Everyone else noticed the thicket of bleached hair on the top of Luke Smith’s head. Tim Corbin noticed where he was standing in the Louisville dugout.

“Top of the railing, the entire game,” Corbin said. “That’s a kid who’s into his team.”

Everyone else saw the glaring, shouting and swearing.

“F__ you! F__ you! Get the f__ back in the dugout!” Smith screamed at Vanderbilt’s Julian Infante after striking him out in the top of the eighth of a classic game in the 2019 College World Series, making the entire exchange very easy on lip readers and making himself a target.

Whew, Louisville pitcher Luke Smith letting Vanderbilt know exactly how he’s feeling. #CWS2019 pic.twitter.com/rQ5SGe4MoI

— Trey Wallace (@TreyWallace_) June 22, 2019

Corbin saw what he has seen a lot, including from himself at times over the years, emotion briefly overtaking a fervent competitor. So he gathered his players around him that night in a victorious dugout, after the Commodores had come back to beat Smith in the ninth — some of them letting Smith hear about in no uncertain terms — and gave them clear instructions.

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“Whatever you do in that press conference, you protect that kid,” Corbin said to the Commodores, who would go on to beat Michigan for the national championship. “We are not going to pile on. Anybody asks you about Luke Smith, you be honest about how he competed in the game, because you know it. Don’t say something you might regret in the heat of the moment.”

Everyone else made a big deal out of Smith’s rant and resulting setback — well, not everyone, but more than enough people to make the whole thing go viral. You can still easily find headlines about it, many of them with unflattering descriptions of Smith, and you can find what became of his Twitter mentions if you like. You can’t read his direct messages. That’s probably a good thing.

“He showed some to me,” said Jon Goebel, Smith’s close friend and former junior college coach, “and we’re talking about some shit that’s just out of this world.”

A lot of people made Smith out to be a villain, based on a few fiery seconds. As for Corbin? He made a friend.

Smith’s phone buzzed and he saw a text from an unknown 615 number. He was in a Walmart parking lot in Louisville. The text began, “Hi Luke, this is Coach Corbin from Vanderbilt…”

It was May 28, 2020, nearly a year after the Cardinals got sent home from the program’s fourth CWS appearance in seven years under coach Dan McDonnell. It was a couple of months after COVID-19 wiped away their chance at a fifth in eight years — and perhaps at the elusive first national championship in school history. That had been Smith’s full intention as he put in offseason work toward the 2020 season, after a brilliant CWS performance against Vanderbilt — 10 strikeouts in the longest postseason start in school history, 8.1 innings — that was overshadowed by its circumstances and ending.

But Smith had been distracted, too, by some combination of defending himself and enjoying the large growth in social media following his viral moment had afforded him. Between Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, he said he gained about 30,000 followers.

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“I’m not gonna lie, my head had gotten pretty big,” Smith said. “My mom had to have a heart-to-heart with me about that type of stuff, the social media things. Basically she said, ‘Make sure you’re living your life like Jesus would want you to.’”

And that speaks to the people who got to him. Tim and Sara Smith raised Luke and his three younger siblings in Champaign, Ill., in the Lutheran church, praying before every meal and before going to bed each night. God and faith were never far from the conversation. Smith played his first two years of college baseball at Parkland College in Champaign, staying close to his family while developing his pitching skills under Goebel. He picked Louisville over offers from NC State and several others. He got instantly involved in Fellowship of Christian Athletes at Louisville, to stay connected to his beliefs and use his newfound platform to help people, especially kids.

This was his identity at Louisville. That helps explain why teammates and coaches voted him a captain at Louisville. The internet, though, saw a 21-year-old hurling “F” bombs into the Omaha sky and discovered he had religious messaging on his social media accounts.

“The comments were constant, even with games the next season and opposing fans chirping at me,” Smith said. “The comments never really got to me, except when it was fans saying, ‘How could this dude claim to be a Christian?’ A lot of people tried to poke at me in that way. And it’s not that it hurt my feelings, but man, it was like, ‘If they only knew who I really was, how dedicated I really am in my beliefs, how many things I try to do in my community.’ You wish people really knew you.”

Those who did weren’t all that surprised by what they saw that night. Smith had been a popular target of opponents at Parkland, an intense, bespectacled string bean on the mound. Goebel had seen things like this before — Smith rising up to compete at a high level on the mound and elevating emotionally in the process. As a coach, he far preferred that to players whose intensity and competitiveness needed to be drawn out of them.

