Son Repays Late Mother’s Rich Legacy Player Pledges $2.5 Million For Scholarships

Clara Bell Smith’s life was as simple and dignified as the trim, one-story house where she and her husband raised their children, a patch of color in this gray city.

She was secretary of the block club. She was “the neighborhood mom” and keeper of the basketball court that filled her back yard. She was the purveyor of sweets and gentle discipline to the boys who played there.

When she died in February 1992, just months after her younger son, Steve, signed a professional basketball contract for $14 million over five years, a dream seemed to die with her.

It was Steve’s dream, a son’s desire, to shower his mother with riches. He felt hollow without her.

Now, in time for Mother’s Day, he knows exactly how to honor her. He pledged $2.5 million - the largest donation ever made by a professional athlete to an alma mater - to Michigan State University, to provide scholarships and build the Clara Bell Smith Student-Athlete Academic Center.

Education, not sports, had been foremost in Clara’s mind.

“It had been selfish of me to think, ‘I want to pay my mom back,”’ said Steve Smith, a 6-foot-7-inch guard on the Atlanta Hawks and a rarity: a soft-spoken star. “I wanted her to do everything she hadn’t been able to do before. But this is something she would like more than anything else, because that’s the kind of person my mom was. That’s why I did it, to let her know I’m still thinking of her.”

Smith’s tribute to his mother greatly touched people in Michigan, in this era of “Show me the money” greed and profligacy among athletes.

Michigan’s governor, John Engler, declared that Smith, 28, is creating “a legacy of honoring one’s parents.” Smith’s lawyers, Howard Soifer and Jack Davis, flew their children to Smith’s announcement so they would learn the importance of family loyalty.

As news of Smith’s gift trickles out around the country, curiosity has arisen about how Clara Smith’s nurturing continues to shape Steve Smith, athlete and role model.

“It was like a friendship,” Steve Smith said in an interview. “She shared things with me like a friend. We pretty much had both relationships, mom and friend.”

Their closeness was such that Steve could almost forget that their lives were hardly pure bliss.

Violence bit at the edges of their neighborhood. Tragedy visited in 1975 when Steve’s older sister, Janice, was gunned down in a robbery attempt in California. There were deprivations, temptations and, finally, illness, but always there was love.

At 18, Clara married Donald Smith, an Army veteran. Within two years, they had a son, Dennis, and a daughter, Janice. All day, Donald drove a bus. And he worked two moonlight shifts with a chemical company, sanitizing toilets so Clara could stay home with their children.

Steve, the last child, came 13 years after Janice.

“I always asked my mom, ‘Was I a mistake?”’ Steve said, laughing. “She said, ‘You weren’t a mistake. We were just waiting. We were taking a rest.”’

Coming so many years after the others, Steve had Clara’s undivided attention.

When tragedy arrived, her first thought was for 7-year-old Steve. Donald Smith remembers getting paged on his bus, told to call home at the end of the line. The news was shocking: Janice had been killed.

“She wanted him to understand how life and death worked, that there are things you can control and things you can’t control,” said Dennis Smith, now 42 and working for Pepsi Cola.

Steve recalls, “We sat down and talked about it. She asked me to ask questions, any question I could think of, not just about what happened. I would always say, ‘Why did it happen?’ and she said, ‘There’s no reason why it happened. It’s just something that happened. You can’t hold anger toward anybody because you know deep down that she’s going to a better place.”’

During long afternoons at home, Clara shared her activities with Steve. “They went swimming twice a week, they bowled together, they walked for miles around the neighborhood,” said Dennis.

Donald Smith would return home at about 7, eat supper and go to bed, setting his alarm for 4 a.m. Donald still remembers the lilting hum of his wife and son chatting at the dinner table after he went to bed.

“I never knew what they were talking about,” said Donald, now 66 and retired, living in a wooded development in the suburbs beside a golf course. “I could hear them for hours.”

While Steve was in the midst of a glorious senior year, putting all his skills on display, Clara was diagnosed with cancer. In April 1991, she confided in Dennis. But Steve was living at Michigan State, in East Lansing, and was about to become a first-round draft choice in the National Basketball Association.

Even though she was too sick to join the family at the draft, she swore her husband and Dennis to secrecy on the illness.

Only later, during his first months with the Miami Heat, did Steve realize something was amiss.

During his rookie season, Steve flew eight relatives down to Miami for Christmas dinner in his new condominium in Key Biscayne.

Clara spent much of those days resting on Steve’s bed. With Clara lying on one side, Steve sprawled on the other and, side by side, they renewed the conversations of his youth.

“She said, ‘I feel sorry for you. I’m going to a better place,”’ said Steve. “She also said you and your father and your brother have to become closer and take care of each other.”

She died within two months.

For a year, Steve’s heart wasn’t in basketball. Then slowly, his mother’s teachings started coming back to him. He began to read the worn Bible she had given him when he went to college, having underlined the passages she wanted him to read.

Now, Steve Smith is a star with the Hawks. Last year, he signed a seven-year contract with an average annual income of $7 million.

His mother’s memory pervades his life.

Smith often thinks of life after the NBA. He and his new wife, Millie, plan to have children. After his playing career, he plans to “be a father who’s around.” It’s another lesson of his mother’s life: There can be great fulfillment in staying home and raising children.

He now says he was foolish to think at the start of his pro career that he could reward his mother with material gifts.

“It wasn’t ever money - it was who you are,” said Bessie Tolbert, a longtime neighbor of the Smiths who’s become a surrogate mother to Dennis and Steve. “I bet you each person her path crossed in this neighborhood, she touched. Everyone would have a good word for her. She was truly a mother. Truly a mother.”