‘Am I gonna die?’ How Chiefs star Trey Smith became NFL success story unlike any other

On a late-summer Friday years ago, Trey Smith stopped taking the medication prescribed to keep him alive.

Some 24 hours later, he rummaged through his college football locker on game day before securing his orange and white Tennessee Volunteers jersey top. If he wasn’t already acutely aware of the consequences of his next steps, an accelerated heartbeat offered a nudge.

“If I go out there on the field,” he recalled thinking — but when re-telling the story, his booming voice uncharacteristically trailed off.

“Well, you know.”

This was 2019, back when Smith, now a two-time Super Bowl champion and four-year starting lineman for the Chiefs, wasn’t yet old enough to drink celebratory champagne, much less dream those opportunities would arise.

More than 85,000 people packed the college stadium that afternoon, the optimism of a new season furnishing a volume so loud that its intended recipients could feel it from inside the locker room. But there, a 6-foot-6, 325-pound All-American felt something else.

Fear.

Anxiety.

Kickoff minutes away, he looked down to see his hands and body literally shaking. Some teammates, even coaches, wondered how football could be worth this.

If only they knew.

Here sat a 20-year-old young man whose life pivoted on the promise he made as a 15-year-old boy.

By the time he pulled the uniform over his shoulders, targeting his first football game in 10 months, sweat drenched him.

“If I go out there,” he said, when once more re-visiting that moment, before looking up to make eye contact and finish the thought.

“Am I gonna die?”

‘I’m going to play in the NFL’

By the end of his junior year of high school, Trey Smith became the nation’s No. 1 football recruit.

He looked every bit the part.

Eventually.

As a toddler, his parents had made a special appointment with the pediatrician — his father, Henry, had become concerned his son was too small. The doctor respectfully laughed at the notion.

A fever-pitch recruitment, Trey spent weekends on the road visiting schools, father and older sister Ashley along for the ride.

“Trey,” more than one coach asked, as Henry remembered, “Where’s your momma?

“She decide to stay home?”

The silence revealed the answer.

Trey was 15 when his mom got sick, just a sophomore in high school. He didn’t know the gravity of it because that’s all Dorsetta Smith would share — an illness — even until her final days. She didn’t want her kids to worry. Her siblings, either.

Henry, her college sweetheart, honored the wish.

Initially, the expectation was a week in the hospital over winter break. But a week grew to two and then a month before she was transported from a facility in their hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville.

The medical center employees couldn’t believe the amount of visitors, but community and church events had left an impact. They were a passion and an intentional example for a mother of two. “She’d give her last anything to help someone,” Ashley, her daughter, said.

Dorsetta begged her kids to dream big. The blueprints to accomplishing those aspirations were made over late-night conversations molded by encouragement.

Trey last visited her in early February 2015. When he entered the intensive care unit room, a breathing tube ran through his mom’s mouth, turning his next words into a one-way conversation.

Hoping she could still hear him anyway, he leaned over.

I’m going to get my college degree, he assured, still two years shy of a high school diploma.

And then one more thing.

I’m going to play in the NFL.

It was the last time he would see her.

On Feb. 10, 2015, Dorsetta Smith was gone. She was 51.

Two days later, Trey Smith was back in the gym, the vow to his mother on his mind. Football, he discovered, provided an opportunity to express the frustration life had unexpectedly provided.

An outlet, he considered it.

His sister, his best friend, had none.

Nearly nine years Trey’s elder, Ashley worked for the NCAA when her mom died, the organization’s offices headquartered in Indianapolis.

She lived alone.

And she felt it.

Tears would stream down her face as she stared at the computer at work. Her mom had taught her to wear business attire, advice she always heeded, but she stopped dressing up or wearing makeup because she couldn’t muster the energy to embrace the day. The mornings were instead reserved for talking on the phone with her father, and, for nearly a year, they passed time in the evenings the same way.

Her apartment told a story, reeking of depression. Empty to-go boxes from Buffalo Wild Wings, McDonald’s and Taco Bell littered the room.

A woman of faith, another attribute instilled by her parents, Ashley lay in bed and eventually sought release in the only coping mechanism she knew.

Prayer.

“God,” she began, “please just let me not wake up tomorrow.”

The torment, her family sensed.

They knew she needed them.

Without warning, her dad, brother and an aunt made a 7-hour drive from Jackson, Tennessee, to Indianapolis. As seemingly every college in the country sought Trey’s commitment, an onslaught of letters, texts and calls incoming, he didn’t hesitate to skip town.

Upon pulling into the Indianapolis apartment complex, Henry called his daughter and asked if she was home. Out with friends, she lied in response.

“Then why is your car in the parking lot?” he responded. “Open the door.”

When she did, there it was — the grief in plain sight.

To-go boxes on the countertops. Clothes on the floor. Dishes piled in the sink.

Her dad insisted she return home, but she didn’t need convincing.

Before he had even got in the car, he’d already lined up professional help at Lakeside Behavioral Health in Memphis, where he would drive her the hour and a half to treatment every day for six weeks.

