This article appeared in the Wichita Eagle; written by Bob Lutz:
Randy Smithson lived most of his life wanting more, a desire that very nearly killed him; now he’s following a new path.
Randy Smithson has finally figured out what he wants to do when he grows up.
It takes longer for some than others. Smithson is 51, so it has taken him a while.
He is redefining himself as something other than a college basketball coach. And, even more life-altering, as something more than an addict, one who was nearly brought down over an eight-year period by an assortment of pain medication.
“I walked around numb for a number of years,” Smithson said.
Now he wants to help people who fight the same addictions to alcohol and pain medications that he has. Helping people has always been his life’s calling; he’s just going to use a different avenue to do so.
Smithson is finishing up an associate’s degree in counseling from Butler Community College. He’s the athletic director at Word of Life School in north Wichita, where he also drives the bus on field trips and takes time to appreciate the things in life he never paid attention to before.
“I get in that school bus and drive and I actually enjoy it,” he said. “I think maybe I’ve turned a corner. Just getting up every day is fun for me –’Now what are we going to do?’ It’s a different life. So much of it before was basketball. Now there’s a whole world out there I never was exposed to.”
• • •
Smithson’s life has been a series of “Where’s Waldo” episodes since he was forced to resign as Wichita State’s basketball coach in 2000.
By then, he was taking too many pain pills to cope with player departures and the realization that his goal of returning the Shockers to their glory years, something he relished, wasn’t going to be achieved.
Smithson’s whereabouts since he left WSU have been a constant source of curiosity and confusion.
He spent a year in Ocala, Fla., to be near his parents, former WSU coach Gene Smithson and his wife, Sandy.
Randy came back to coach basketball at Cowley College in 2001, even though he knew down deep that wasn’t what he wanted. But he stayed for four years, fighting a losing battle with pills.
He went back to Butler to coach in 2005, even though he had been there, done that and really had no desire to do it again.
If you know Smithson, you know he is driven by desire and passion.
“I’d go down and see him when he was at Cowley and he wasn’t the same person,” said Wes Race, Smithson’s student manager and director of operations at Butler from 1990-96. “He’d call me someone else’s name. He was really flighty and he couldn’t concentrate. Instantly, I knew something was wrong.”
Smithson received a two-month leave of absence to deal with his demons during his final season at Butler in 2006-07.
He says he has been clean since, with the help of numerous counselors, rehab stays and other addicts he has met in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
He took a job as a sports-talk radio co-host at KGSO, 1410-AM, in the spring of 2007, even though he was required to also sell advertising, something he dislikes.
Later that year, he and his estranged wife filed bankruptcy, listing debts of more than $150,000.
Then he took a fundraising job with the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, even though he dislikes raising money.
“I can’t ask people for money,” he said. “I just can’t do it.”
Now, finally, Smithson thinks he is on solid ground. He said he has been sober and drug-free for two years and the Word of Life job and being a college student have given him focus.
• • •
Word of Life superintendent Gordon Schultz has known Smithson for years. His son, Matt, played at Wichita State during the mid-1990s, just before Smithson took over.
Schultz knows the good and the bad and was more than willing to offer Smithson a soft landing place.
“Randy is deserving of this and Randy is doing a great job,” Schultz said. “We’re a faith-based school and we’re blessed to have him. He’s willing to do anything to help. He doesn’t see himself as some privileged person who has had these wonderful jobs and now wants someone to hand him something. He’ll drive the bus, he’ll substitute teach, he’ll be the AD, he’ll empty the trash cans. He’ll do whatever it takes.”
Smithson has found peace of mind at the small school with an enrollment of 144 students in grades K-12. He has an office with numerous post-it notes on top of one of the desks.
“He’s around good people all the time at Word of Life,” Race said.
Smithson was always just a normal guy, even when he was accomplishing abnormal things. It doesn’t take that much to make him happy.
“Randy is, to me, just a real person,” said his mother, Sandy. “That’s why I don’t worry about what people are going to think or what they might say. I believe in being real. If you expose yourself and you’re real, you’re going to help people.”
Smithson is learning new skills. He wants to be influential in people’s lives, but might not have basketball as his tool.
“There isn’t a ton of money in counseling,” he said. “I’m not going to be a doctor or a psychiatrist. But that’s not really where I’m at right now. I don’t need a lot. But I do have a lot to pay back.”
• • •
Every man invariably asks himself whether or not he is successful.
To understand Smithson’s addictions, you need to understand his definition of success. And it’s harsh.
Success, to Smithson, is to be the best.
It wasn’t enough for him to be a standout guard on one of the best Wichita State basketball teams in history, the 1980-81 team that went to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament.
Smithson was always a gym rat, a self-made player who didn’t run very fast, didn’t jump very high but had the heart of a winner. Smithson made himself into a player through long hours of practice and an obsession with success.
When Smithson got cut by the NBA’s Kansas City Kings during training camp in 1981, it sent him on an alcoholic spiral that lasted three years. In his mind, he had failed.
“One day I’m in the NBA and a month later I’m dressing up as the WuShock on KAKE ‘Kaleidoscope,”‘ Smithson said. “Then, later, I was the Rainbow Bread Man on some commercial.”
Inside those mascot costumes, Smithson was miserable and desperate, and getting a taste of how addiction — and the way he defined success — would follow him to his dream job, basketball coach at Wichita State.
• • •
Smithson was clean and sober during his first stint at Butler, from 1985-96. He was winning, overseeing arguably the most successful junior college program in the country with a 273-95 record.
