Despite his lofty draft status and breathtaking ability, Aldon Smith’s fifth arrest as a professional was too much for the San Francisco 49ers to endure as their 2015 off-season went from bad to worse. Cut from the roster in August, Smith spent six weeks out of work before being signed by the Raiders less than 24 hours after the start of the season. With further trouble in store, which led to a four-year absence from the league, we delve into the Gridiron archive as Simon Clancy looks at what went went wrong for a once-in-a-generation pass rusher.

The late Steve Jobs once wrote that ‘you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future’. The dot-to-dot of Aldon Smith’s past may hold the answers to what lies ahead for the former San Francisco 49er turned Oakland Raider. A career that once glistened lies in tatters. A man physically, but a child in the real world, struggling with his position in life, emboldened by a talent so rare that you have to see it to truly believe it exists, haunted by fear, suspicion and a lack of trust borne deep in childhood that seems to envelop his every movement. In a noisy world, the quiet man screamed the loudest. Only no one heard Aldon Smith screaming until it was too late. But it didn’t have to be this way, not with a talent so precious.

“It was obvious on first sight to me that he was a serious physical specimen. I mean he passed the eye test and then some.”

Ken Clemens knows a thing or two about athletes. He ran track in college and graduated into one of the best high-school coaches in Missouri, turning 0-10 Winnetonka High into conference champions in 12 months before taking over at struggling Raytown High. But as Clemens told Gridiron, he’d never seen anything like Smith when he arrived at practice for the first time: “Day one I told the staff that he’d be a big-time player with big-time NFL potential. He was tall and wiry, about 6ft 4ins, 210lbs and we wanted him out on the field as much as possible so he played tight end and defensive end/outside linebacker for us. Boy he was special. He could flat-out take your breath away.”

Smith can have that effect on you. I, too, remember vividly the first time I saw him. He was a redshirt freshman playing defensive end for Missouri against Illinois. I was studying talent for the 2010 NFL Draft when number 85 caught my eye. I don’t often grade non-draft-eligible players but, just occasionally, you see someone worth noting for the following campaign and so, on that day in early September 2009, I wrote the following: “Wow. Physical specimen. Long, long arms, very rare explosion, closing speed. Explodes off the ball at 7.27 first Q. Push/pull move reminiscent of Jason Pierre-Paul (check notes). Inside explosion and hand usage is insane. Can bend and run the arc but often possesses too much speed to have to rely on technique. Play at 9.38 first q, he takes inside rush move and is a step and a half from the hand-off within a second of the snap, almost forces a fumble, gets up as back escapes, still makes tackle from behind for a loss. Freak.”

I was mesmerised.

A year and many Missouri games later, I was getting ready for an exceptional 2011 draft. There were a number of players I really liked: Mike Pouncey, Prince Amukamara, Adrian Clayborn, Bruce Carter, Marcus Gilchrist. Then a group I loved: Randall Cobb, Julio Jones, Von Miller, Cam Newton, Stefan Wisniewski, DeMarco Murray. And even a player the NFL Network invited me to appear on to discuss (Ryan Mallet) after a long thesis for a Florida newspaper caused some uproar. But there were two players who I thought were legitimate Hall of Fame possibilities, who I’d rarely seen the like of. One was JJ Watt of Nebraska and the other was Smith, the number-one rated player on my board. I’d have bet good money that both would enjoy the sorts of careers for which busts are made in Canton. Watt is now a superstar and one day a yellow Hall of Fame jacket will adorn his shoulders. But six years after I made those notes, Smith is attempting to restart a career he tried so hard to destroy, despite the very brightest of beginnings.

That dot-to-dot of this life is a complex one. The son of a former army reservist, Smith battled the familiar circumstances surrounding familial breakdown: doubt, insecurity and a lack of guidance. He was devastated. His parents separated early in his teenage years and he lived with his mother in Cedar Rapids, Iowa while his father relocated some 300 miles away to Raytown. Aldon drifted in and out of youth athletics, flashing talent on the hard wood before dropping out inexplicably. Described by a family friend who spoke to Gridiron off the record as “often difficult in a sulky rather than confrontational or criminal way”, Smith’s life hit a crossroads in the summer of 2008 when his mother was offered work in Atlanta. The choice was simple: move to Georgia or head to Missouri to live with the father he missed so much. He chose the latter.

“To some, it seemed an odd decision,” says Clemens, “because they clashed quite a bit and his father was tough on him. He ran the technology department for the schools in the area so he could access all the data on his son’s performances in class every day. And there were rules.” The biggest of those was the demand that Aldon maintain a 3.0 GPA if he wanted to play sports. There was also the stipulation that Smith become more respectful and responsible. Governed by the spirit of renewal, he toed the line. His schoolwork improved and he played the drums and the piano in the church choir. He also began expressing an interest in a career in law enforcement, specifically the DEA, if football didn’t work out. Despite this, though, the arguments continued between father and son: “I think we fought because we’re so alike,” reveals Thurston Smith. “You tell me I can’t do something and I’ll show you I can. Aldon has that same streak of resolve that sometimes becomes defiance.”

Those that know Smith say he was never a troublemaker, either in high school or at the University of Missouri. He did, though, begin to develop the talent that Clemens had seen early on and soon became a star for the Bluejays. But there lingered a surly, sometimes fractious, teenager screaming silently from within. And people started to notice. “There were times when he was a leader, times when he’d get down on himself, times he’d get emotionally tired,” adds Clemens. “And there were times when he would pout and when he’d get frustrated.”

