He was one of the greatest tight ends in NFL history. He died of AIDS 40 years ago today.

Growing up in the 1970s, I was obsessed with baseball and football. 

Those were the years of the Pirates and the Steelers, when it seemed like Pittsburgh won something every October or January. 

I was an obsessive collector of cards. My first baseball card was of the Pirates’ Gene Clines, and my first football card was Billy Kilmer, the famous wobbly passer for Washington.

I can still see the last Roberto Clemente card made in 1973 after his passing. The shot of him was like a silhouette at the plate. 

My all-time favorite football player — Franco Harris — had already become a memory. It still bugs me why his uniform on his 1973 Topps card had a strange green tint.

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And I remember Jerry Smith’s card.

Despite living in Pittsburgh, the Washington Redskins were one of my favorite teams. I can still rattle off that offense: Sonny Jurgensen, Kilmer, Larry Brown and Charley Taylor. And of course, Jerry Smith, the tight end who caught 421 passes and 60 touchdowns over 13 seasons. 

And as I got older, I later learned that Smith was one of three gay players in the 1969 Washington Redskins training camp, that included running backs Dave Kopay and Ray MacDonald, who was cut prior to the start of the season. 

Smith was not only a standout on the team, but in league history. He was one of the first true receiving tight ends, along with Baltimore’s John Mackey, at a time when the position was used mostly for blocking.

One of Smith’s cards showed him without a helmet. Not an action shot, just a face and a head of blond hair. I don’t know if I kept looking at it because of the team or the player. 

Looking back, I think part of my 10-year-old brain knew exactly why that card was so memorable.

As the years passed and my brain became more mature, I moved on to other, more adult things than collecting football cards.

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A horrible, terrible disease

In 1985, news didn’t move with the speed of light the way it does now. There were three major broadcast TV networks and, in Pittsburgh, two newspapers. 

When Rock Hudson died that year of AIDS, the images of him, frail beside his old co-star Doris Day, were frightening. But I was deep in the closet, and it all felt so far away.

Then came August 1986. Smith, hospitalized and wasting away, told The Washington Post he had AIDS. He didn’t discuss how he got it or how he lived. He said he wanted people to understand what he had been through and how terrible the disease was, and that maybe it would help drive research.

I didn’t read about his passing in a big-city paper. I found it in the local paper in the congressional district where I worked as an aide. 

Smith died on Oct. 15, 1986, at 43, exactly 40 years ago today. His weight had dropped from 210 pounds to less than 140. He had spent his last months on intravenous feeding, able to speak only in a whisper.

I was sitting at my desk at my first job out of college when I read that, a chill running down my spine.

His passing was personal. It was the first AIDS-related loss of someone that hit me. I liked him as a player. If I’m honest, I liked the way he looked. And I took a lesson from his loss. If Jerry Smith, a hulking, fearless athlete, could be taken by this disease, then no one was safe.

And if no one was safe, then I certainly couldn’t explore who I was. Suddenly, I was afraid of men.

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I imagine there were many thousands of men like me, boys who collected football cards and were quietly mesmerized by a handsome tight end with a secret. 

For us, Smith’s death wasn’t just sad news. It was a warning, and it turned the closet door into a vault.

It is super hard to get a generation who didn’t live through AIDS to understand its horrific impact and the almost insurmountable homophobia that existed during that time. 

It was a double whammy. If you were gay, then you were assumed to have AIDS. It was all so crippling.

NFL teammates were there for Jerry Smith

Despite that environment, the football world did not turn away from him. 

Former teammates visited his hospital room. Nearly 300 mourners came to his funeral, including Sonny Jurgensen, Charley Taylor and safety Brig Owens. Smith and Owens became one of the NFL’s first interracial roommates.

Smith’s family received thousands of letters from fans thanking him for his courage.

The very people I thought would reject someone like me had embraced him, and that’s something I don’t remember from that period.

The next year, it was Liberace. I had met him twice, and his death hit home, too. 

These two men could hardly have been more different, the sequined, flamboyant showman – and the macho, athlete wide receiver. 

But AIDS didn’t discriminate.

Forty years later, it’s hard to fathom how much, and how many, we lost to AIDS. A generation of artists, athletes, teachers and friends, many who died alone and many who were afraid to say why. 

Sometimes it angers me that younger people don’t understand this and can’t appreciate how Smith stepped forward and told the truth at the end of his life.

That’s why it infuriates me that Jerry Smith is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. His numbers alone make the case. His courage makes a stronger one. Everyone who has ever voted knows why he’s still waiting. He deserves far more than a footnote.

At some point, my thousands of football and baseball cards disappeared. I’m not sure what happened to them, but I know why I’ll never forget that handsome Jerry Smith card.

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