Steve Smith Sr. has always been the ultimate master of mind games

Steve Smith Sr. has always been the ultimate master of mind games

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Joe Haden flinched. He was sure of it.This was in the lead-up to the Baltimore Ravens Week 3 game against the Cleveland Browns, during the 2014 NFL season, and veteran Steve Smith Sr., in his first year with the Ravens, was doing his usual if also maybe over-the-top pre-game film preparation. While most NFL wide receivers typically request to view a selection of clips of their upcoming defenders often just those plays in which other receivers had made a catch against them Smith wanted to see everything: the pa ses, the runs, the cornerbacks succe ses, their failures.According to Smith, this kind of exhaustive viewing library was e sential to his proce s because he wasnt just interested in understanding what had happened previously, but alsowhyit had happened. You got to understand why they caught it on him, says Smith. Why did he respond that way. In the case of Haden, Smith knew he would be up against a great playera former first-round pick and a Pro Bowler but he hadnt had much opportunity to study the nuances of his game in the past: This was their first season competing in the same division. Smith wanted to know, as he always wanted to know, what kind of dude he was dealing with.Then he saw it: the flinch.The clip came from the previous season, when Haden had been matched up against Brandon Marshall of the Chicago Bears. He did something to Brandon Marshall. He pushed Brandon a little bit harder than Brandon liked, Smith recalls. And on the next play, Marshall caught a pa s, which Haden slapped at, trying but failing to dislodge. Brandon stood up and jumped not jumped, but you know how you flinchatsomeone? says Smith.Well, Marshall did that. Haden flinched as a reflex.I said, Hmm. He flinched, says Smith. That said something to me.MORE: ----------Growing up in South Los Angeles, near Athens Park, Smith was the oldest of three brothers and surrounded by a large extended family. There were cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and seemingly all of them talked smack, especially when they were chasing each other with water balloons, or sitting at the table over a game of spades or gin or dominoes. When he was very young, Smith wasnt allowed to join those grown-up games, but he always paid attention. He picked up on body language and posture. He listened to what was being said. Man, you played a bad hand, you was going to get talked about thatwholegame, he says.It was all love, of course. But there was a ruthle sne s to it, too.Smith noticed a competitive edge in his family members. They would read the intentions of their tablemates, and pre s every advantage. Or theyd drop a perfectly-timed card and say,.According to Smith, this sort of banter wasnt just meant to get in your opponents head, it was designed to completely deflate them. And thats how he approached his opponents in the NFL, too.On the football field, Smith was a voluble, erupting presence. He would yell and grunt and scream, and almost always maintained a running dialogue during games, which could feel like an affront to the guys on the other side of the line even if he wasnt talking to anyone but himself. A lot of times, I wasnt talking to my opponent, says Smith. The defender just gets to hear me talk to myself out loud. He gets to hear what I feel about him. He might say,But Im not really talking directly to him. He just gets the ear hustle.Against Haden, Smith chose a different tact.In his mid-week film study, the wide receiver believed hed identified a weakne s in his opponent, and he deployed a verbal strategy that was designed to exploit it: He didnt say a word. Smith understood he didnt have to talk to turn up the volume. There were other ways to get his me sage acro s. Sometimes hed communicate to an opponent with nothing but a look a look that might say, Oh, man. I did you bad, as one former teammate puts it. Other times, hed let his actions speak for themselves, like when hed give a defender a gratuitous shove after the whistle, or hold his block for a beat longer than was nece sary. Thats how he greeted Haden, on the first run play of the game.The first play I blocked him, I gave him an extra shove, says Smith.Haden, who always seemed to have a smile on his face, took it in stride.But Smith didnt reply. Next play: same thing.No reply.Smiths physical provocations continued. A couple of plays later, he tried to put his hands up, and I smacked his hands down. Once again, Haden tried to US National Team Jersey reason with his opponent. He was trying to talk it out with me, says Smith, who stubbornly delivered the same unspoken me sage. Again and again, with each succe sive encounter, he was telling Haden: Im prepared to take this somewhere you might not want to go. And sure enough, Haden started to back off. He stopped crowding him at the line. He gave him space. Why is that, for me, something thats interesting? asks Smith. It