“I really feel like my dad played a major role in saving my life,” she said.

Henry reminded his daughter of her accomplishments — in school, in her career and in life — and reminded her all those honored her mother. Her life, she says, consists of winks from God in that way.

But there was one other thought she couldn’t shake.

“I have a brother who needs me.”

Closer in bond than age, Trey and Ashley had been linked initially by life itself and then, unexpectedly, by death.

By grief.

And then, the very thing that has underpinned their bond for nearly a decade now.

By their survival.

An unexpected diagnosis

His phone rang on a day in February 2018, and Henry Smith picked up to the sound of his son’s voice.

“I’m at the hospital at the University of Tennessee,” Trey said.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“They’re running some tests,” Trey replied succinctly.

In the background, over the hospital intercom, the next two words came through the phone:

Trey Smith.

“I have to go,” Trey said, and he hung up.

A few days earlier, the Tennessee football program had begun its offseason workouts under new head coach Jeremy Pruitt. Smith crushed the first day.

During the next, as it progressed to the second-to-last rep in the drill, he felt short of breath and keeled over on the sideline.

Passed out.

The team transported him to the hospital for further evaluation before he returned home.

A few days later, a 325-pound football player couldn’t lift a 10-pound dumbbell during a sit-up exercise. On a walk to his dorm room, an All-American athlete needed to stop four times to catch his breath. He lost 13 pounds in 48 hours.

A call from the doctor came as he walked out of class.

Stay put. We’re coming to pick you up, and we’re taking you to the hospital.

The tests revealed blood clots in both lungs, a life-threatening condition if untreated. Smith, and this gives a peek into his personality, felt relieved by the diagnosis, because “at least I knew I wasn’t just being mentally weak.”

He was prescribed anticoagulants (blood thinners), but they entailed an edict: no more football. Absorbing contact, particularly the repeated contact along the offensive line, while on blood-thinning medication could be deadly.

Six months later, after a visit with Dr. Sam Goldhaber, a blood-clotting expert in Boston, Smith received clearance to play — but he’d have to halt the medication. If the blood clots returned, it would be over.

Smith, now a college sophomore, made it through six games without an incident. Life had normalcy again. Purpose again. The promise to mom, most notably, was alive.

But during a late October practice, Smith became short of breath. He didn’t think much of it — maybe he had a cold — but the team took him back to the medical center just to be safe. He recognized the gamut of tests.

And then the doctor’s results too.

The blood clots were back.

Sitting in a hospital bed, toward no one in particular, he uttered two words out loud.

“I’m done.”

A football dream

It had been three years since his mom passed, and after spending nearly all of it working toward following through on his pledge, Smith spent three weeks trying to come to terms with knowing it wouldn’t happen.

It was New Year’s Eve 2017, a time reserved for aspirational goal-setting, but Smith was sitting in his car, blaring gospel music through its speakers.

And crying.

“God,” he said. “If this is the vision, if this is what you have for me in life, show the dream. Show me the vision.”

He went to bed that evening absent the celebratory party, and even if the next moments came through only in a dream, he recalls them vividly.

Dressed in full uniform, the orange and white jersey he never planned to wear again, he’s running onto the football field — or running through the T, they call it in Knoxville, as the marching band forms the capital letter on the field. They fancy it the greatest entrance in sports.

In a sweat, Smith awoke.

He called the only person in the world he figured would understand — the one who had some familiarity with a bleak crossroads.

“I told him if this is what you believe God is saying to you, and if you feel strongly, then let’s figure this out,” said Ashley, who by then had left her job with the NCAA to take one in the Tennessee athletic administration, seizing the opportunity to see her brother almost every day while working as the director of football administration.

The football team held its year-end banquet that month. Smith requested a meeting with his head coach, Pruitt, along with his dad and sister.

Pruitt opened the conversation, complimentary of what Smith had provided the program, even if he could provide it no more. And, hey, if he had the desire to coach one day as he had expressed, he could come out on the field and job shadow.

“The door is open,” Pruitt said, before turning to Henry, Trey’s father. “And don’t worry — we’ll honor the scholarship. He’s earned that.”

Henry thanked him for the commitment, but as the conversation continued, dissecting the next steps, Smith interrupted.

“Dammit,” he said, “I’m right here.”

“And I’m going to play again.”

The university let Smith and his family drive the ambition, but they offered the fuel. They set up appointments with leading experts across the country — a deed for which the family is eternally grateful.

The ensuing travels mirrored his recruitment. The first stop, the renowned Cleveland Clinic, provided an optimal start. The blood clots had not actually returned, they determined — rather, it was scar tissue on his lungs.

His final stop, to see Dr. Stephan Moll at University of North Carolina Hemophilia and Thrombosis Center, enacted a plan that Smith believes he’s the first major college football player to even attempt. He enacted intermittent dosing with his anticoagulants, meaning he’d take the blood-thinning medication every day of the week before skipping Friday morning, allowing it to leave his body by kickoff. Then he’d start the cycle anew after a game.

