Amid Aldon Smith’s life-and-death struggles, he sought to be a cautionary tale
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Aldon Smith died at age 36; autopsy performed, cause and manner pending.
- Smith was released from a six-month jail term following his 10th arrest in nine years.
- Smith ran I.M. Loading and met with Mizzou players and planned NFL rookie talks.
One August entering his final season at Mizzou in 2010, Aldon Smith reflected on the early journey that would soon lead him to becoming the No. 7 overall pick in the 2011 NFL Draft, reaching 30 career sacks faster than any player in NFL history … and, alas, a shattering aftermath.
With a touching vulnerability he was prone to share at times, Smith spoke back then about how he had once wanted to quit football forever. That was during his junior year at Raytown High, as he was “going through that period where I didn’t trust anybody” after moving here from Iowa.
Alluding to his family calling him by his middle name, Jacarus, he implied that he had been seeking his true identity even if merely at that surface level.
“I think it’s any person growing up,” he said. “Even though I don’t (really) know you, I’m pretty sure you went through a period like that.”
Just about everyone did and does, of course, and you wonder now much he really realized that as he said it.
But what feels most haunting about the arc of then to now, about Smith’s unfathomable issues and woes — yet obvious heart and particularly evident quest to find himself in recent years — is that his words then were spoken with a sense of arrival and past tense. Nothing seemed beyond his grasp.
As it tragically happens, Smith felt anything but arrival and ease with himself through much of a life that abruptly ended far too soon last week at age 36 ... and now is the subject of an apparent legal investigation.
The Santa Clara County (California) Office of the Medical Examiner released a statement to multiple media outlets saying it has performed an autopsy and the cause and manner of death are pending, and much remains unclear about the broader circumstances.
Smith’s death is piercing for many reasons, including the alarms he’d radiated for years — enough so that you could understand he was in a battle for survival long ago.
But it’s also excruciating because of the redemptive and fulfilling arc he’d apparently been on since being released from a six-month jail sentence in 2023. That sentence came in the wake of his 10th arrest in nine years, offenses often connected with substance abuse.
‘I wasn’t honest with myself’
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Smith was spending the last day of his life helping deliver pizzas to a charity for homeless people when he was found unresponsive. Much seems to remain incomplete about that scene.
Beyond that snapshot, though, Smith evidently had reset in a number of ways through his business, “I.M. Loading,” which he explained in 2024 to Windy City Gridiron’s Jacob Infante stood for “Intelligent Movement” — a name, he wrote, connoting the idea that the more intelligent moves one makes in life, the more likely one can become the person they want to be.
While Smith included art, music and clothes-design under that umbrella, he became dedicated to another element: trying to help others avoid the path that long consumed the man who was drawn to fire even as a toddler and long stayed intrigued by figurative flames.
Essentially, Smith didn’t want his odyssey and the traps he fell into — or for whatever agonizing reason gravitated to — to have been in vain.
Infante reported in 2024 that Smith was to meet with Jacksonville Jaguars’ and Las Vegas Raiders’ rookie classes to offer mentorship and candid insights about his own jagged trail.
Closer to home, Smith indeed met with Mizzou football players in the fall of 2024, and a portion of his talk can be found on his Instagram page.
“I wasn’t honest with myself,” he said.
Noting a tendency he had developed over the years to be in denial about who was at fault, he added, “At the end of the day, I’m out here tripping, and I know I’m not doing the right thing.”
He added, “It was just that the wrong thing is so comfortable sometimes.”
Later that fall, the first time he’d been back to Columbia since 2013, Smith was the guest of honor on a Tru Sons Podcast hosted by former Tiger Kevin Rutland with Jeremy Maclin and Sean Weatherspoon.
During the compelling 67-minute show, Smith spoke about the “heavy video” of his issues that became part of his presentations, and the reasons why he thought he could help.
As he spoke, he initially focused on how difficult it is when your playing days suddenly are over — problematic enough for any long-term athletes, including the three who commiserated during the podcast.
