The Best American Sports Writing 2014(130)
After reading an article about the young Raider, Denise Matthews, aka Vanity, now a born-again Christian, arranged a meeting with Anthony, eight years her junior. Three days later she proposed to him, and one month after they met, he made her his second wife. (He’d had a brief marriage to a young actress a few years earlier.) But this new marriage too quickly turned to dust, recalls Dwayne Simon, a friend of Anthony’s from that time. Dwayne remembers one uncomfortable team-family breakfast before a Raiders game when Denise said or did something that made Anthony furious. “He grabbed her by the arm, made her sit down,” says Dwayne, a producer with the L.A. Posse and Def Jam who arranged music for Raiders games. “She tried to get up, but he snatched her back down: ‘Get down!’ I was really scared for Vanity. I thought he was going to break her friggin’ arm.”
At the same time, Smith was telling one of his rich-white-businessman friends that he had helped Denise get a kidney. (Her body was hard hit from years of drug use before she swore off that life and turned to God.) What a good guy. What an angry one. Was one of those Anthonys more true than the other? Or had he just become a violent man who knew how to shine?
A year and a half after they married, Anthony and Denise were done. (Shortly after they separated, in 1997, Anthony was arrested for domestic violence involving another woman and sentenced to anger management classes.) Finally, sometime in 1997 or ’98, he started a relationship that would last. His third and current wife, Teresa Obello White, is a graduate of Stanford University and Pepperdine law school. She was working for a personal-injury firm when they met, and he told friends she would make a wonderful mother to their children.
He brought her to Elizabeth City to introduce her to his family, Bryan recalls. But what started as a Fourth of July barbecue quickly turned into a confrontation between Donald and Anthony, according to Bryan, with Donald becoming threatening enough that Anthony grabbed Teresa and they left for the airport. Anthony and Donald never talked again. “Anthony felt abandoned,” Bryan says. “And that’s his biggest issue.”
After a mediocre 1997 season, he parted ways with the Raiders, spinning him into a panic until he signed with the Broncos in July 1998. But then, abruptly, he let it all go. While at training camp in Denver that August, Anthony called his personal assistant back in LA. “Get the Hummer and come get me,” he said. He had decided he was done with football. On the way back home, they stopped in Las Vegas, where Anthony and Teresa tied the knot.
So at 31 years old, Anthony Smith was retired. He had busted-up fingers and bad knees. He was newly married for the third time, but this time he felt he’d found the right woman. Soon he would be a father. There was plenty of adoration and goodwill out there still, though a lot less money. He stood at that cliff’s edge familiar to every newly retired pro athlete.
When an athlete leaves the game, he goes from always being told what to do to free-falling through a world without structure. Now he has to find a way to survive. How does he put food on the table? His athletic talent, his pro experience, is not translatable to the civilian world. It’s a terrifying moment. How does he find a new skill? Learning one takes time, patience, faith. For those who are used to making things happen by sheer will and force and power . . . how do they channel their frustration at this slower, craftier world? Those short on patience might object to starting at the bottom of the learning curve; they might start to look for shortcuts.
Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the Federal Trade Commission—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. “He was bringing the edge around, and I didn’t like it,” Bryan says. When he asked Anthony why, Anthony told him, “These guys care about me. They’re genuine dudes.”
“I couldn’t understand it,” Bryan says. “You’re married to a lawyer. You’re living in Playa del Rey. Why would you be involved with these kinds of people?” He began to back away, unhappily, because he felt like now he was abandoning Anthony too. Dwayne Simon didn’t like Anthony’s new friends either. “That’s when I stopped hanging around,” he says. “That’s when he started to change. He got that scowl, that ugly look.”
By March of 2003, Anthony had become the prime suspect in the Simply Sofas arson. After speaking to Marilyn Nelson, the owner of the store, Sergeant Almada discovered that two weeks before the fire, she and Anthony had argued over some items he had left on consignment. Anthony had come to the store to pick up a check for the items that had sold and to retrieve a few unsold things, including some framed swords and a marble obelisk. When Anthony noticed that the stand on the obelisk was broken, he insisted Marilyn pay for it. They argued a bit (she believed it was broken when he brought it in), but he was adamant: “You are going to pay for it.” After years of dealing with customers, Marilyn knew when to hang tough, and this didn’t seem like one of those times, so she agreed. She’d already given Anthony a $615 check for the items that had sold. He said he’d come back to pick up the unsold items and told her she should have another check ready for the broken obelisk.