Early On, Anthony Smith Had to Learn to Be Tough : Arizona: Drugs enveloped the defensive lineman when he was a youth. Now he is sober and has rechanneled his energy into football.

TUCSON —  Anthony Smith was only 8, but he wanted a Cadillac.

That Cadillac. The one next door. The one he saw his neighbor come out and warm up on those cold New York mornings.

An orphan since 3, Smith had drifted from relative to relative.

At 8, he was living with his Aunt Netti. She drank a lot, leaving Smith and his three brothers and two sisters to run the house and make the decisions, and Smith’s decision was to get that car.

So one morning, after watching his neighbor start the Cadillac and go back indoors, leaving the engine running, Smith jumped in.

He took off at about 60 m.p.h. He was so small, he banged his head on the steering wheel.

But he knew how to drive. He had learned at a car wash where he was already working.

Smith drove to where some teen-age friends hung out. They pushed him into the back seat and took control, racing the Cadillac at speeds up to 100 m.p.h.

Then, the driver lost control.

The car crashed. Both kids in the front seat were killed. Smith and a companion in the back survived.

Smith, shaking badly, looked up and down his body. Not a scratch.

So, he got out and walked away, leaving the smoke and the screams and the approaching sirens behind.

Just another day on the streets.

Anthony Smith is a star defensive lineman for Arizona. This Saturday, if a separated shoulder has healed sufficiently, he will face USC at Arizona Stadium with a Rose Bowl berth possibly on the line.

But there’ll be no pressure on Smith. The football battles each week are make-believe to him. The real battles in Smith’s life were in the tough neighborhoods of New York.

He won that war, and nothing since has seemed as important.

When Smith was 3, his mother, Naomi, died of liver damage attributed to drinking. He never knew his father.

At 9, Smith started experimenting with marijuana.

“I grew up with a little older age group,” he said. “The guys my age were a little afraid to do some of the things I did. I guess mainly because they had parents.

“The first joint I smoked, I did it because everybody else did it. It was just a dare.”

From there, he went on to cocaine, heroin, PCP, acid, speed, pills and mixtures of chemicals he’s not sure of. He even got high by smoking cigarettes sprayed with cooking oil.

All this before he was a teen-ager.

“I took stuff we used to call stars,” he said. “I don’t even know what they were. All kinds of pills. You name it. I remember one time taking uppers and downers. And drinking behind that.

“Damn, I took some stuff , huh?”

Smith can remember dropping acid at 9, before watching TV.

“The cartoon characters (appeared to) come out of the TV screen and hang on the wall,” he said. “I would just sit there in a daze.”

Smith got into a gang, the Black Spades, and more trouble.

At 10, he went along with some friends on a bank robbery.

He went so far as to put on a disguise, including a wig, but got scared and backed out before his friends went through with it. They are still in prison.

At 11, Smith was involved in an armored car robbery, which he wouldn’t discuss, except to say he didn’t back out that time.

By 12, he was stealing regularly, to get money for drugs and to buy clothes and food.

“Where I was living,” Smith said, “next door, people would drink and beat their wife and kids. People would get high on PCP and cut people up. When you spend the night with these people, you are susceptible to anything.”

He can remember thinking he might beat up his 2-year-old niece because the toddler had flushed cocaine down the toilet. Instead, he backed off.

Smith sold drugs, lacing them with talcum powder and baking soda to stretch the cocaine.

He also admits mugging other dealers and stealing their drugs.

On his 14th birthday, he and a brother took heroin.

Smith wound up in the hospital. He was lucky; his brother died.

“That really, really scared me,” Smith said.

He became even more scared when he and some friends gathered to meet another group in a showdown fight. Smith brought along a brother’s gun.

According to Smith, he lost the gun during the fight, but it was eventually used to kill several people. The weapon was traced to him. Having lied about his name and age, Smith was put in jail.

There he stayed for three months until the murderer was caught.

Upon his release, Smith went to North Carolina to live with his half-brother, Donald, a policeman 18 years his senior.

But once there, Anthony reverted to old habits, sneaking off to do drugs.

Donald came home one day, caught Anthony with drugs in his hands and threw him out of the house.