That meant one of the country’s top-rated offensive lineman spent the entire season without practicing.

It was a compelling story.

If only everyone could see it that way.

The NFL call

The emotions from that 2019 season opener with Tennessee, his first game with the intermittent dosing plan, haven’t left him.

That fear.

That anxiety.

And that thought that, yes, he could be putting his life in danger.

“As far as I was told, this had never been done in contact sports,” Smith said. “Like, are his calculations right? If I go out there, am I going to mess myself up?”

All that passed after a handful of plays.

Well, for him.

As he settled into the game in his junior year, among that crowd of 85,000, two fidgeted in their seats.

Dad.

And sister, Ashley.

In the first quarter, a running play created a common pile-up along the offensive line. Henry scanned the field and didn’t immediately see his son. Then he saw: There was No. 73, laying on the grass ever so briefly.

“My heart skipped a beat,” Henry said.

He jumped up in his seat, preparing to run down to the field.

Ashley tugged on his shirt.

“Dad. Dad. He’s OK.”

Trey cried after that game.

He had made it back.

He had survived it.

Thrived, even. He was a two-time All-SEC selection, staying his senior year to improve his draft stock — and maybe practice a time or two.

Six years later, now 25 years old, Smith doesn’t take the medication anymore, but he must still be careful to avoid situations known to increase the risk of blood clots. A long plane ride necessitates he gets up and moves around. That sort of thing. Doctors never determined the root cause of the blood clots, which adds to the worry.

It certainly added concern for the NFL.

If this seems like a lengthy story, imagine sharing it with 20-plus teams, one by one, ahead of the 2021 NFL Draft, trying to prove you can play. Smith had it down to a science because he needed to have it down to a science.

A first- or second-round talent tracked that 2021 draft from home. ESPN sent camera gear and the hats for all 32 NFL teams, thinking, hey, when you get drafted, we sure would like to show your family’s reaction from Jackson, Tennessee.

The first day came, and the Smith family set up the camera equipment and hit record. His name, though, didn’t get called. The second day, the equipment returned, and then the record button again, but alas, no call.

By the third and final day, he didn’t bother. He stayed in his room to play video games, the entire family left to reconcile that carrying out a promise would require an unconventional route.

“As a competitor and an athlete, I didn’t want anyone to pity me because of the draft. I didn’t like that,” Smith said. “It’s an ego thing for me. I’m mad, but I also knew what I could do. I just needed one opportunity.”

His dad grew tired of tracking it all and left to grab lunch. His sister stepped outside their Jackson home to make a call, needing to vent to a friend.

“Why can’t he ever catch a break?” she asked at some point during the call.

And then her friend, whose eyes were still glued on the TV, interrupted with a question.

“Kansas City?”

“What?” a distracted Ashley asked.

Then it came in the form of an emphatic statement.

“Kansas City.”

Ashley sprinted to Trey’s room. He was on the phone. She mouthed the same thing her friend had just relayed over the phone.

“Kansas City?”

Trey nodded. Unusually, a Chiefs team doctor delivered Trey the news of the draft pick in the sixth round.

No. 226.

He walked back out of the room to greet his sister. The two hugged. They didn’t need to speak.

Only two players from the draft class have played more than Smith’s 4,296 snaps in the ensuing four seasons. (One of them is a teammate: Creed Humphrey.)

A four-year starter with two Super Bowl rings, Smith is set to become a free agent this offseason and could demand one of the most lucrative contracts ever awarded to an interior lineman. First, he’s trying to be part of the first three-peat in NFL history.

It was an emotional ride to get here.

Once here, it still is.

Ashley is employed at the NFL league office now, working in player engagement. She started in 2021, drafted into the most popular league in the world the same year as her brother. How fitting.

Her weekends are frequently occupied by traveling to most of her brother’s games, Super Bowls included.

The two championships have come within just a couple of days of the anniversary of their mother’s death in February. Ahead of Trey’s first Super Bowl, a Chiefs last-minute win against the Eagles in Arizona two seasons ago, Ashley began the game with tears in her eyes.

“Why is my mom not here?” she thought.

Upon reflection, she added: “But the reality is my mom fulfilled her purpose and ran her race. I feel like she’s passed the baton to Trey and I to do this thing.”

After that game, with red, yellow and white confetti shooting from makeshift cannons, there was Smith, once more sprawled across the field.

This time, as Henry rushed from the stands, Ashley didn’t stop him. She joined him.

When they found Trey, a trophy presentation consumed the stadium, Patrick Mahomes on stage receiving the MVP honor.

A family of three sat alone at the 50-yard line, the chaos of a celebration swirling around them, and recognized something a little extra.

They knew Trey’s promise. They were the only ones who fully understood its odds.

After they left the field, as the team quickly spoke of extending their championship run, Smith held a Super Bowl hat in his hand.

He uttered three words, perhaps not even recognizing the parallel to six years earlier.

“Not done yet.”