So frustrated that Smith tried to quit the team on numerous occasions. “I told him, ‘I don’t believe in raising quitters’,” said Smith’s father. “That’s one thing I instilled in him.” Clemens chose another path: a simple arm around the shoulder. “I love the kid and I’d always get him to laugh and get that big smile on his face. Sometimes you just need to know what buttons to press. I mean it’s not a surprise to know a kid wanted to quit. Especially a big-time prospect that’s sweating and working every day for what he considers his second sport, because Aldon always viewed himself as a basketball player. We deal with that a lot in high school football. It’s a grind, especially in the hot summer months.”

It seems like a lot of Smith’s life, in his mind, has been a catalogue of let-downs. “The trust got broken a lot when I was growing up,” he would tell a San Francisco magazine in the spring of this year. “I didn’t really have a lot of people who were my friends.”

If there was ever a situation that could tip a disillusioned kid towards full mistrust, then it’s being at the centre of the shady world of the recruiting process. These may not be the days of courting Marcus Dupree, but collegiate selection remains a duplicitous annual routine where athlete and school beg for faith in one another while charming someone else behind each other’s backs. For a teenager beginning to believe he’d been let down by life, recruiting may well have made things worse. Smith was offered plenty of scholarships from Big 12 schools but, after years of not feeling a part of anything tangible, he chose to stay close to the life he’d built with his father and signed in-state with Missouri. But his personal frustration continued to grow when he was forced to redshirt his freshman season after an NCAA review into his high-school transcripts. He still practised hard and would routinely dominate in practice. Wyoming coach Dave Christensen was part of the Mizzou staff that year: “He was something else to watch. We didn’t have a single kid who could block him. He was special.” Internally however, Smith fumed over what he saw as a missed opportunity. But, a year later, the nation got to see the same as Christensen and the Tiger coaching staff when he recorded 60 tackles and 11 sacks, winning Big 12 Defensive Freshman of the Year.

Twelve months later, his highlight reel interception and 58-yard return of Heisman candidate Landry Jones’ pass moved him from possible first-rounder into a legitimate top-ten candidate. To the outside world, he seemed happy and content but, inwardly, a different bell was ringing. A bell unseen. “Who knows what was going on privately but, to everyone around the school, he seemed like he was in a really good place. This was a good, clean kid,” Adam Cribbs, who followed Smith’s every move for the Tigers website Rock Nation, told Gridiron. “He was quiet, tough and a hard worker. He knew he had a future in the pros and he knew this coaching staff could get him there. I heard the rumours from high school about being a little surly but I guarantee you, if you were to ask any Mizzou coach if that were the case here, they’d laugh in your face. He had a tonne of work to do to get that first-round call and he did it.”

Yet his problems were manifesting themselves in other ways. Smith was classed as a risk ahead of the draft despite never being in trouble with the police and maintaining good grades. The scouting service Human Resource Tactics, whose reports are trusted by many NFL teams, noted that, based on a personality test he’d taken, Smith was a ‘higher than average risk’. Out of a possible 10, he scored just one on ‘interpersonal style, receptivity to coaching and dedication’ and two on ‘focus and effective commitment’. So how did HRT see what no one else could? Because nobody connected to Smith believed the report or its findings. “I mean, that is amazing to me,” said Cribbs. “The only time Aldon did something to get himself in a negative light was after the draft when he was partying in the streets with the frats and the sororities after Bin Laden was taken down. Along with every other college kid in America. Other than that he kept a clean record. (Missouri head coach) Gary Pinkel said he was “zero problem” when he was here and he’s right.” And Clemens agrees: “Aldon was always a likeable, respectful, hard-working kid. He was never in a hint of any trouble any time he was with me.”

Relative calm at Missouri became chaos in San Francisco, on and off the field. As a rookie, he took the league by storm, winning team MVP and finishing the season with 19.5 sacks. More remarkable still were the 42 takedowns in his first 43 games with the 49ers. But those statistics were surpassed by five run-ins with the police in four years, including three DUI arrests. Finally the rubber met the road and the 49ers set him free, unwanted again, cast adrift from something he loved dearly. Where once it was his father, now it was the city he’d come to love.

History repeating itself.

Smith would admit to ‘importing a college lifestyle’ and ‘getting more drunk than he should’, but denied he had an alcohol problem. However, those values of respect and responsibility set by his father seem distant memories. Or maybe that was the problem; maybe he was drinking to shut out the past.

Smith has a second chance in the NFL with the Oakland Raiders. Veterans like Justin Tuck and Charles Woodson will look to succeed in mentoring him where Charles Haley and Justin Smith failed in San Francisco, partly perhaps because what Smith needs is not a counsellor but to realign the dots of his broken childhood. Three months before he left the 49ers, he was the guest speaker at the banquet of a local high school all-star game. He told the kids that they wouldn’t all make it as football players, but that they could be anything they wanted if they applied the lessons that football teaches. “Don’t let somebody else write your story,” he told them. “You can make the decision. How do you want your story to be told?”

If war educates the senses, what has the battle to write his story done to Aldon Smith? Only time will tell.

This article originally appeared in Issue XVI of Gridiron magazine – for individual editions or subscriptions, click HERE