A preseason, 17-yard game-winning field goal by linebacker Billy Ray Smith with no time left on the clock was all the opportunity he needed to peacock a little bit. After all, eight seconds earlier, Smith thought his 34-yarder had won the game, only to be disallowed because officials penalized the linebacker for having athletic tape over his shoes.
The rules forbid tape or any foreign substance on a player’s kicking foot.
“You guys didn’t talk to me when I was a linebacker,” said Smith afterward. “It was time for me to put up or shut up. I always thought there was more pressure when a 300-pound guard was coming your way rather than kicking a little football.”
After a penalty moved the Chargers back into field goal range, Smith came back on to try again. This time without a shoe.
Just as he maximized everything he touched for so much of his ebullient life, Billy Ray knocked the ball through the uprights and gave everyone on his sideline a grin so wide it felt, momentarily, as if good things could actually happen to good people.
“This was the most fun I’ve had without getting banged up in a long time. The funny thing was, they didn’t say anything (about the tape) after I missed (an earlier field goal).” said Smith. “After I’m finished being a football player, I think I’ll be a kicker.”
Ask him to rush the passer, and he could get you 11 sacks. Ask him to switch sides from weak to strong to cover tight ends, and he could get you 5 interceptions. If your kicker pulled his hamstring in warm-ups, you could ask even Billy Ray Smith to kick field goals, as he did in 1986.
You didn’t have to ask him to be your friend, though. That would be too gauche. It went unspoken. Later it even became a cliché for callers who got on the air with him on his radio show. A shorthand for how well we all felt like we knew the big rascal. “Great friends.”
And when his body could no longer play linebacker for the Chargers, he became an emissary for the game and the city that proudly adopted him, though he did not become a kicker.
Smith, who spent his entire 10-year NFL career in San Diego before launching a second career in media, died at 64 last week.
A statement released by his family said that he “faced his long journey with dementia caused by CTE with unmatched bravery, dignity, and strength.”
The news came with the shock that his declining health had been preciously protected by the people who knew him best; the people who knew that Billy Ray’s gregarious laughter, his firm handshake, his personification of Southern Californian sunshine could no longer rise to the standards by which he had lived his oversized life.
And in doing so, they shielded us from pity. Not just for Smith and his family, but from ourselves, and our interminable appetites for a sport that we know destroys the bodies and minds of its virtuosos.
Perhaps his final years will be lamented for their contrast to the measure of celebrity he courted, or earned, beforehand; because Billy Ray Smith lived a very public life. A charmed life, he would readily admit.
He was easily the most approachable star athlete you could ever cross paths with. The type of player that a whole city knows by his first name. Well, both of them. They do things differently in the South.
Born into a football family in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1961, his father, Billy Ray Sr., played in the NFL for thirteen years with the Steelers, Rams, and most memorably the Colts. The year he was born, his father registered a career-high 13.5 sacks for the Baltimore Colts. His father’s first career provided Billy Ray the opportunity to wander NFL sidelines amongst some of the game’s titans as a boy.
“When I say I’m the luckiest guy in the world, I was the luckiest kid in the world,” said Smith. “Every summer I would be a regular at Colts practices with Johnny Unitas, and Mike Curtis, and Bubba Smith, and Billy Ray Smith, and Don Shula, and all the great players and coaches that the Colts had in the sixties. I was just right there walking around. When I got out of college and made the jump to the pros, it wasn’t a big deal to me because I’d been there.”
Growing up in Plano, Texas, Smith’s journey began, as all football folk stories seem to, in a small town with a voracious devotion to the high school sport. Arguably the best player to ever play for the Plano Wildcats, Smith led the team to back-to-back state championship games in 1977-78, where he played both offensive guard and defensive tackle. Named All Metro Defensive Player of the Year in his senior year before following his father’s footsteps to play for the Razorbacks in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
As a heavily recruited high school star, Smith had universities lining up to sign him, including Texas and Notre Dame.
“The story went that his dad said he could walk to Texas or drive a new car to Fayetteville,” said Keith Burns, Billy Ray’s Razorbacks teammate and roommate. “But that was just talk. His dad didn’t get him a new car. He did not have a car on campus until our junior year.”
As for driving a new car, that wasn’t far-fetched for many other Southwestern Conference campuses in those days. Arkansas players had heard rumors of gifted vehicles at SMU and Texas A&M, but that was not the custom for Razorback stars.
On his recruiting trip to Fayetteville, Smith Jr. and Burns weren’t sure what type of cars the Razorbacks could even procure.
