Chris Smith was sitting in the park with some of his buddies when his 7-year-old boy ran up to him crying.
“What happened?” Smith asked his son, J.J. “Why are you crying?”
It was a typically hot, steamy South Florida summer day in 2013. With tears streaming down his face, Jeremiah (J.J.) Smith, who had spent the week in youth tackle football tryouts, said he got cut from his team, the Miami Gardens Vikings.
The news surprised Chris. In kindergarten, when the school had its field day, J.J. would win all the ribbons. Other little kids would come up to Chris after they found out he was J.J.’s dad to ask: How did he get so fast? This time, Chris was the curious one. He walked over to the coaches to see what happened. Turns out, the football coach knew Chris and told him he didn’t realize J.J. was his son. He said J.J. should come back to the team. He wouldn’t cut him.
Chris Smith told the coach not to worry about it: “It’s OK. We’re good. He doesn’t have to play.”
Chris knew his son was good enough to play on that team and could feel him hurting, but he didn’t want J.J. to get a spot like that. On the 20-minute ride home in his gray Impala, Smith wanted to send a different message to J.J., who was still sobbing. He comforted his son and told him it wasn’t his fault.
“We’re gonna work a little harder,” Chris told him, “and you ain’t gonna have to worry about that again.”
Chris, who didn’t play high school football growing up in Miami, was close to a few people who played in college. He had a plan. He told J.J. he would get to be a kid during the week, “but on weekends, we workin’.” He would train with two of his buddies who had become top youth coaches in South Florida. One was a speed and strength whiz; the other was a former star receiver in the MAC who would help polish up his game.
Chris didn’t realize it at the time, but that day 11 years ago when his son got cut from that team was the best thing that could’ve happened to J.J., who has developed into one of the best players in college football at Ohio State as a freshman wide receiver a decade later.
Much like when Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team when he was a sophomore or when USC dropped Tom Brady’s scholarship offer and gave it to a different quarterback, the snub ignited something deep inside a kid who would never allow himself to forget it.
“Whatever God did that day, I think was meant to happen,” Chris Smith said. “Just him hearing that he got cut did something to him.”
The younger Smith said from that day on, he was determined that he would never be outworked.
“That just motivated to take everything that I do very seriously,” J.J. Smith said. “I still really remember that moment of the hurt feelings of being a 7-year-old kid that just wanted to play football and didn’t get the chance to that year, so I don’t take anything for granted anymore.
“That moment made me tougher. I think about that moment each and every day. It’s something that I keep in my mind while I’m playing, or if I ever feel like I’m slacking off, I remember that moment and that feeling.”
The next season, J.J. not only made a team, but he won the league’s version of the Heisman Trophy.
Jeremiah Smith has wowed Ohio State coaches from the first moment he set foot on campus after arriving last winter.
At 6 feet 3, 218 pounds, he was stronger as a freshman early enrollee than most Buckeyes receivers are after they graduate. He bench pressed 355 pounds and squatted 530. He broad jumped 10 feet, 10 inches, vertical jumped 36 inches and clocked a max speed of 23.39 miles per hour. Longtime coaches like Buckeyes offensive coordinator Chip Kelly had never seen anyone quite like Smith — especially not at this age.
On the field, Smith has been as impressive as hoped. The nation’s top-ranked recruit in the Class of 2024, Smith has become the first true freshman in Ohio State history to have a receiving touchdown in each of the first five games. He’s averaging almost 20 yards per catch on his 23 receptions for 453 yards and six touchdowns. He’s produced a dazzling, must-see viral moment every time out — except against Michigan State last month, when Smith made two spectacular catches.
Former Ohio State star wideout Brian Hartline, now the team’s receivers coach, has developed four first-round receivers in the past three years in Marvin Harrison Jr., Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson, plus Jameson Williams, who transferred to Alabama before becoming a first-round pick too. Hartline is a hard guy to wow. But he raves about Smith’s attention to detail, not just his freakish athleticism.
“Making the plays is awesome,” Hartline said. “But I’ve been even more impressed with the conversations and the work ethic and all the intangibles. That’s been really awesome.”
Pierson Sutton, along with Sly Johnson, was one of those two childhood friends of Chris Smith who helped develop J.J.’s body and his psyche. He said it all traces back to what took root in J.J. when he was a little kid, fresh off the sting of getting cut. Smith worked for hours on the weekends, running on the track, jumping rope, doing plyometric and resistance training and running thousands of routes.
The hill in South Florida’s Vista View Park has become a special place for elite track athletes in the area. That 50-plus-yard incline in the sweltering Florida heat became a proving ground for Smith.
“Those Saturday morning hill runs are no joke,” said Sutton, a former Alabama State wide receiver who became a high school track and football coach. “He’d be there early. We would do 10 reps on the big, steep hill for more power. We would do accelerations and power runs.”
“The Hill is something different,” Smith said. “That hill made me a man. I went out there every Saturday, offseason, during the season, in the summer with Coach P, running that hill 20 times. That made me tougher.”
Even though Smith was younger than most of the kids running up the hill, he became a leader of his group.
“Other kids would cry, complain — they are gonna throw up,” Sutton said. “J.J. never complained. And if he ever did, he did it in his head or in the car ride home. He never showed it in his body language that he was tired. He was going to lead the group up. Jeremiah is just different.”
