The story Chad Melville starts to tell about Cameron Smith involves three bottles of red wine.
It’s summer 2017, and Smith is working at Melville Winery underneath the rolling hills of the Santa Ynez Valley in Lompoc. Melville, who is a second-generation vintner at the family winery, relishes a chance to further his intern’s wine appreciation. On about a half-dozen occasions, he selects three varietals for Smith to taste: Cabernet, Grenache and Pinot Noir. They gather at a table. The lights dim, heightening other senses. Melville figures Smith will gravitate toward the Cabernet. Its bold flavors should resonate with a younger, undeveloped palate.
“They’re louder,” Melville says. “It’s like Britney Spears or something. Blonde. Really pretty. Attractive. You’re kind of drawn into that.”
Instead, as the sampling begins, Melville notices something different. Smith prefers the Grenache and the Pinot Noir, two subtle, nuanced wines, evidence of an already acute sense of taste that is reminiscent of a seasoned connoisseur.
It’s a moment rarely in public view. For four seasons, Smith has cast an image as USC’s hard-nosed middle linebacker, sitting in the teeth of the defense, stuffing darting running backs on the Coliseum grass and leading the Trojans in tackles in seemingly every game he’s played. That visage has been the greatest constant at USC short of Clay Helton patrolling the sidelines.
Look further, and what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. Smith’s life story shows different shades of personality. His family, friends and the people close to him recount stories that reveal a richer portrait of the Butkus Award candidate, an old-school linebacker with diverse interests that encompass winemaking, firefighting ambitions, yoga poses and self-enrichment reading. Smith pursues more than ballcarriers.
***
From the beginning, Cameron Smith looked like a budding linebacker. He was born 11 pounds, 2 ounces, to the awe of the people inside his delivery room.
“Check under his arm for hair, I think we have a man,” his mother, Suzy, recalls her doctor cracking.
While growing up in Roseville, Smith gravitated toward sports at an early age, joining a local Pop Warner football team at 6 years old and playing with older middle school boys by the time he reached the fourth grade. He played on a travel baseball team, where he was the catcher.
He harbored a certain intensity, be it on the field or on the diamond. When he covered home plate, he treated sliding base runners like running backs on third-and-short.
“Some of those poor kids coming through would get tackled,” Suzy says, “and they would yell, ‘It’s not football!’ ”
His father, John, noticed the passion on early wake-up calls before Saturday morning football games. On one occasion, he leaned over a top bed bunk railing to rouse his heavy-sleeping son.
“Hey Cam, you know what day it is?” John asked. “Gameday!”
Eight-year-old Cameron opened one eyelid before muttering, “I just want to hit somebody.”
He would, often, too.
Teammates in high school remember the time when Smith, then on the freshman football team at Granite Bay, was the ballcarrier in a running of the Oklahoma drill. The iconic hitting exercise lines up players a few yards apart in a confined space before the defender is asked to shed a blocker and make a tackle. Vince Lombardi referred to the drill as the ultimate test of manhood. In their iteration, Smith flattened fellow freshman Michael Malamatenios.
“It was like a head-on collision between cars,” Malamatenios says.
The impact sent Malamatenios to a local hospital with a broken shoulder. For the rest of the season, coaches withheld Smith from hitting drills.
“He was our quarterback at the time too,” says Brian Graber, a close friend. “So are we doing it to protect him or other people?”
“He was so mighty,” says Bruce Cooke, another former teammate.
Smith craved the physical side of football. In his recruitment, he considered a scholarship offer from Wisconsin, intrigued by the Badgers’ smash-mouth, Big Ten style of play, but it was too far from home, Madison 2,000 miles east of Granite Bay. He idolized players like Brian Cushing, the former imposing linebacker at USC during the Pete Carroll heydays. He once planned to wear No. 10 for the Trojans like Cushing until it was assigned to John Houston, a part of the same recruiting class.
His fervor reminds his parents of someone two generations older. Bob Lakata, Smith’s maternal grandfather, was once a brawny athlete himself, a former basketball player with a sturdy 6-foot-8 build who played on Duke’s first NCAA tournament team in 1955. The 6-foot-2 Smith never reached the same height, but he shares other traits, his wide frame and his red hair. Friends nicknamed Lakata “Big Red.”
But sports were only the start of their similarities. “A mini Bob,” Suzy says of her son.
Lakata, who later worked in the insurance business in northern California, spent his free time hunting deer and duck, as well as fishing along the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Once he reeled in his catch, Lakata loved to host a big fish fry at his Sacramento home.
Smith loves the outdoors, learning to fish at a young age and long showing uncommon dedication toward the task.
“Just had patience to sit there to watch his lure,” John says.
In the offseason, Smith visits the woodlands near Chico with friends to hunt ducks, geese, turkey and waterfowl, relishing the rush of anticipation that comes with a 5 a.m. sunrise. “You get that feeling in your stomach,” Smith says, “you never know how the day is going to go.”
The passionate outdoorsmen are connected through their family lineage and stories.
When Smith was 4 years old, Lakata died. He suffered from a heart attack while out fishing on the delta, locked in a tussle for 40 minutes with a 100-pound sturgeon on the other end of his line.
***
Smith’s wine appreciation was enhanced by a chance encounter.
It was after a practice in 2016, a few days before the Trojans hosted Notre Dame on Thanksgiving weekend, when Melville was in attendance. Tyson Helton, then the quarterbacks coach, and his wife, April, had visited the winery earlier that spring, sparking a friendship. Helton invited Melville, also a USC alum and football fan, to visit some of the team’s practices. He first encountered the quarterbacks, including Sam Darnold.
