Falcons coach spends free time fly-fishing on quiet rivers

Just one more cast, Smith declared. One last whip of the fly rod. One last pass of the lure-of-the-day – a wispy brown stonefly – before shutting down this afternoon escape from football.

As all good fishing stories should, this one concludes with a fish on, a rod bending, a reel singing in staccato bursts.

"That's a nice fish," Michael called out from the bank, as Smith set the hook and began the day's final little fight. Now it was time to coach the coach.

"Please keep tension on the line," Michael implored.

"Let him run now."

"He's bigger than we thought. I don't know if you'll be able to. . .

Cutting him off, Smith shouted, "Don't talk that way." You lead the Falcons back from the dead, you certainly don't want to hear about the impossibility of landing one fish.

Walking the trout back and forth, holding the rod high and keeping as much pressure on the fish as he dared, Smith worked it for 10 minutes.

"It's fourth-and-goal at the 2, coach. It's all up to you," Michael said, bringing the net near.

"He's wearing my wrist out," Smith happily reported.

Man 1, Fish 0. In victory, Smith cradled a fat rainbow, nearly two-feet long, weighing around 8 pounds, then released it back to the river to grow some more.

Such is the play-by-play of one coach's off-season.

Smith's quiet time

Whenever he can, the Falcons 49-year-old, second-year coach seeks these places far away from the noise and violence of the NFL. While making his place in this world on a raging sideline, he chooses to spend his free time on a quiet river, in a pursuit that, Washington Irving wrote, "tends to produce a gentleness of spirit, a pure serenity of mind."

To see another side of the NFL's Coach of the Year requires only an appetite for simple pleasures. You can tell a lot about a guy by what he does when no one is watching.

Growing up on the east coast of Florida, Smith fished because it was there. Find a dock and introduce some mangrove snapper to the water's other side.

When Smith went away to play for East Tennessee in 1977, the father of a classmate introduced him to fly fishing. They'd hike in for hours to find a remote stretch of stream, fish, eat a snack of cheese and canned sardines, and make the long hike back.

Much of Smith's early career kept him in Tennessee – he was an assistant at Tennessee Tech from 1987-98 – and in touch with fly fishing. Only took him 10 years to get comfortable with a fly rod in his hands, he said.

Smith has tried the other extreme of the sport, fishing deep water off Cape Hatteras, N.C., for bluefin tuna. But, really, if you spend your whole working life in the company of behemoths, why do the same with your hobby?

And he hardly was in need of the macho fix provided by big game fishing.

"A friend hooked up with a 550-pounder," Smith said. "Looked too much like work. It was like reeling in a Volkswagen. I did it once and that was enough."

Moving back to Florida didn't mean a change of tactics. In his five seasons as defensive coordinator in Jacksonville (2003-07), Smith still got away to fish. He didn't need a big boat, or a lot of gadgets. Just a kayak and a fly rod and some stolen hours to work the backwater for redfish.

Football and fishing don't easily co-exist – "If I get out 10 times a year, that's about the extent of it," Smith said.

And spare time became all the more precious when he was hired to his first head-coaching gig with the Falcons last season.

There was a wrecked franchise to make over into one of 2008's big surprises (11-5, and a playoff loss to Super Bowl-bound Arizona).

Look at the way he fishes and get a clue to how Smith did it: Fundamentally. Quietly. Without pretense.

New scouting trips

Scouting new fishing holes around Atlanta remains an on-going process. Smith can walk from his home to a stretch of the Chattahoochee to get in a few quick casts. Through an acquaintance, he was introduced last spring to Michael and his River North Fly Fishing operation about an hour away from the Falcons Flowery Branch headquarters.

That first time there "he got it handed to him," said Michael. Smith was unfamiliar with the scale of the trout that Michael nurtures on his section of the Soque (pronounced SO-kwee). His trout can beat up your trout. And break off the line the moment a fisherman leans just a little too heavily against its pull.

"The second and third times he got it figured out."

With time running out to trout fish – before the weather turns too warm – Smith last week packed up his SUV and, after one of the Falcons late-morning workouts, fled like a truant.

He had been fishing only one other time this year, while taking his wife and daughter camping in Tennessee. There was a now-or-never feel to this getaway, as he hurried up I-985, then down progressively smaller roads leading to two ruts in a big field and a break in the trees on the bank of the Soque.

An early 20th Century writer wondered: "What are more delightful than one's emotions when approaching a trout stream for the initial cast?"

The 21st Century head coach echoed the sentiment his own way: "Can you feel the excitement?" Smith said to no one in particular as he began gearing up. "There's nothing like putting your waders on." Especially with the dark forms of big fish showing up against the river's sandy bottom.

At River North, Smith found a sanctuary. The Michaels have spent so much time traipsing the outdoors that they haven't really paid much attention to football. Nobody here is going to talk about deficiencies in the secondary or Michael Vick's salary cap implications.

"You had a pretty good team, right?" wondered Eddie's father, Doug, upon meeting Smith for the first time. He required no further detail.

Freed to fish, Smith showed himself a fully engaged angler. He whooped. He hollered. He muttered and sputtered according to what was going on at the other end of the line. Every time he had one on, and it threw itself into the air, Smith yelped as if he had never seen such acrobatics.

In all, it is a somewhat more relaxing afternoon matching wits with a trout than it is with John Fox.

On his first cast, Smith hooked up, and then landed a nice fish. Two hours later, on the last, he caught – and released – his seventh and largest of the day.

Yes, he keeps score.

But as it always goes, Smith ran out of time before he ran out of fish.