In the newspaper business, we call it "burying the lead." You decide, for whatever reason, to take the best, most interesting nugget of information you have for that particular story and insert it somewhere around the middle of the article or lower rather than near the top.
Burying the lead is not exactly a compliment, and anyone who attended the 41st annual Chattanooga Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast at the Chattanooga Convention Center on Tuesday morning might understandably believe guest speaker Sherman Smith buried the best, most interesting facet of his life story if they had read or heard much about the longtime NFL assistant coach and player before the event.
After all, how many folks have you ever heard about who fathered a son in their teens but never knew it, then 16 years later successfully recruited that son to play for the same college team they had starred on, from that point forward carried on a strong relationship with that young man though neither the father nor the son knew of their biological connection, then, when the son reached his 40s, he discovered that the coach who recruited him and bonded with him 28 years earlier was his biological father?
Pretty amazing story, huh? And that's what happened to Smith in November of 2017. Having spent the entirety of his adult life having no knowledge that a high school girlfriend had become pregnant or later given birth to a boy who would become Deland McCullough after that girlfriend gave him up for adoption at birth, Smith - who recruited McCullough to Miami University - was shocked to receive a phone call from him one day that went something like this, according to a marvelous ESPN story last year by Sarah Spain:
Told that McCullough finally had discovered his birth mother, Smith reportedly exclaimed: "Praise the Lord! What a blessing!"
Then McCullough, by now 44 years old and an assistant with Southern Cal, told him the rest of the story, which Smith remembered thusly: "And then he said, 'I asked her who my biological father was, and she said you.'"
Stunned, Smith asked if he could call McCullough back later.
Said the shocked father in the article, the father who'd always told his players to act responsibly: "Being irresponsible is not neutral. When you're irresponsible, someone becomes responsible for what you've been irresponsible for."
Still, Smith was 63 years old. He and Sharon, who accompanied Smith to the prayer breakfast, had been married for 42 years. They had two grown children. He had never once heard so much as the slightest rumor that McCullough's birth mother, Carol Briggs, had been pregnant or given birth to a son at the close of their relationship. He asked for a DNA test. It came back that he was 99.99 percent certain to be the father.
Suddenly, so much made sense for both men.
"I look at it, and I just say it's a God thing," Smith is quoted in the article. "It's grace. It's undeserved. And that's what's made it great for Deland and for all of us, how everyone has embraced this and is excited about our new family."
Said McCullough in the article as he thought back about all the times throughout his life that people had told him that he and Smith were like son and father: "(They'd say) 'Man, you and Coach Smith look alike.' 'Man, you all walk alike.' 'Y'all this, y'all this.' There was no reason to connect those dots because you weren't even thinking about them. A sense of pride that went through me, like, 'Wow, that explains these things.'"
We all have our public lives and private lives. We tend to keep our private lives close, even in this age when so many want to spill so much on social media, as if everyone holds their breath to learn where we went to dinner or what our children made on their latest pop quiz.
And Smith has every right to hold back about McCullough. Had that story not already been told in an ESPN E:60 piece and written about by Spain, he might have, quite understandably, done just that.
But this was a prayer breakfast attended by 2,100 folks, and as Smith said in the story, "I look at it, and I just say it's a God thing."
Then you take a closer look at the other things he said to those gathered at the breakfast, including how he always told his players once he became a coach, "You may not be looking for a father, but I'm going to treat you like you're my sons."
It all boggles the mind, as does this: Smith and McCullough are both in the Miami U. Hall of Fame and McCullough's son, Deland McCullough II, is now a defensive back at Miami U., just as Smith's son Sherman was.
You can read all of this and more by searching a web browser for Sarah Spain and Sherman Smith, and it's worth your time because there's so much more to this story than can be repeated in a daily newspaper column, as there are with most stories.
And perhaps that's partly why Smith barely touched on it in his fine talk. But as he also once said when asked if he coached to make a living or coached to make a difference: "I coached to make a difference."
In the Spain piece, McCullough said of the father he long knew before knowing Smith was his father: "If you would have told me to pick who my father was, there's no way I would have picked him because I might have thought I wasn't worthy for him to be my father. I felt like my blessings came full circle, because I'd always wanted to be somebody like him."
No father can make a bigger difference than that, and that's a lead that deserves to never be buried, however fascinating the rest of the story.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.