When you drill down into the Georgia earth, you need to add water.
And when you’re standing on the edge of a hole, shoveling while a digging rig churns into the ground, you’re going to get dirty.
“You have a good bit of mud on you,” Roquan Smith said. “You get mud on your face if the machine’s spinning.”
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Smith, the inside linebacker drafted No. 8 by the Bears, spent part of his junior and senior year in high school with a shovel in his hand. To make extra money, he worked for Roy Yoder’s company digging wells around his small Georgia town after school.
“You’ve heard of Lex Luger, The Total Package?” Yoder said, referencing the professional wrestler that made his name in the South. “Wrong answer. Roquan Smith is The Total Package.”
It’s because of his mindset more than his football skills. Yoder said it got so muddy that workers needed the right attitude: getting muddy wasn’t work, it was play.
So was football practice.
“When he got out there to play the game, he was literally playing like, ‘I’m playing in the mud,’ ” Yoder said. “Because he’d done all the hard work.”
The Bears are betting that his work ethic turns into NFL success. Two years ago, they made the same evaluation of Leonard Floyd, another small-town Georgia kid who played for the Bulldogs. A few years apart, the outside linebacker once helped in the watermelon fields about an hour’s drive from Smith’s job site.
“There’s no trick to it,” Smith said. “Just hard work.
“It gives you perspective, I feel like. It shows you there’s a lot of tougher jobs out there than playing the game you love: football.
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Smith’s hometown was incorporated in 1854 when the town of Traveler’s Rest, Georgia, moved to be closer to the new train station. Residents, many of them soldiers who’d returned home from the Mexican-American War, named the town after the Aztec ruler they’d learned about across the border: Montezuma.
When Smith went about 150 miles north to college, the name traveled with him. He became ‘‘The Montezuma Missile.”
Smith even made a little missile noise with his mouth Friday — “Pewwww!” — when describing the violent tackling style and quickness that do the moniker proud.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart has compared Smith, who left after his junior year, to his former player C.J. Mosley, a three-time Pro Bowls. They have the same ability to run in space and cover receivers. Bears coach Matt Nagy said his run-stuffing ability, on top of the coverage, was why he “automatically becomes a top 10 pick.”
“He is one of those guys who can just uncoil when he hits,” Bears general manager Ryan Pace said. “So when he strikes a guy, it’s very impactful.”
He’s no mere projectile. Smith, an economics major, has been keeping a diary about his draft experience. His feel for diagnosing runs is about more than brute strength, and comes from a lifetime spent at linebacker.
When he was 6, the local Pop Warner coach — Smith knows him only as Duke — knocked on his mother’s door. Knowing his older brother was athletic, Duke wondered if the little boy wanted to try out for football.
Smith’s mom said she’d ask him.
“Pretty much after that,” he said, “I was there every practice ever since.”
Soon, he was playing linebacker and quarterback. The positions share the same traits.
“You’re the leader of the team,” Smith said. “You’re right in the middle so it’s hard to avoid you and whatnot. Everything has to pretty much come through you.”
As a 176-pound freshman at Macon County High School, though, he was more focused on playing forward on his basketball team. Halfway though his high school career, football coach Larry Harold convinced him he was chasing the wrong dream.
“He was like, “Football is going to be your bread and butter,’ ” Smith said. “Ever since then I knew at the end of the day football was going to be it.”
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There were close to 1,000 people in his high school gymnasium in February 2015. ESPN was airing his signing-day news conference live.
Smith, though, had no idea what he was going to do. Hours before his announcement, he learned that UCLA assistant Jeff Ulbrich, who’d recruited him, was leaving to take a job with the Falcons.
Smith was going to commit to the Bruins but wasn’t sure he should anymore.
Still, there was a show to put on.
“Man, you can’t just walk out of the gym and say, ‘Hey, I’m calling signing day off for today,’ ” he said. “That would’ve been pretty hilarious. I knew I had to do something, but I knew at the end of the day I didn’t have to sign those papers.”
In front of the cameras, with a smile plastered on his face, he slipped on a pair of UCLA gloves, claiming later they were the first he saw.
And then he refused to sign the official paperwork.
The moment Smith had looked forward to since he first played as a kid had been turned upside-down. By comparison, sitting inside AT&T Stadium on Thursday night, waiting to hear his name called, was easy.
Rather than panic, he waited and made a mature decision. He eventually decided to sign with his home-state Bulldogs.
“I’ve been at Georgia for my three years,” he said. “I couldn’t envision myself being anywhere else.”
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When he sat out spring practice with a shoulder injury last year, Smith was so influential with young players that he earned a nickname from Mel Tucker, the former Bears defensive coordinator who serves in the same role at Georgia: “Coach Smith.”
The year before, teammate Javon Wims, the Bears’ seventh round pick Saturday, watched as the linebacker identified every offensive play during a Georgia scrimmage — even ones they hadn’t run in previous practices — before the snap.
He told his cornerbacks what routes the receivers were running. He was right.
“Roquan, he’s just an animal …” Wims said. “He’s hard-working. He’s a leader by nature. He sets the standard. He sets the tone.”
When Pace and Nagy took Smith to dinner at Maevery Public House in Lake Bluff during his visit, they already knew what his leadership looked like on film — directing teammates with hand signals, identifying plays early and attacking the ball. It was the clearest in the biggest games: he had sacks at Notre Dame, against rival Georgia Tech and in the SEC title game. His best performance — 13 tackles, including 2½ for loss, and one sack — came in the national-title game loss to Alabama.
He was just as mature, intense and no-nonsense in person.
“You get to the draft process and the recruiting process of where you get to bring them in and meet the person, and it’s a slam dunk when you meet him,” Nagy said. “He’s a guy that is the same way, for instance, at dinner than what you see on the field. It’s hard to not like something like that.”
That’s why, when Nagy was handed the telephone Thursday night, he welcomed Smith to the Bears by bringing him full-circle.
“Guess what?” Nagy said. “We’re picking your gloves this time, buddy.”