goes back to when I was watching my family play cards. Which is to say: He didnt want to just win the game; he wanted to dominate it psychologically. And when Haden backed off, Smith saw hed succeeded in doing just that. Haden was conveying that hed rather not raise the stakes in the way Smith had been proposing, and that tells me Ive won, he says. Not that Ive won the match. Ive won in that now I get to dictate how the game is played.Thats how the receiver felt with le s than ninety seconds remaining in regulation, and the Ravens down by one point. They had the ball around midfield, no timeouts. When Joe Flacco, the Baltimore quarterback, turned to his star receiver and asked what kind of route he wanted to run, a slant or a sluggo, Smith gave the answer hed been working toward all day.I want a sluggo, he said. A sluggo is a route involving a double move, which allows the receiver to feign a slant route, before running a go route to get behind the defense. Smith knew Haden wasnt likely to pre s him at the linenot after all the physical and psychological abuse hed endured. There was a greater chance, therefore, that Haden would bite on the slant portion of the route, to make up for lost ground, and that would allow Smith to escape into open space.Heres how Smith narrates the play: He backs off. I run a slant. He jumps. I run a sluggo. Smith shook his defender and caught the ball, racing down the right side of the field Mohamed Salah Jersey . Bang, he says. Tackled after thirty-two yards, inside the red zone. As time expired, Ravens placekicker Justin Tucker drilled the game-winning field goal.Haden never stood a chance.----------The sports psychologist and former track-and-field coach Rick McGuire teaches a formula for succe s. The formula is as follows: Succe s = Ability x Preparation x Effort x Will.If you think about it like a science beaker, as suggested to me by Mark Aoyagi, the co-director of sport and performance psychology at the University of Denver, an athlete is at first trying to fill his or her beaker, understanding that not everyones beaker will be the same size, because not everyone has the same level of talent or abilities. Still, every athlete must fill that beaker the same way: by practicing i.e., through preparation wherein he turns ability into capability, or usable skills. The next piece of the equation is effort, which helps define not only how much a person putsintohis beaker, but also how much he getsoutof it during competition, when it matters most. Thats where will or willpower comes into play.Its when you have to put it all out there, says Aoyagi, who brings up the 400-meter race, by way of example. The last hundred, one-hundred-fifty meters are pure pain, he explains. Its just horrible pain. And its in that moment, two-hundred-fifty meters in, when an athlete has already emptied almost all of the contents of her beaker, that she has to make a choice. Per Aoyagi, Am I going to dig, claw, scrape whatever clich you want to use to get this last little bit out of the container? Or am I going to give into the pain and shut it down?Because the truth is: not everyone empties the beaker.As an NFL player, Smith understood that, and he wanted to help his opponents answer that question by having them question how far they were really willing to go. At some point in every game, somebody will say, Uncle, he says. You can see it on a mans face:He dont want none. He done. Almost everything Smith said on the field was geared to get the best out of himself during games psychologists call it self-talk; he says, Im a self-motivator but there was a more ruthle s objective to Smiths on-field dialogue than simple self-motivation. He didntjustwant to get the best out of himself; he also wanted his defenders to recognize they stood no chance of winning, as a result. He wanted to impre s upon them that, however far they were willing to go, he was willing to go further and thereby break their will to compete. If you take a shot at me on a run play, Im taking a shot at you for the nextfiveplays, he says.When former cornerback Cortland Finnegan and Smith tu sled during a 2007 game, for instance per Smith, He cheap-shotted me, and I blocked him into the water cooler Smith told his opponent their feud wasnt finished. I told him, If I see you out at the mall with your family, be prepared. Where Smith did see Finnegan next was in line for credentials at the 2009 Pro Bowl, and the wide receiver intended to keep his promise. He says, I looked at him and I went straight to him and was like, Well, here we go. As it happened, Finnegans teammate and fellow Pro Bowler Michael Griffin stepped in and smoothed things over, but Smith had made his point. I made sure he understood, he says. I was willing to go further.Even those dudes who tried to verbally intimidate Smith would often find themselves in wars of attrition they couldnt sustain. He says, There were guys that would try to get in my head, guys that would say stuff. But the thing is, they wouldnt be able to do it all game. Because trash talk like willpower takes commitment.Smith tells me about one game, in particular, in which he was tasked with blocking an opposing safety on the first run play. It was a booming collision, and the defender punctuated the violence by saying, Ill be here all day!But on the next run play, Smith did it again. And again. And again. He even started looking at the guy to let him know when he was coming. He wanted to see if the player had meant what he said, if he was truly making that commitment. And you know what he did, about the fifth or sixth time? says Smith. He looked at me, and that told me his eyes said, F, I hope Steve isnt coming again. That means you aint here all day, dog.E sentially, he flinched. He said, Uncle.