1 and is now subject to all the NCAA’s stifling eligibility and transfer rules.

“God makes no mistakes,” Smith said of the turn of events. “I put it in his hands and he took me where he knew I’d be happy. He led me in the right direction.”

As for UCLA, Smith said Ulbrich and coach Jim Mora apologized. Otherwise, Smith said he has tried to put the whole episode out of his mind.

“I’m just going to let it lay where it lay,” Smith said. “I try not to remember that day. I’m just happy to be a Georgia Bulldog. That’s my main focus just getting up there and doing what I can do to get on the field and help my teammates win championships.”

Great expectations

So now Smith’s future rests with Georgia. About that the Bulldogs are very excited. Getting Smith on board was another step toward addressing one of their areas of greatest need.

Smith, a four-star prospect, was one of five linebackers brought in this year and one of four slated to play inside linebacker. The Bulldogs lost Amarlo Herrera and Ramik Wilson, who accounted for more than 400 tackles the past two seasons.

That position got somewhat settled during the spring as Reggie Carter, Tim Kimbrough, Jake Ganus and Natrez Patrick showed promise. But the 6-foot-1, 210-pound Smith brings to the table a skill set few others can match.

“One thing about Roquan that’s different from anybody we have is just his athleticism,” Georgia coach Mark Richt said. “He has the ability to play all three downs, in our opinion.

“A lot of people think you have to have good corners to play man-to-man coverage, which is true,” Richt continued. “But if you’re playing man everywhere, your linebacker has to match up with running backs, too, and we think Roquan is really well-suited for that. We think he’s unique in that way. We definitely need him.”

Considering all the fuss and attention his recruitment brought, Smith knows the expectations for him are going to be high. But he’s OK with that.

“I know what I’ve got to do,” Smith said. “The only thing I can bring to the table is everything I’ve got. So that’s what I’m going to do, bring everything I’ve got. Whatever it leads to that’s what it leads to. I don’t expect anything to be given to me. I expect to have to earn it like a man should.”

Thanks to the way of life in Montezuma, the folks back home believe Smith is up for it.

“He’s been taught hard work,” Edmond said. “He’s been taught it’s important for a man to go out and earn his keep. You’ve got to work for your dollar that day and take pride in it. It’s that old time way of raising children: Earn your way.”