Steve Smith Sr. is the eighth-leading receiver in NFL history and easily one of the toughest guys to ever grace a football field. However, without a job that he had at Taco Bell in his youth, the two-time All-Pro may have never gotten a chance to star for the Carolina Panthers and Baltimore Ravens.
Steve Smith Sr. got into a fight with a junior college teammate and recently revealed that his job at Taco Bell likely prevented him from being shot by the unidentified teammate shortly after the incident.
The wide receiver-turned-media guy shared the story on the most recent episode of 10 Questions With Kyle Brandt:
“What’s crazy, is that job, later in life, ended up pretty much saving my life, to be honest,” Smith recently explained on 10 Questions with Kyle Brandt. “What I mean by that is, I know this is a shocker, but I got in a fight in practice with a teammate in junior college. We squared up, and he took that L, and as the folks say today, no cap. He got molly-whopped. And on Fridays, I didn’t have class, so I would work at Taco Bell. And then on Saturday mornings, I would catch the bus at about 4:00 in the morning, from the inner city, go up there, work from 6:00 until about 2:30 and then go to school. We played night games, so I would go to my boy’s house, and then we would play that game at night. So I would literally be working all day.
“But what happened was that on Friday, I didn’t make walk-through, because I was working, as usual. But old boy that I got in a fight with, he was waiting in my locker area with a pistol. And he was in the locker room, waiting basically to shoot me. And if I would have came in, he would have shot me. But the fact of the matter is, I didn’t show up that day, because on Friday’s, I didn’t have to do the walk-through because I was working. So it’s kind of crazy how all of that intertwined. Some people look at working in fast food as a curse, but for me, I really look at it like it was a gift.”
Smith declined to name who that teammate was, and said that they moved past the incident and he hopes that his former teammate is doing well today.
