![]() ![]() His garage, known locally as the Dog Pound, once stored football equipment for the youth league. “Everybody is seeing what I’ve seen for years - you put Joe Burrow on the team, that’s the X factor,” Smathers said. Everyone wants to come talk to the coach who first installed Joey as the peewee team’s quarterback in the third grade. GiGi’s Country Kitchen, a breakfast place on the main drag where Burrow was fond of the Western omelet, is a regular tourist stop.īursting with pride that sometimes makes him emotional, Smathers is eating up the media attention this week. He watched from his porch this week as dozens of cars, many with out-of-state plates, rolled by slowly and went up the hill to the “Joe Burrow Stadium” sign. A big, gregarious guy with a graying ZZ Top beard, Smathers has lived across North McDonald Street from the scoreboard at the football field since 1988. Smathers, the former youth coach, is a 56-year-old retired electrician who now keeps busy driving a shuttle bus for the university. ![]() That he hasn’t changed makes him even more appealing: They can still identify with him. People here see Burrow projecting the same unassuming cool, polite forthrightness and unshakeable confidence he always did. His face is not ubiquitous on national TV commercials, at least not yet, but last fall he used his name to help publicize a nonprofit program to help train Ohio workers for in-demand jobs. It’s different in The Plains though, more personal.Īt the center of it is a feeling that Burrow left but didn’t leave the people behind.īurrow’s poignant mention during his 2019 Heisman Trophy speech of the poverty in the region turned into the Joe Burrow Hunger Relief Fund, which has taken in $1.5 million in two years. Burrow spent plenty of time in Athens, so it’s legit. There’s a Burrow banner stretched across Court Street and signs all over town. Bars and restaurants have renamed menu items after him. Blockbuster: Colts get QB Matt Ryan in trade with FalconsĬlose enough, say the people of Athens and the 20,000 or so students at Ohio University who have claimed a piece of him. ![]()
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December 2022
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