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Special giant Lloyd Ray passes torch

By: Mark Wiedmer
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The e-mails arrived roughly once a month for several years. They often dealt with news from the Area 4 Special Olympics. They occasionally contained jokes or funny stories.

Sent by retired Area 4 director Lloyd Ray Smith, they all were greatly appreciated.

At least all of them until the one Smith sent Feb. 11. The one slugged “Kinda Saying Goodbye to All.” The one that read in part:

“Well, I don’t know any other way to do this as I can’t call everyone personally. But my doctor says I have two to six weeks to live — or he might have said six months. ... So I wish the best for you. ... I will be home trying to fight the dreaded ‘C,’ which has a head start as it is in all of my vital organs and nodes. — Love, Lloyd Ray.”

Early Saturday morning, Lloyd Ray lost his fight with the dreaded “C.” To slightly alter the Special Olympics creed, even if he could not win, he was extraordinarily brave in the attempt.

The funeral service is set for 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at the East Chapel of Chattanooga Funeral Home. Visitation is noon to 6 p.m. today and 2-8 p.m. Monday.

Smith was 73, forever an athlete, a competitor lost too soon. Fifty years had passed since his days as a record-setting fullback at Northeast Louisiana State College (now Louisiana-Monroe), yet “The Tank” — as he was known in college — still carried himself with an athlete’s confident gait, though he never discussed his gridiron glories.

“A mountain of a man,” said University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football coach Rodney Allison. “Anybody who would do what he’s done for 40 years, that’s commitment.”

Here’s commitment: On knees turned to mush by football and a military stint as a paratrooper in both the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, Smith took his Special Olympians snow skiing in January.

Snow skiing. At 73. With special-needs children and adults who had never skied before. With the dreaded “C” already ravaging his liver, lungs and lymph nodes.

“It may have appeared to a lot of us that some of those kids and adults had reached their maximum,” said Chattanooga attorney Jerry Summers, one of Smith’s closest friends. “But Lloyd Ray never believed that. He felt he could always encourage them to take another step forward and that those little steps could become big steps.”

Special Olympics was a big step for him. He had been a military man and a football coach. In those years before he left northern Louisiana for Orange Grove, then the Special Olympics, his first daughter, Tracee Randall, called him a “loving father but a strict disciplinarian.”

In fact, he was so uncomfortable early on with assisting special-needs children at Orange Grove that he once told this newspaper he had planned to leave after one year. He was used to athletic excellence and military discipline, and these new students could usually give him neither.

But something magical happened that first year at Orange Grove, just as Eunice Shriver hoped it would within all Americans when she staged the first Special Olympics in Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1968, with Lloyd Ray in attendance.

The kids changed him and inspired him.

“My parents had divorced,” Randall recalled. “I hadn’t seen my dad for awhile. I came to Chattanooga to visit and here he was with all these kids. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, my dad is so patient and kind. Those kids softened his heart.’”

From then on, for 36 years, Lloyd Ray Smith was the gentlest giant on the planet, 6 feet 4 inches worth of kind words, high-fives and hugs. To see him each spring at McCallie School’s Spears Stadium — his thick, wavy hair out of control, his glasses thick, his Special Olympics T-shirt usually hanging over dark shorts, his socks white and his shoes black — was in many ways to see a football coach from the 1960s.

But then he’d high-five a race winner — or loser — give him or her a hug and say, “Great job,” and you realized he was far more caregiver than coach. He was a dad or granddad or lovable uncle for these sweet souls. And he was always there for them.

“The love he gave them was pure and unconditional,” Summers said.

Smith’s younger daughter, Wendy Leaumont uses similar words to describe her dad. So, too, his sons Gabe and Buddy, as well as the young men who became his sons, Cork and Tim Conner. And his last love, Leona.

“I think one thing I’ll remember most,” Gabe Smith said Saturday, “was the love and kindness he showed everyone he ever met. He was a very humble guy. He just loved helping others.”

To help remember Lloyd Ray, the Area 4 Special Olympics will forever more be known as the Area 4 Lloyd Ray Smith Spring Games. As an extra tribute, this year’s volunteers will wear purple and gold T-shirts to honor Smith’s deep passion for the LSU Tigers, with whom he initially signed before a running back named Billy Cannon came along and convinced him to transfer.

Said Judy Rogers, who replaced Lloyd Ray as Area 4 chairman, of that name change: “Now the Games will always be special.”

Perhaps almost as special as the softened heart they once called The Tank.

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