Olesker: Bye, Bubba, Bye

On his most glorious days, Charles Aaron (Bubba) Smith heard the sporting cries of “Kill, Bubba, kill,” and roused himself to knock down blockers and chase terrified quarterbacks across Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium.

But his death Wednesday, at 66, apparently from “natural causes,” reminds us again—particularly so soon after John Mackey’s death—of the toll on their bodies paid by professional football players we once considered indestructible.

In his prime, Bubba was a behemoth. He was 6-feet-7-inches and never one of those blubbery 300-pounders you see on pro football fields today. He was fast, he was powerful, and he played on Baltimore Colts teams when they almost never lost—except for the one loss, to the New York Jets in Super Bowl III, which still rankles around here.

In his five years in Baltimore, those Colts—with Bubba playing alongside teammates such as Mike Curtis and Billy Ray Smith, and Fred Miller and Rick Volk—won a remarkable 53 regular season games while losing only 13. In three of those years, they lost a combined total of just four games.

They went to the Super Bowl twice in those five years, losing to the Jets but somewhat redeeming themselves when they returned to beat Dallas.

Kill, Bubba, kill, indeed.

But, behind the ferocious football caricature there lurked the gentle, good-natured giant that Smith went on to portray in a series of “Police Academy” movies and Miller Lite beer commercials.

He really was a smart, sensitive, funny, gracious man when he wasn’t trying to bury some opposing quarterback.

As a young guy writing features on the Colts for the old News American newspaper, I can still remember Bubba crushing the Minnesota Vikings’ quarterback, Joe Kapp, in the 1968 playoff game here on their way to Super Bowl III.

After he’d knock Kapp down, Bubba was always solicitous enough to help him back to his feet.

In the Vikings’ locker room after the game, when I asked Kapp about Bubba’s gesture, Kapp snapped, “Never mind him picking me up. What about all the times he was knocking me down?”

But that was only part of Bubba’s persona.

In his retirement from pro football, he was a natural comic figure in the hugely popular Miller Lite commercials in which a whole succession of lovable ex-jocks would holler, “Tastes Great!” “Less Filling!” at each other.

Those commercials were great fun—but there was a price that was paid for them, and Bubba came to understand it. Years of TV pitches helped make the consumption (and over-consumption) of beer seem a natural rite of passage to young people—many of them, in fact, far too young to be drinking.

At the height of the commercials’ popularity, Bubba walked away from them.

“I didn’t know what it was doing to the kids,” he said. “Once I saw it, I thought, ‘I’m not going to do it any more.’ How much money can you make before you ruin everybody?”

He had a soft spot for a lot of kids. When the Colts trained at the old Western Maryland College every summer, youngsters would flock to him after practice. Bubba was happy to sign autographs. He was even happier to kneel on one knee and let some of the kids pour entire buckets of water over his parched, exhausted head.

He lived on Woodcrest Avenue, in northwest Baltimore’s Cheswolde community, for several years. One of his neighbors had a basketball court in his back yard, and one afternoon Bubba came over to shoot a few hoops with the neighborhood kids. He brought a buddy with him, a tall kid named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who showed some real potential.

One other thing about Bubba’s sensitivity. He knew he was good—he was All Pro the year the Colts won the Super Bowl, and All-Conference twice—but he also knew who he wasn’t.

He wasn’t Gino Marchetti.

Gino was the immortal defensive end by whom all others were judged—and all came up short. He was the Colts’ leader when they won two straight NFL championships, and neither teammates nor fans would allow comparisons between him and anyone who followed, including Bubba Smith.

And Bubba understood this, and talked about it good-naturedly one night at a Colts’ reunion long after he’d retired.

“I wanted to be like Gino,” he said, laughing ruefully. “I even bought his hamburgers. If I’d have stayed in Baltimore, I’d have had some Bubbas.”

He wasn’t Gino, but he was Bubba—and that was pretty exceptional. He heard the cries of “kill, Bubba, kill,” when he played his violent game. But he was a gentle and gracious man off the field.