“It was winter, and we landed just after an ice storm had hit,” Burns said. “Bob Cope was the coach in charge. He picked Billy Ray and me up at Drake Field, and we headed to campus. There was a hill that we couldn’t climb, so Billy Ray and I pushed the car about 20 yards.”
Imagine the Instagram Live roasting a recruit would give a coach now if they asked them to push a car up an icy hill in an antebellum December.
“Years later, when I was coaching with Bob at Pacific, he told me that asking two recruits to push his car on ice was about the dumbest thing he ever did,” said Burns. “He figured after that neither one of us was coming to Arkansas.”
Odd as it may sound, Smith, who did not choose Notre Dame—at the risk of disappointing his father—still wound up playing for Lou Holtz. Football circles are small, and serendipitous like that.
Despite his celebrity status as an athlete, Smith wasn’t a normal football star. As the owner of a personality both engaging and witty, he inevitably became everyone’s favorite interview. Throughout his life, Smith loved to perform the minor magic trick of imitating a Cro-Magnon dolt to someone meeting him for the first time, before transforming into an erudite comic.
While some players shirk from the burden of a large shadow, Smith seemed determined to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his father. This explains why he waited until junior high to use his full birth name. Billy Ray Smith Jr. forged his own legacy at Arkansas, lettering four years at defensive end and serving as team captain in 1982.
By the time he graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in finance, Smith had set a school record with 63 tackles for loss among his 229 total tackles. In 1982, he won the Knute Rockne Award as the best defensive player in the country and was named a unanimous All-American for the second straight year.
“I think that he has finally made everybody forget about me,” said Billy Ray Smith Sr.. “That’s always been the point, hasn’t it?”
From 1975 until 1983, the San Diego Chargers front office did not use a single first-round draft choice on a defensive player. Coach Coryell’s offensive genius entailed that points would be scored in volume. The other side of the ball, quixotically, gave ground like plots of Oklahoman pasture in 1889.
In modern parlance, the Air Coryell Chargers were stat-maxxing, on both sides of the ball.
Those were the halcyon days when all the Chargers needed was an average defense, maybe even a mediocre one, to dream of trophies and champagne.
That changed in 1983. Or, at least, it began to.
At the time, Billy Ray Smith was the highest defensive player the Chargers had ever drafted.*
Asked to play out of position at middle linebacker, Smith began his professional career in 1983; a season in which games were won, 41-34 and 41-38, and lost, 41-29 and 34- 31.
“That was a nachos-and-beer defense,” said Smith. “Because everyone went for nachos and beer when the defense was on the field. They wanted to make it back to their seats before Dan (Fouts) got back onto the field.”
Weaker defenses must take chances. Introduce a little anarchy. On many Sundays, a Charger blitz would result in a big play for the opponent because it exposed a weakness elsewhere where the defenders had vacated space.
“Exposed is a good word,” said Smith. “Sometimes, we were indecently exposed.”
“Every week, there were 10 new guys in the huddle,” said Smith. “My father used to say, don’t even learn a guy’s name for two years. But some of these guys weren’t around two games.”
“Here’s an accepted thing,” said former running back Charger Hank Bauer. “You’re a second-class citizen if you played defense for the Chargers in the 1980s. We had an offensive coach. We had offensive star power. And I’m sure those guys felt like second-class citizens.”
But as that defense began to add talent, and as the years went by, it quietly became the strength of the team. Draft picks allocated to blue-chip defenders included cornerback Gill Byrd, defensive ends Lee Williams, Leslie O’Neil, and Burt Grossman. Playing the Chargers defense was no longer a picnic at the beach.
“Basically, in 1983, we started concentrating on bringing in good defensive players,” said Smith. “Maybe we weren’t really emphasizing defense then, but at least it was starting to balance out.”
As a stand-up defensive end and pass rusher at Arkansas, playing inside linebacker was never comfortable, so when the Chargers asked Smith where he wanted to play, he asked to move to the outside again.
“It was a case of where I thought I could help the team most,” he said.
He didn’t complain about how the staff was using him. He didn’t make any waves by throwing teammates under the bus. In a losing locker room—where fingers frequently point everywhere but yourself, where “rebuilding” has outlasted presidential term limits, where trade requests and holdouts hold can knock franchises backwards—Billy Ray stayed the optimist. He asked to play outside linebacker again.
Which, if you consider how he framed it, was classic Billy Ray. I just want to be my best so that the team can be its best.
“Maybe I look at it too much like I did in high school and college,” said Smith. “But I just have a tremendous amount of loyalty to the people that have supported me and believed in me.”