Larry Blustein, the godfather of high school scouting in Florida since the early 1970s, told The Athletic’s Manny Navarro that Smith is the best of his generation. It’s a hefty statement. Just in the past three decades, the area has produced Isaac Bruce, Chad Johnson, Anquan Boldin, Santana Moss, Antonio Brown, Marquise Brown, Amari Cooper, Calvin Ridley, Jerry Jeudy and the guy who some compare Smith to because of his remarkable blend of power, speed and drive, Pro Football Hall of Famer Andre Johnson.
Former NFL cornerback DeMarcus Van Dyke, now USF’s cornerbacks coach, is also a protege of Sutton and knew Smith was rare, even in a hotbed of top football talent.
“First time I saw him, he was in the park at 11 years old and running routes like an 11-year NFL vet,” Van Dyke said. “He was so skilled at a young age. His dad did a great job with him.”
Chris Smith used football to help educate his sons, but it wasn’t just the field work that he saw as a way to hone their work ethic and give them focus. When J.J. was 10, his dad took him and his younger brother, Angelo, to a local library so they could be exposed to chess.
“There was this elderly man there who taught me and my little brother how to play and I just fell in love with it,” J.J. said. “I learned that it definitely translates over to other aspects of your life because you have to really think before you make a move, before you make a decision. That’s not just about football, but about everything in life.”
Standing on the Buckeyes sideline 30 minutes before kickoff of Ohio State’s game against Marshall, Chris Smith beamed while watching his son go through warm-ups, snatching passes out of the air.
J.J. watched his older cousin, quarterback Geno Smith, leave South Florida to star at West Virginia and later in the NFL. His uncle, Danny Smith, was a two-time Olympic sprinter from the Bahamas who won an NCAA hurdles title for Florida State in the 1970s.
Asked when he first thought J.J. could be the next great player out of South Florida, Chris Smith chuckled before pausing a few breaths.
“To be honest with you, I never thought of it like that,” he said. “I used that time to bond with my son. That was just my time to be a dad. Even with the NIL when that came along, I didn’t even care about that. My mind was on just getting my son to college and getting a free education because daddy can’t afford it right now. Others around me might’ve thought about what he might be, I didn’t.”
Chris Smith’s oldest son, Chris Jr., played linebacker at Savannah State and Tusculum. It can be mind-blowing to see another son become the talk of college football. It’s hard for him not to get nostalgic now thinking of all those car rides with J.J., his young “old soul” son listening to Teddy Pendergrass, the Isley Brothers and Earth, Wind & Fire.
“We’d laugh a lot but it wasn’t always peaches and cream,” Chris said. “We’d lose. I’d get on him. I’d be mad. He’d say the team lost, but you’re still mad at me? I couldn’t really explain it. The car rides home were beautiful to me. Those are the memories that I take with him. Tying his shoes. Putting his pads on just right. At 12, 13, he wanted to be a big boy and do it himself. Just bonding with him, talking to him about different things, about life. Listening to music. I talked to him like he was my age.
“I never had that type of relationship with my own father. That’s the reason why I wanted to have that with him, something that I had never had growing up. Like, he’s one of my best friends. I used to call them my broke best friends.”
The 18-year-old Buckeyes star said he misses those car rides with his best friend, but he cherishes those memories.
“He wanted the best for me and my brothers,” J.J. said. “I’m so happy to have him in my life because he’s helped me so much. He shared a lot of stuff with me that kept me on the straight path, to make sure I didn’t go down the wrong road because he saw a lot of kids that were my caliber, maybe that could’ve become NFL players, that went down the wrong path, doing the wrong things, the bad things, getting involved in the streets, drinking, smoking. My dad didn’t play about any of that. He was very hardcore with me.”
Chris Smith calls it surreal that his old “broke best friend” is now the first college football player to ever have a deal with Red Bull. His son also has NIL deals with Chipotle and Lululemon.
The one thing he hoped to instill in J.J. didn’t have anything to do with football. At least not directly.
“’Just try and be a good person.’ First, be humble. Don’t ever look down on people. Follow God,’” Chris said. “You can have all the talent in the world but you’ve gotta be humble too. You gotta recognize it’s God-given, and always be a man of your word. What you say let it be true.’”
The latter was tested in the recruiting process. Smith committed to Ohio State in December 2022 during his junior year at Chaminade-Madonna Prep. But when some of his close friends committed to nearby Miami, rumors started to swirl about a potential flip to the Hurricanes. Chris Smith said it probably stressed Hartline out.
“He’d read the blogs and everything and I’d always reassure him, ‘We’re not going anywhere else other than Ohio State unless you leave or Ryan Day leaves,’” Chris Smith said. “Hartline was the reason why he committed.”
Chris said he’s proud of J.J. for staying true to his original commitment at Ohio State rather than flipping to Miami, where he would have been surrounded by familiar faces. Going to college a thousand miles away at Ohio State will provide plenty of lessons, some he couldn’t get in South Florida.
“It’s gonna get cold up there,” Chris Smith said, “but if you go in the draft and the Bills or the Packers draft you, you gonna tell ’em no? You’ve gotta learn to play in certain elements. Just think of it as another challenge.”
(Top photos: Jason Mowry / Getty Images and courtesy of Chris Smith)