----------There are countle s ways to intimidate ones opponents before or during an athletic contest. Michael Jordan was known to wait outside an arena for the opposing teams bus to pull up, just so he could ask whod be guarding him. On the tennis court, petulant pro John McEnroe seemed to play on the edge of derangement and, in his words, with an energy that would freak my opponents out. Two-time Olympic gold medal-winning figure skater Katarina Witt demonstrated a quieter approach, per Indiana University profe sor John Raglin: She improvised dance routines to her competitors music during free-ice practices, when she and her rivals were all slicing around the rink. On the other end of the spectrum was someone like former NFL linebacker Terrell Suggs. According to former ref Gene Steratore, Suggs would broadcast violent pre-game warnings to opposing players who were well within earshot under the guise of chatting with the officials. Before a game against a young and dynamic quarterback named Robert Griffin III, for instance, he screamed, Hey, Gene! If RG whatever the f his number is if he pulls that run-pa s s today, tell that motherfer Im taking his motherfing head off!Smith didnt make threats; he made promises he promised to test another players limits. But according to Jeremy Jamieson, a psychology profe sor at the University of Rochester who studies stre s responses, many trash-talkers are effectively saying the same thing, regardle s of their exact me sage or method, and that is: The demands of playing against me are so high, you are not going to be able to win. Per basketball legend Cheryl Miller, Its imposing your will, verbally.Indeed, trash talk was pure utility for Smith. Its not a game to talk me s, he says. Its a game to know who my opponent is. By talking trash (or in the case of his game against Haden, speaking volumes with his actions and silence), Smith was able to negotiate his on-field confrontations to both convey his own level of unwavering commitment (and thereby highlight the demands of playing against him), and to interrogate his opponents under the harsh light of real-world competition: to discover what they were willing to put on the line. What they were willing to lose. Are you willing to take that fine, po sibly? How far are you willing to go? he says.In the world of behavioral economics, there is a concept called lo s aversion, which describes a phenomenon in which the prospect of potential lo ses weighs more heavily on a person psychologically than the po sibility of equal-sized gains. To put it another way, people would rather avoid a lo s than pursue a gain, all things being equal. But fromSmiths perspective, he had nothing to lose. Im playing with house money, he says. And thats how he competed, with an unyielding psychological gravity, born as much from those family card games as from the circumstances that surrounded them: a childhood of harsh realities. Most of my life was Pedri Jersey in chaos, says Smith. I grew up in L.A., in the inner-city. I grew up around the time of Reginald Denny and Rodney King. I grew up with the L.A. riots, gang-related shootings, the crack epidemic. Nobody was going to scare him by dialing up the perceived pre sure on a football field; he already knew what was at stake. For me, smack-talking wasnt gamesmanship. It was life or death, he says. I was playing for keeps. I was playing to embarra s you. Honestly, to make you doubt yourself when you look in the mirror the next day. My whole goal was to make you fold like a tent. See, thats the difference some players talk smack to get under peoples skin, and I do it to make you question yourself. To question how badly you really want to scrape the bottom of that beaker.Its a mindset Smith has clearly taken with him into retirement, too. Last Thursday night, one could see that same never-back-down fire blazing behind the former wide receivers eyes as he held a microphone on national television and called out Denver Broncos wideout Jerry Jeudy for not living up to his potential and in so doing, daring him to respond.Smith has never been afraid to talk a big game, because he always knew he was going to scrape his beaker raw and then some. As he puts it, My job is getting done. The question is, whats it going to costyoufor me to do my job?
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