the heisman

devonta smith for gq

“There’s ambition in DeVonta’s eyes. It isn’t that he’s quiet or closed off —he’s thinking. Brooding. Calculating if he wants to trust you. His face crinkles into a mosaic of broken pieces, thoughts lingering between each. If you look long enough, you’ll catch his true motives, but he tucks them away before you’re able to capture a good glimpse.”

“It’s mighty hot at 7:30 a.m. on an overcast March day in “Titletown.” That’s Tuscaloosa, for the unacquainted, where the Alabama Crimson Tide reside—the Death Star of college football, a team that’s won six national titles in the last 13 years. DeVonta Smith, the latest in a line of wunderkind wide receivers from ‘Bama, is walking into coach Nick Saban’s castle—err, training facility—for an early workout session. Last season, Smith shredded record books for the SEC (most receiving touchdowns in a season with 23), ‘Bama (most receiving yards in a season with 1,856), and the country (46 touchdowns in his college career, the most ever by a Power 5 player). He even had 12 catches, 215 yards and three scores in the national title game, which Alabama won. Excuse me, he did all of that just in the first half.
Those electrifying feats made Smith the first receiver to win the Heisman since Desmond Howard in 1991, and now he’s likely to be a high first round pick in the NFL draft. Fans of the Crimson Tide lovingly call him “Slim Reaper,” and when you see his lean frame in person for the first time, the nickname makes sense. I paused for a second when he greeted me, mistaking him for a regular student. This...is the Heisman? This... is Titletown’s trademarked touchdown king? How could this stringbean be the most dominant dynamo to run routes in the college game since Howard?”

“But when we walk into Alabama’s famed weight room—the one that turns gangly teenagers into sentient cinder blocks—DeVonta changes shape. That stringbean is now bouncing off the linoleum for split jumps with a squat bar on his back, doing explosion techniques with resistance bands tied to his body while dragging a strength coach behind him, and darting all around the gym like a bullet trapped in a steel box.”

“He’s a boy from the tiny country town of Amite, Louisiana—population around 4,500, 3.9 square miles, one public high school—with a twang somewhere between Kevin Gates and James Carville.
From the outside, he’s a typical, reserved Louisiana boy. From inside the facility that showed the world DeVonta could be a star, the picture looks much different. Part of DeVonta’s mystique is that you can’t tell what he’s thinking (especially if he doesn’t know you), or what he’s feeling (unless you’re family). Even his brothers in arms remain constantly surprised by “Smitty.” After ‘Bama beat Georgia last season, DeVonta walked into the locker room, sat down next to some of his teammates and blurted out, “I love y’all boys, man.” Folks were frazzled. “I was right next to him,” Najee Harris, another likely first round pick from Alabama, tells me. “I was like, this n-gga speaks?” he laughs. “This n-gga has emotions?”

DeVonta first knew football could be his gateway when he was a boy in Amite. But his mother, Christina, drove a strict ship: “When you street lights come on,” DeVonta remembers, “bring yo’ ass inside.” When he saw his father, Kelvin, on the weekends, they’d go into the woods, hoop in the dirt, cruise on four wheelers, fry some fish in a shed, have a crawfish boil...or get chased by hogs. Apparently a lot was happening in those woods. What’s in there? “Go in there and find out,” he tells me. “We find something new everyday.” DeVonta said it made him feel like a man: “it’s real country, country wit’ my dad.”
But boys can be prone to mischievousness. DeVonta had one of the only good balls at the park most days, so he’d be out way past his momma’s warnings. He’d scrap with his younger brother in their modest house on occasion, bumping heads and throwing hands over video games. “I was terrible when I was younger, honestly,” he told me. “It wasn’t until I got to high school that I settled down.” What could Christina do to keep her son in line? Eventually, she started telling his coaches he wouldn’t be playing in high school games. “If she said I wasn’t playing this game, no one was gonna talk her out of it. She stuck by what she said,” he says.
There isn’t much to do in Amite. The crime rate is 75 percent higher than most localities in Louisiana and 12 percent higher than the national average. Twenty-two percent of people in town live below the poverty line, and income is just above $14,000 per capita, per the 2010 census, depending on “what side you on,” DeVonta says, “whether it's the white side or the Black side.” DeVonta shies away from describing Amite as a poor town, but does offer one caveat. “It’s not nowhere where you’d be like, ‘I wanna stay here.’”
Amite is wet sand waiting to trap the most vulnerable of the American republic. This, at least, was Christina’s fear. She wanted better for her boy, she wanted him “to get away, to not go down the wrong path,” DeVonta says, so she pushed him to get his grades right, to be a model citizen, to use athletics as a road out. DeVonta learned that if he could catch enough touchdowns, his mother could stop working that social work job he hates, and if he ran fast enough, he could get her away from Amite.

There’s a phrase from the Louisiana and Mississippi Delta that comes to mind when you think about DeVonta Smith: He’s what we’d call “out the mud.” He oozes an authenticity that’s specific to the region. Think about mud for a second. It ain’t pretty or polished, but it is nutritious, necessary, unassuming. It’s where the root of a soul is forged. As he told me: he’s a lil country, country. That’s why his hair was slightly unkempt during our time in Titletown and why there’s a twinkle in his twang. That’s a taste of the Tangipahoa Parish talkin’, and the pride leaps from his tongue as soon as he speaks.

DeVonta isn’t trying to convince us of anything, really. He’s come this far, so it's all bound to work out. It has to. Or else, what the hell was this all for? Why else is he signing footballs for strangers in his offseason, or autographing the back of ‘Bama encrusted golf shirts for employees who’ve crept in the players’ lounge on campus, or allowing stares from white folks at the local Buffalo Wild Wings while he eats after a Saturday practice? Why did he take exercise science as a major to better understand how to rehab his body, or take selfies with moms on the way to his car? Why did he pick ‘Bama instead of LSU? It’s league or bust, man.