When Melville arrived in late November, Darnold approached him to ask if he could meet Smith, introducing him as his friend and roommate.
“He’s really into fermentation science,” Darnold told Melville.
As they chatted briefly at Howard Jones Field, Smith asked if Melville hired college students for summer internships.
Melville did.
Smith had developed an interest in wine, how it was made, its history. He read restaurant menus that listed diverse wine regions. He observed his girlfriend’s father ordering a glass at dinner.
“There’s so much more than just the alcohol percentage in a wine bottle,” Smith says. “It’s not like I’m saying I love beer, or I love vodka, or I love whiskey. I think wine is such more appreciated, the beauty, how much work it takes.”
Smith harbors NFL aspirations and is likely to be selected in the earlier rounds of the draft come April.
But throughout his childhood, it was also his only professional aspiration, like countless other boys. He dreamed of playing on Sundays, or maybe the major leagues. Suzy at times asked if he had a plan B. He informed her there was none.
But his feelings changed after enrolling at USC in 2015. Tutors asked him and other players to contemplate life after football and learn about other potential occupations.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘What does the NFL stand for? Not For Long.’” Smith says. “I’ve heard that for a bajillion times here. It’s not them pushing down our throats that we can’t play football, but find more. Life is not just football.”
The day after he met Melville at practice, Smith called to ask more about a summer internship. He started six months later.
During the summer months in 2017, Smith typically arrived twice during the week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, when he would leave after USC’s 6 a.m. conditioning workouts, making the three-hour drive northbound on Highway 101 to Melville Winery. In order to work weekends on Saturday and Sunday, he stayed with Suzy, who lives in nearby Pismo Beach. Smith cleaned barrels in the cellar, gave tours and met guests in a tasting room as part of his duties. Melville divided the internship into three main aspects: farming, winemaking and sales. Smith’s quick education still makes an impression.
“If you’re a masculine dude and you’re blowing up people in a violent sport, to run off the field and talk about the nuances of Pinot Noir, that’s mind-blowing to me,” Melville says.
With growing knowledge, Smith contemplates becoming a winemaker or a sommelier once his football career ends. Another ambition is firefighting. One of his high school friends fought in the Redding fire earlier this summer, sending him updates of the blaze through Snapchat. The one class that Smith, a communication major, takes this fall in his final college semester is a potentially useful first-aid course. A firehouse holds a chance to replicate the camaraderie of a locker room.
“I started thinking about what I would miss about football,” Smith says. “It’s really the culture part of it. The leadership, the brotherhood, the accountability. Always working as a team.”
Smith is a modern athlete, conscious of the lifespan of a career, plotting a future, and similarly attuned to the subtle ways to ready for his next performance. He took yoga classes this summer at CorePower Yoga in USC Village to improve his flexibility. He shed more than 20 pounds in the offseason, dropping to about 235 pounds, to enhance speed and quickness. To lose the weight, he leaned on fellow senior linebacker Porter Gustin, who suggested he eat six times per day rather than three so his slower metabolism could more easily digest meals. He cut out Starburst candy, among other late-night sweets.
He’s sought a cerebral edge. Attending the Pac-12’s media day in July, he reunited with Cal linebacker Jordan Kunaszyk, a childhood friend who was on the same Pop Warner team. They talked about the preparation for their senior seasons, including books they had been reading. Kunaszyk suggested Andy Andrews’ The Traveler’s Gift: Seven Decisions that Determine Personal Success. Cal players read it as a team earlier this year. Kunaszyk also recommended Smith listen to an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that preached the value of sleep, encouraging athletes especially to sleep six to eight hours each night.
He taps into something that was there all along. Coaches first spotted Smith’s hulking size, his gripping handshake, but they soon noticed his keen awareness, able to identify an opposing team’s offensive formations and plays. Observers can spot other linebackers who move quicker sideline to sideline or in pass coverage, but the 21-year-old Smith carries almost a sixth sense for where to float on a field, sensing the subtleties like a seasoned veteran. He can detect a wide receiver’s route through the number of steps in the quarterback’s drop-back.
It’s propelled him to the verge of history: Smith, who averages 10 tackles per game, is on pace to break Marcus Cotton’s three-decades-old school record for tackles, provided he plays a 13th game this fall. He will next deal with dangerous Arizona dual-threat quarterback Khalil Tate on Saturday.
“He’s always been a very instinctive linebacker that understands the pass game and what to do,” says former USC linebacker Dallas Sartz, who coached Smith in high school at Granite Bay. “When you’re a Mike linebacker, it happens so fast. You got your crossing routes, whatever it may be. You got to have some good instincts and pick it up.”
Now, as a college senior, those instincts have taught him to cut against the expected grain. The once mono-focused teenager has cultivated so many interests outside the sport that he says he hears some people who question whether he loves football at all.
He shrugs it off. He sees no conflict.
“I would hope this is being looked at more of a positive, because he’s planning for his future,” Smith says. “He’s mature. He’s thinking about long-term. He’s goal-oriented, this and that. It’s not frustrating, because you can really tell somebody’s love of the game by their game film and how they play the game of football and their passion. I just think I have passion in off-the-field stuff. I’m just a really passionate guy who finds something that he likes and sticks to it.”
Post-football plans are there to reassure a life as rich as the one his grandfather lived.
Smith yearns to tackle it all.