“It doesn’t matter if you have five dollars in the bank or five million in the bank when it’s over,” Smith said. “We all experience that loss and that transition phase.
“And I don’t feel like there was a person that was in that gap to fill that void and give you something that made sense to you. Something where you didn’t feel like you were just left, you know what I mean?”
As he went on, though, Smith lamented the feeling of realizing how outside the bubble “everyone else around you has already adjusted to life,” and referred to his own specific struggles with alcohol and getting help.
And the longer-term stuff that even those close to him might not have recognized.
A while after Weatherspoon had joked about how Smith never lacked for confidence, Smith said, “The thing is, man, it all wraps around to, like, how I felt inside. … I wasn’t confident. When you guys met me, I may have portrayed that.
“But I wasn’t cool with who I was; I wasn’t sure of who I was.”
Again, though, that seemed to be past tense: Smith spoke with conviction about that endeavor and his art and wanted to share the message to athletes to keep growing and keep “feeding your mind” — and to not hesitate to explore other parts of themselves.
“I really am excited to be able to show this side,” he said. “Things that we might enjoy doing that we might not think we’re good enough at.
“Don’t be afraid to try that.”
‘The Great Aldini’
Embracing the message, the ever-exuberant Weatherspoon said that “I wish my kids were right here” to hear that.
So much still remains publicly unclear about the final years for Smith, whose funeral was scheduled June 20 at Cathedral of Faith in San Jose, California. Attempts to reach former coaches at Mizzou and Raytown were unsuccessful, as were efforts to reach former MU players.
A statement sent to The Star and other media by The Law Office of Harry M. Daniels asked to respect the privacy of the family as it “struggles to come to grips with this terrible loss.”
The statement also said the attorneys are “currently investigating all of the aspects of this tragedy including the potential role CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) might have played given the numerous concussions Smith suffered throughout his career.”
Toward that end, it said that Smith’s brain will be sent to Boston (presumably to Boston University’s CTE Center, though that wasn’t specified) for examination for CTE and “other damage caused by years of concussions and additional trauma.”
Related or not, when Smith’s hosts were teasing him on the podcast about how easily everything seemed to come to him on the field, Smith made a point of saying, “We have contact every play. Extreme contact every play.”
Once more for emphasis, he added, “Extreme contact every play.”
Someone the other day mentioned a Steve Jobs quote I’d never heard before, and it came to mind just now.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs said in 2005. “You can only connect them looking backwards.”
Maybe these dots of Smith’s life somehow will connect one day in a way that makes more sense … and perhaps even offers some consolation. Unless and until, though, we’ll be left to wonder.
Was it just all too much, too soon, as some would surmise? Was he enabled too often in the NFL? Or was it more like he told his former teammates and, stronger yet, Jay Glazer on a different podcast:
“People looked up to me, and they saw me as this superstar,” he said. “And I had low self-esteem, I had anxiety and my sense of self was very, very negative. So I filled those gaps, and I did everything I could to live into that persona.”
None of that is ours to know. Chances are it never will be.
But you don’t need to know the demons to sense the soul. You could see that tender side of Aldon Smith in his rapport with teammates, and you could know it from those close to him.
“Aldon was a gifted artist with talent beyond the gridiron, a heart of gold, and a smile made to be in front of the camera,” Weatherspoon wrote on X. “Football is so small in the grand scheme of life, it’s a game that we serve with reverence that God only deserves. Still, it is a vessel of hope for many young kids from the ghetto in America.
“The tale of Aldon Smith is not one of tragedy, it is one of perseverance. When I last saw him we had the best time, it was like I was 20 and he was 18. He wasn’t a shell of himself, he was Aldon.”
Or “The Great Aldini,” as Weatherspoon loved to call Smith, with whom he bonded from the beginning as his Mizzou recruiting host.
A beloved teammate and son who ultimately most wanted to be a cautionary tale for others — a poignant signature of his final years that, whatever else he was coping with, speaks to who he was at heart to those who knew him best.