Ever the good soldier, Smith rarely said anything out of turn, and whenever he did speak, his words were both thoughtful and light-hearted. In time around town, Smith became the team’s most prominent player; the one you put on the billboards, the schedules, the newspaper ads to sell tickets; the player you sent to speak at a school or sign casts at a hospital.
“They were patient with me during the time it took for me to start excelling and reaching that level in the NFL where I’m considered one of the better players,” said Smith.
“I feel like I owe something to the community. I owe something to the team. I owe something to the owner. He’s the one who put his confidence in me and the rest of the players by paying us ridiculous amounts of money to play a game for a living.”
Smith was voted team MVP by his teammates in 1987. The following year he was nominated as an NFL Man of the Year candidate for his charitable work in the community.
The giving also gave back. Having devoted himself to dozens of charities across San Diego, he met ABC 10 News anchor, Kimberly Hunt, at a United Cerebral Palsy telethon. The two married in 1990 in what was a star-studded event locally. Two years later, they welcomed a daughter, Savannah.
In a way, Smith was courting a relationship with the media even before that. Unlike most athletes, he never saw the press as oppositional. He treated everyone the same way, whether they were people he bumped into at the gas station or if they were gazillionaire owners of sports franchises. His handshake could knock you off balance, but his generosity with his time is what floored you.
It was jocularity, yes. But in the most wholesome sense that anyone ever could expect from a giant man who unironically sported the mustache/mullet combo and trafficked in professional violence.
Admired by anyone who crossed his path, Smith was a bridge builder, in football, as in life.
He was one of the most important cogs that bridged the gap between two distinct eras of Charger football. Unfortunately for Smith, by the time Don Coryell’s defense began carrying its own water, Coryell had long gone fishing in it. The puckish outdoorsman retired to the San Juan Islands in Washington in 1986.
Defensive units are interesting in that the better they are, the less they play. Which, ironically, is what happened to Smith in 1992 when head coach Bobby Ross was hired.
As the rebuilt defense became one of the staunchest units in football, Billy Ray’s health prohibited him from reaping the soil he had fruitlessly tilled.
A torn tendon located just above his hamstring stubbornly refused to heal, and so he spent his final season on injured reserve; a spectator to the team winning 11 of their last 12 games and it’s first playoff game in a decade.
“It’s a heartbreaker,” said Smith. “It’s like working for six months with your daughter to get her to walk and then being gone when she takes her first step. It’s that kind of deal, except this is working with something for 10 years, and then not being there for it.”
“I’ve got a beautiful wife, a beautiful baby girl, and I still am a part of the team, albeit somewhat removed from the action. If I were to sit around and say, ‘Why me?’ that would drive me nuts. I realize how lucky I have been.”
When his playing days were over, he would tell you that he lucked up again because people liked hearing him talk about sports. In addition to television work at ABC 10, Smith teamed with Scott Kaplan for “Scott and B.R.” on multiple platforms, anchored “Chargers Power Report” on Fox 6, “Chargers Preview” and “Aztecs Sports Weekly” on NBC 4 and was a contributor to Fox’s national college football and NFL shows. Here is a video of him interviewing Chargers Hall of Fame receiver Lance Alworth.
As the tributes have poured in since the news of his passing, we can begin to know how deeply he is already missed.
“Anyway, I can’t worry about what anybody writes or says about me. The only way a sportswriter can hurt me is to run on the field and tackle me. Even then, it better be from my blind side. If I see him coming, chances are I’ll get one shot at his knees.”
-Billy Ray Smith
“But he wasn’t merely a great football player,” said Chargers owner Dean Spanos. “He was, truly, larger than life. Always smiling. Lighting up every room he walked into. Infectious laughter. The kind of friend a friend should be. That was Billy Ray.”
“When someone who brought so much positivity into the world leaves us, it’s hard to process. Hard to accept,” said Spanos. “That’s how I feel right now, and I know I’m not alone.”
You didn’t have to know Billy Ray Smith to think that he was already your friend. As one of the smartest and funniest players who played of the “wrong side of the ball” under Air Coryell, Smith became a indelible part of the community long after he ceased being a witty quote for sports writers. The outpouring of grief felt by his loss in San Diego should stand for a measure of his memory, but hopefully this article explains how and why that came to be.
Dominic Mucciacito, the Managing Editor of Rivers Lake Yacht Club, has followed pro football since he moved to San Diego in 1989. Blending an eye for theater, cinema, and style, he weaves contemporary subjects into an anecdotal tapestry. His long-form features—which focus primarily on the intersections of myth-making and anthropology—appear here and in the Los Angeles Journal. He refuses to use AI to speed up his process, so trust that every word has a human conception.
