Charging ahead

San Diego GM Smith paid tribute to fallen friend at draft

It was A.J. Smith's idea, and that tells us something about the man right there.

Before the San Diego Chargers' new general manager put his name on his first NFL Draft as the guy in charge, 26 years after he entered the league, he put John Butler's name on it, too. Way up high. Where everyone could see it.

On Friday, before the weekend of picking started, Smith called his entire football staff together in the Chargers' draft war room. The first card he placed on the team's draft board looked like every other card. A name, a school, a position, and all the measurables that matter.

But this wasn't just any card, listing the particulars of just any prospect. It was Butler's draft card, specially made and placed there atop San Diego's board in memory of a man who had made just this kind of work his life's work.

It was a simple act. But with it, Smith created a moment that was part ceremony and part celebration for the Chargers, who lost Butler, the team's vice president/general manager, to lung cancer April 11. It marked a passing, and a new beginning, and served as a both a remembrance, and a reminder that life and work goes on.

"We put it right there under the Chargers helmet on Friday," Smith said. "I pulled it out of my pocket, and said, 'This is to remember John, and what he did with his life.' And we put it up there on top of our board, with all the other players' cards.

"Of course, we had some fun with it. It said: John Butler, Illinois, defensive tackle, 6-3. But I had his weight down to 323, and we gave him a 4.98 40 time. And then John's Wunderlich test was a 41 [which is preposterously high for the league's favored intelligence test]. That's what broke everybody up. John would have loved that. He would have had so much fun with that. It was lighthearted, and yet special."

Kind of like Butler himself, a large and popular man who left an even larger void in both the NFL and San Diego's organization. Leave it to Smith, his longtime friend and confidant, and now his replacement, to find the perfect way to memorialize Butler in his most natural environment.

"On Saturday, when we got back in there, all the names were gone off the board and only John's remained under the Charger helmet," Smith said. "And as the draft went on, we put the names back up there one by one under his draft card.

"It made it go down a road we wanted it to go down. When we were printing up all the cards, I just decided I'm going to print one for John and put it up there on the board. ... With John, I could almost see a tombstone and it saying, 'John Butler, Here lies an old NFL scout.' That would be perfect for John. That's what he was."

For Smith, there were many other moments this draft season when his thoughts turned to Butler, who he had worked beside almost continuously since 1982, when both were scouts for the USFL's Chicago Blitz. Even with Butler hospitalized for the last month of his life, the two met and talked Chargers personnel until the very end.

"When we started our readings and he wasn't there, that's when I felt it," Smith said. "That's where everybody comes in and you coordinate the draft effort, getting everybody on the same page. Normally I would have been sitting beside him, but this time I was in his chair, running things.

"Then on draft day, obviously, when I went up there to pull that first card for [cornerback] Sammy Davis, and got it ready to turn his name into the league, that's when it really hit me in reality that John was gone and I was in charge. That was the big one. The big moment. That was tough."

But Smith, 54, is fully in charge, and the Chargers are in good hands because of it. Make no mistake: This was his draft. Not Butler's. Butler had input, but it was Smith who made the decisions.

When San Diego traded its No. 15 pick to Philadelphia, moving down to No. 30 to select Davis of Texas A&M, it was the first-time GM who didn't blink or opt to play it safe. When the Chargers decided to take four defensive backs among their eight picks, addressing San Diego's 32nd-ranked pass defense, it was Smith who made the call and explained the thinking to the team's fans and the media.

The two men were the best of friends, but they weren't carbon copies of one another. They shared philosophies and work addresses, but Smith had been preparing for this solo moment for a while now. Both over the course of his own distinguished personnel career, and in the months since Butler was diagnosed with cancer July 4.

"I knew immediately when he told me what he was up against," Smith said. "It's tough. I lost my dad to lung cancer at age 47 in 1972, my brother-in-law last year, and I've had some very close friends die from it. I knew that the medical professionals say you have about nine months with lung cancer, and John fought it for nine months and one week.

"He stayed positive and talked about the fight and didn't give in to anything, but he knew. John was aware of it. He knew all along, because he was talking to me privately and telling me he understood what he was up against."

Smith once wanted to work in the NFL so badly that he sent resumes to all 28 teams, asking if they had any openings in their scouting department. That was 1977. Almost half his lifetime ago. Now he has the job of his dreams, but it came to him via a scenario that he would have sooner never imagined.

He has been asked to carry on the work that he and his good friend started in San Diego in 2001. Until his promotion became official last week, Smith was the Chargers' assistant general manager and director of pro personnel. Now he is Butler's successor.

"To stand up there and be named general manager, after 25 years in the league and the work that we've put in, it was very special to me," said Smith, who like Butler spent 14 years with Buffalo before coming to San Diego. "It was a little bit over the top for me. It was the ultimate, because of the circumstances. To take over for John."

There will be no long honeymoon for Smith. There's no time for that in San Diego. The Chargers in Butler's first two seasons started quickly both times, and then collapsed. A 5-2 beginning in 2001 melted away to 5-11. And last year, with new head coach Marty Schottenheimer on hand, San Diego bolted to a 6-1 getaway, only to stumble home 8-8 and miss the playoffs for a seventh consecutive season.

"It's the push year for us," Smith said. "When John and I came in here, the thought was we set up shop the first year and get things going. The second year we tried to make sure everything was in order, and we had a coaching change to contend with as well. Now it's the third year, and it's 'Let's do it.' We knew we had to get it done this year. This is a very important season for us."

On offense, the Chargers added standout receiver David Boston in free agency, giving them a downfield threat to help take the pressure off the third-year tandem of running back LaDainian Tomlinson and quarterback Drew Brees. But it was on defense, where San Diego ranked 30th overall last year, that major change took place. Gone are cornerstones Junior Seau and Rodney Harrison. On their way in are all those new defensive backs, with an emphasis on a unit that plays faster, with tighter coverage, in order to supplement the team's pass rush.

"Something has been wrong defensively," Smith said. "Something hasn't worked. We've jumped out of the gate two years in a row and then collapsed. You've got to stop the losing attitude, the losing streaks. We've had two different coaching staffs and two collapses and that's disturbing to us. Either they don't believe they can win, or there's something wrong with the players we have. We believe we've addressed some of that with some of our new players.

"We need to grow together back there in the secondary, and if we've made the right choices, we should be able to do that. They're big, strong, fast kids. It remains to be seen how they'll do, but we better about what we have going into the season. We do believe this team is on the rise. But the time's coming when we get to find out."

His days of serving as Butler's loyal right-hand man over, Smith's time has come as well. Not the way he wanted it. Not the way he envisioned it. But opportunity doesn't always follow a script. Whatever these Chargers are to become, Butler and Smith will have built them together. The names of both men, and their handiwork, are all over this team.

After all these years, could it be any other way?

Don Banks covers pro football for SI.com.

 

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