Anthony’s ticket out was football, though it took him a while to see it. He was the biggest kid at Northeastern High, but he wore glasses and was a bit of a nerd, and it was almost funny, the way he ran around with the other boys, eager to be just like them, Bryan says, not even aware that he was 10 times more athletic than anyone else, whether he was wrestling or shooting hoops or playing football. He had no ego. He wasn’t even that interested in football until his junior year, when he began to work out obsessively. Anthony was always fast, but now the coaches watched him get bigger and stronger and finally committed to playing.
All of his high school coaches use the same words to describe Anthony: enthusiastic, courteous, earnest, voluble. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing. He was a super good guy,” says David Brinson, his defensive line coach. “He just did things a little differently. He did things Anthony Smith’s way.” He didn’t really have any close friends, Brinson adds, but “I don’t remember him not getting along with anyone. I mean, he’d walk up to you and start talking to you about anything. He just . . . he liked to be where he was.”
And that seemed to be it, really, the standout quality about Anthony Smith at that point in his life—he was just glad to be there, out from under Donald’s heavy hand and whatever loneliness lay at home. Anthony once told Sports Illustrated that his brother Donald “had his own life to live, but what I needed was to be a son to somebody.” (Donald could not be reached for an interview.)
He found that figure in Alabama head coach Ray Perkins, who recruited Anthony to join the Crimson Tide. He kept mostly to himself at Alabama, not hanging around much with other players. He had better manners than the average 18-year-old, teammate and friend John Cassimus remembers, but some of the other guys found him intimidating, and it was hard to put a finger on exactly why. “If you looked at him, there was just something which didn’t click right,” Cassimus says. He would crack one of his dark little jokes that only a couple of guys found funny, and then he would fall silent. “He would create a significant amount of angst just sitting there and not saying anything. It was like going up to a dog and the dog is super beautiful, sweet-looking, wagging its tail, and it’s acting really friendly, but there’s something about that dog . . . You worry one day he’s gonna bite your hand.”
When Perkins left to coach the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after Anthony’s junior year, Anthony transferred to the University of Arizona. He majored in social and behavioral sciences, won first-team All-Pac-10 honors, and was an unexpected first-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Raiders. Anthony was surprised to be taken so early, but not that he went to the Raiders. “The team fits my personality and fits my style of play,” he said. “I like sort of roaming around in the field like a free spirit, sort of with a hard-core hell-bent-for-leather attitude.”
It was 1990, the height of gangsta rap and crack cocaine, and the Raiders had become the beloved team of N.W.A and Ice Cube (who would later make an ESPN documentary on the team, Straight Outta L.A.) and every Blood and Crip who claimed the City of Angelz as his own. Anthony landed in LA as a kind of minor deity—to rich white sports fans and gangbangers alike—and still with everything to prove.
At first he seemed to thrive, despite missing his entire rookie year because of knee surgery. He spent some time volunteering for a mentors program with the mayor’s office, heading into South Central LA, often staying overnight in Compton. “I was lonely, away from home, didn’t have anybody to look after me,” he told Sports Illustrated. “So maybe if I’m tired or don’t feel well, I stay the night with a kid’s family. Next day, I wake up, my car’s washed . . . and my laundry’s done.”
Over the next three seasons, he missed only one game, racking up 36 sacks, and in 1994 the Raiders rewarded him with a four-year $7.6 million contract. He’d been enjoying his paychecks since the moment he entered the league, but now the money was really flowing. He bought Donald a new Corvette every year, according to Bryan; he bought several houses for himself, including a five-bedroom white-brick palace on a hill overlooking the Pacific in Playa del Rey. But something angry and aggrieved had started ticking in his brain. “The way I’ve seen people react to me, Anthony Smith the Raider, has been sickening,” he told the Los Angeles Times, going on to complain about the women who loved his money and his fame, not him, and the friends who always had their hands out.
“He used to talk about his family asking for $30,000 like it was $300,” says former running back Harvey Williams, Anthony’s teammate and close friend. “Anthony always said he didn’t want to be broke after football. He’d say, ‘When I’m done, I want to be able to relax and chill for the rest of my life.’”