When Scott Thompson was fired in 1996 after four unsuccessful seasons at Wichita State, Smithson was hired and Shocker fans were elated to have one of their own.
The program received an instant boost; Smithson’s first team was 14-13, far better than the 8-21 mark in Thompson’s final year. There seemed to be no limit to what Smithson could accomplish, especially after he successfully recruited Wichita Collegiate guard Maurice Evans to WSU in 1997.
Evans was the kind of homegrown marquee player the Shockers had lacked since Aubrey Sherrod and Antoine Carr, and Evans averaged more than 12 points as a freshman in 1997-98.
But it didn’t take long for the relationship between Smithson and Evans to sour. Midway through his sophomore season, Evans left the practice floor after being criticized by coaches for not hustling. A couple of days later, Evans said he had lost respect for Smithson and painted a picture of a coaching staff that demeaned, isolated and berated its players.
Evans finished the season and even announced in March that he would return for his junior season. But he didn’t, instead transferring to Texas. From there, Smithson was never able to gain much traction. He was asked to resign by new athletic director Jim Schaus in March 2000 with a record of 55-62.
• • •
Success or failure?
Some would argue that reaching the Division I level as a coach, regardless of wins and losses, makes one a success. As bad as Shocker basketball had been under Thompson and Mike Cohen before him, Smithson was able to re-ignite the passion of the WSU fan base.
But it wasn’t enough. When he began to lose the loyalty of his players, he turned to pills. At first, he told himself, it was because of the discomfort from numerous surgeries over the years. In truth, though, Smithson’s injuries were emotional.
• • •
Smithson’s addiction to pain medication escalated when he was coaching at Cowley in 2004.
When asked how bad it was, he is embarrassed to answer.
“I hate to say it,” he said. “I mean, I hate to say this, but at the height — and I hate to say this — but probably well over 100 pills a day.”
If he didn’t have the money to pay for the pills, he found the money to pay for the pills. He borrowed it from friends who, Smithson said, are still waiting to be repaid.
Some of those friends knew he had a problem, but he convinced them he was on the verge of kicking his habit. He has always talked a good game.
“I don’t know how I lived through it,” Smithson said. “God kept me alive for something. There’s got to be some purpose for me because I should be dead.”
The only thing that stopped him from popping pills was sleep, but a good night’s rest was almost impossible to come by.
His addiction started low. His tolerance level was low at first, but soon became harder and harder to meet.
That meant more pills in less time and Smithson reached a point where most of his waking hours were spent in a drug-induced fog.
“You get to know someone’s habits,” Race said. “When I was at Butler with Randy, we were in the office at 9 a.m. and there until midnight every day, seven days a week. When he went to Cowley and then back to Butler for the second time, there wasn’t near the attention to detail. He wasn’t there nearly as much. And Butler never had the success we had when Randy was there the first time.”
• • •
How did Smithson coach? He reacted out of instinct, because basketball was something he knew so well. Even though he was often a zombie, he could recognize circumstances and rely on his assistants to get through practices and games.
“I’m not someone who would ever say, ‘Well, I’m just going to kill myself,”‘ Smithson said. “But I do think, yeah, there were times I hoped I wouldn’t wake up tomorrow. The bad thing was that I would wake up and have to do that whole madness all over again.”
The more pain Smithson felt, the more medication he took. It took a toll on his family, on his finances, on his friendships, on everything. He is estranged from his wife and the four children from that marriage. He has developed a relationship with a fifth child, Wichita Wingnuts backup catcher Zack Goldberg, one he didn’t acknowledge until recently. He has twice filed for bankruptcy and admits he has had to start over again financially.
His most recent bankruptcy, filed with his wife, Shauna, in the fall of 2007, listed liabilities of $180,049 and assets of $24,175.
“I’ve been bankrupt spiritually, financially, emotionally, you name it,” Smithson said. “I’ve been bankrupt in all departments.”
Smithson’s dependency on pain medication scared everyone close to him.
“I’m going to tell you, I would wake up during the night and I would have to tell myself that God is in control of this,” Sandy Smithson said. “And I can see the prints of God all over Randy’s life. He probably shouldn’t even be here. But I just feel like God has a plan and a purpose for every one of us.”
Smithson has struggled to figure out that plan. Basketball was all he really knew, so he just figured the game would safely accompany him to where he needed to be.
It didn’t.
He often contemplates whether basketball has been good for him.
It’s crazy, really, because basketball has been responsible for so many of the good things that have happened to Smithson.
It allowed him to travel the world. It allowed to him coach at the highest collegiate level, to win junior college championships, to produce juco All-Americans.
But it’s not a question he dismisses.
“The reason I know it’s a good question is because it’s one I ask myself,” Smithson said. “I look back on it and I think I made basketball my God and I obsessed over it. What makes some people successful is also their downfall.”
• • •
Smithson’s favorite athlete is Muhammad Ali, perhaps the greatest boxer in history. He can’t help but draw a comparison between his life and Ali’s life.
“He was such a winner, such a champion, but he couldn’t get himself out of the ring,” Smithson said. “And now he can’t speak, he can’t talk, and it’s sad. What made him great was also his downfall.
“When I look back — and I’m certainly not comparing myself to Ali — but in my own little world, where I was, I think the thing that made me very good as a basketball player and a coach has always been my downfall in life. No ifs, ands or buts.”
Reach Bob Lutz at 316-268-6597 or blutz@wichitaeagle.com