As Anthony sat on the front lawn, out came all his belongings, flying through the door, one by one.

“If you want to do drugs, goodby,” Donald said. “If you don’t, you can stay. I love you because you’re my brother, but you can get the hell on. I’ve given you all I can give you.”

Finally, someone had gotten the message through.

Anthony agreed to go to a rehabilitation clinic, where he stayed for two years. Two tough years. Rehab did not prove to be an instantaneous cure.

“I almost climbed the walls there,” he said. “I scratched (with) my fingernails until they were bleeding and down to nothing.”

Withdrawal included constant headaches, cramps, vomiting and aching eyes.

“A lot of people think they can quit cold turkey,” Smith said. “All the time, I had been telling myself, ‘I can stop.’

“But something comes over you. Like when you see a piece of food that looks real good, your mouth starts to water. Well, I would get a certain salty taste in my mouth where I’d feel like I was about to throw up, and I’d start to jitter if I couldn’t smoke a joint.

“You’re stupid if you take something like this up. You can’t stop. I don’t care who you are, you cannot stop.”

Smith doesn’t think anti-drug campaigns with celebrities are the answer.

“There are people on TV programs,” he said, “telling you, ‘I had this happen to me.’ The kids are still going to use it. They’ll say, ‘Well, I’m not that person. I’m somebody different.’

“If you can say to yourself, ‘I like looking like this, I like my breath to smell like this, I like to act like this,’ then do it. You’re not going to hurt nobody but yourself. And you are going to end up dead.”

A high school wrestler in his New York days, Smith started playing football in his senior year at Northeastern High in Elizabeth City, N.C. He caught on quickly enough, both on the defensive line and as a tailback, to win Parade magazine All-American honors.

He moved on to Alabama for three years and played in three bowl games, including the 1985 Aloha Bowl, in which Alabama beat USC, 24-3.

When Bill Curry replaced Steve Sloan as Alabama’s coach in 1987, the 6-foot-5, 248-pound Smith became unhappy with the new system and began looking elsewhere. In 1988, Rip Scherer left Alabama to become an assistant coach at Arizona, and Smith soon followed.

He first had to attend Tucson’s Pima Community College to become academically eligible.

But since arriving at Arizona, Smith has been “a model citizen,” according to Coach Dick Tomey.

On the field, Smith leads the Wildcats’ defensive linemen in tackles with 64 and is a co-leader in sacks with five.

But more important, he has been consistent, he said, in his determination to stay drug-free.

“If anybody is around me (who wants to use drugs),” Smith said, “I either leave or they have to go.”

He just smiles at his weekly battles on the field.

“They can do all they want,” he said, “but they can’t kill me. Physically, one on one, nobody can beat me fighting because that’s what I grew up doing.”

Having taken such a jagged road to get this far, where would Smith like to go from here--pro ball?

“Yeah if I got a chance, I’d play,” he said. “But I’m not going to die if I don’t.”

His past still returns, sometimes in the middle of the night.

One persistent dream forces Smith to relive the frightening day he took drugs and started hallucinating that bugs were crawling over him. Frantically trying to scratch them off, he opened cuts all over his face with his fingernails.

Smith said he plans to open his own drug rehab clinic someday.

As for drug dealers, he has a solution for them.

“If anybody in my family ever, ever overdoses on something,” he said, “I’m going to find that drug dealer and kill him. If they can live with that, it’s fine.”

Smith has channeled his aggressive feelings toward drug dealers into football.

“I don’t enjoy the game as much as I like the hitting,” he admitted. “I like to bang. I like to hurt people. I like people to hit me. That’s a good feeling. I used to do crimes because I liked the feeling. It’s a euphoric feeling.

“I like going out on the football field because I have a lot of feelings from my past, and that’s the only way I can let them go. I can’t go in and punch my teacher in the face. But I can hit somebody wearing a face mask.”

Talking about his past brings out those feelings. He has put drugs and his previous environment behind. But not the bitterness.

“I didn’t have a Christmas until I was 16 years old,” he said. “And that’s sad. It kind of hurts to think that I missed so much.”