Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images
He’s back, folks.
He’s not quite back home, but he’s back.
It’s been 16 years since the 49ers drafted Alex Smith as the face of the franchise, and seven since they traded him to Kansas City.
And it’s been more than two years since the now 36-year-old Smith nearly lost his life and right leg after a gruesome compound fracture. He was signed to a new, four-year, $94 million deal, finally getting his shot again to be a franchise quarterback, and it was gone.
Despite every logical indication that he would obviously never play again, let alone start again, that’s exactly what he’s done.
Smith spoke to Bay Area reporters on Thursday, saying that his time in San Francisco feels “like a lifetime ago.”
We’re so far removed that Smith said the contest doesn’t “mean anything,” in terms of it being personal. He said he’s looking forward to Sunday’s game, but it being in Arizona even further diminishes the idea of it being an emotional return home.
Still, Smith recalled how those early years, when the 49ers couldn’t buy a winning season—and he missed all of the 2008 season due to a broken shoulder—taught him how to deal with expectations and anxiety, when he underwhelmed and was a constant target of criticism on a team which was not built to properly support him.
His advice to young quarterbacks? Don’t try and be a people-pleaser, as Smith said he tried, and failed to be.
“Nobody has it easy. You’re never gonna make everybody happy, don’t try,” Smith said. “I think, be confident in who you are. Be comfortable in your own skin and go out there and own that. I think that was my biggest problem, certainly those first few years was really trying to have everybody like me.
It’s just so unrealistic and not practical. It’s never going to happen and it’s not a great way to live life or play football. So I think exactly that; be comfortable with who you are in your own skin, your own style of play, not trying to be anybody else.”
The struggles of those early years, and the success that he and the organization finally found in the Harbaugh era were invaluable, he said. They helped build a confidence that he said he’s not sure he would have now, which is apparent in every aspect of how he carries himself.
As San Francisco’s season sputters, Smith is in the midst of a renaissance, guiding a previously hapless Washington Football Team with a dynamic, young defense, to three-straight wins in four-straight starts. Both teams are 5-7, but Washington is tied for the NFC East lead, and San Francisco needs to win out and get help from multiple teams to make the playoffs.
It defies the synapses that fire in our brain, which convey to us what is and isn’t possible. Anyone who watched the E:60 documentary on Smith’s injury, who saw his lower right leg cut down literally to the bone, had those synapses send the message that his career is over.
And still…
Here he is.
It’s okay to feel uncomfortable when you see Smith drop back, worrying about another injury, like the massive gash that he suffered on his left leg last week. Seeing him return to the field for the first time had my stomach in knots, and I’m sure his wife and family’s.
Smith has made clear how invaluable his wife, Elizabeth, is to him. In the early days of his recovery, when the notion of returning to football was this ethereal, untouchable goal, he needed his “wife-nurse,” as he called her, to go to the bathroom, and for IVs and other treatment. He required constant, hourly attention throughout the day.
At that time, he said his wife, friends and family basically humored him on his goal of returning to the NFL. “Sure, yeah, go for it. It’s great,” he recalled as being their tone. But the conversation turned when his bone fully healed and he received medical clearance to return this summer.
“At first, I think she would have said, ‘Hell no,’ Smith said. “When I did finally get the clearance this summer… that’s certainly when those conversations got very, very real. She and I had several [conversations] about, I was finally on the doorstep.
It wasn’t a distant kind of thing and it was right there in front of us and what did we want to do? At that point, I think obviously things have changed a lot and certainly she was fully and is fully behind me.”
As cliche as it is to say he’s defied the odds, it’s a fact. What Smith is doing is closer to impossible than improbable.
But there he’ll be on Sunday, facing his old franchise, a team on a road to nowhere, while Smith has a chance to catapult his franchise—one which has so many freshly severed roots to the 49ers in Kyle Shanahan, Trent Williams and Jordan Reed—towards the playoffs.
A win for Washington will continue to usher in a new era under Ron Rivera that they’ll hope is defined by competency. And a loss for San Francisco allows the franchise to fully accept their reality, that the playoffs are definitively out of reach, and sink closer towards a top-10 draft pick; one which, ironically, could be for the next franchise quarterback.
In a weak NFC, who’s to say Washington’s path is any less viable than the Saints or Packers?
Logic might say otherwise, but Smith is evidence it might not be worth much.