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And as anyone on both sides of that game that night can attest, the chirping was going both ways. It’s college baseball. It was the College World Series. Word choice aside, Goebel was nothing but proud as he watched Smith close out the Commodores in the eighth inning and let them know about it. He knew, when the Commodores got to Smith in the ninth, that the scene would come back on him.

“I’ve seen that fire and passion and body language before,” Goebel said of Parkland’s runner-up finish at the NJCAA Division II World Series with Smith starring. “ESPN just wasn’t there to pick it up.”

The Commodores weren’t there to gloat, as it turns out, which is a pretty significant upset in the world of college baseball and did not go unnoticed by Smith. He said he has reached out to a few of the Commodores since then to express his appreciation. Vanderbilt’s Pat DeMarco, whose winning hit in the ninth against Louisville closer Michael McAvene gave Smith the loss, was asked about Smith’s antics afterward and said: “You know, I think that’s just competition. He was pitching a great game, and he was keeping us off-balance, and he was feeling confident. You know, in the middle of competition, you can’t really say that he’s being unsportsmanlike or anything like that.”

By the time Corbin reached out to Smith, he knew all of this. He had read stories about Smith. He had seen an FCA video about him. And he had reached out to Goebel. Corbin is close friends with McDonnell — Vanderbilt and Louisville resume their annual baseball rivalry tonight in Nashville — but he decided he wanted to talk about Smith with someone he didn’t know.

“Calling Dan would have been too easy,” Corbin said. “I wanted to talk to someone I didn’t know, almost to dignify what I was thinking about the kid. I could feel that he was a good kid. And I didn’t want him to continue to wear this. This is someone’s kid, you know? And no kid should be defined by a singular moment. We all have them. Getting caught up in sports, competition, emotion, where you wish you could do something over again, I’ve had that many times. And I just wanted to bring him some relief.”

First, he blew Goebel away with his knowledge about the Parkland program.

“Kind of surreal,” said Goebel, who is now pitching coach for the Texas Rangers’ High-A affiliate in Hickory, N.C. “A guy like Coach Corbin, there aren’t a lot of stones unturned.”

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Then Corbin got Smith’s number.

“No way,” Smith said when he started reading that text message in the Walmart parking lot.

“It was amazing,” Smith said of that and subsequent conversations with Corbin, including before last season’s 7-2 Louisville win over Vanderbilt in Smith’s final season of eligibility. “There’s just no way he had to do what he did. A guy who has hundreds of guys in pro baseball, who has one of the best programs in the nation, the last thing he has to do is worry about some kid who played against him a year ago. But that’s what separates him from other coaches. He had some really powerful messages for me, just like he has for his guys. I mean, his players backing me up after the way things went down in the (College) World Series? How hard must that have been for them, after how heated that game was? I think that tells you everything.”

Smith’s story says something, too, something Corbin would like his players — beyond that, young people in general — to heed.

As Corbin recalls it, 2011 was the last season the music played on the Vanderbilt bus after a win. Someone had a speaker. He forgets the most popular song of that season. But he misses it.

“It was so cool because all the kids were celebrating the win, celebrating the game,” he said. “Then that disappeared. That left, that came and went. And now when you win a game, you can get on the bus and there’s complete silence. And the silence is deafening. It’s so deafening that it’s awkward. It’s not natural. And that’s not how people are meant to live, you know? How many times in your life do you have moments where you can actually celebrate something that’s good? You don’t have many. And then when you minimize them because you don’t share them with anyone, because you choose to put your eyes on a phone, you’ve missed the moment. And you’ve missed it with a group of people you’re close with.”

The college sports coach has the transfer portal, NIL money, expansion and a weakening NCAA to worry about, among other things. But Corbin’s on the little devices that increasingly run our lives. He devotes a good portion of his job to preparing his players for things beyond baseball. He also respects his own limitations. An authority figure banning or limiting things is not his answer.

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“You hope it catches on with a kid, or with kids,” Corbin said. “This is not for me. This is their experience. And if it’s going to have any worth at all, it’s going to be because they’re present inside their experience. When they’re not present inside it, they miss it. And that’s unfortunate. This is for them. It’s for me because I’m looking over them, but they need to value it. If they miss it, that’s like a good fastball they saw and didn’t even offer at it. They chose not to swing. And I say to myself, ‘That’s too bad.’”

The Smith situation, though, is an opportunity to lecture a bit.

“The lesson I give to the kids on this is that, in their world, everything is so publicized,” he said. “Everything they do. Everything. And it’s dangerous. Because you can get to the point where you posture your way through things, because you’re on a stage for everyone to see and judge, rather than focusing on living a life of fulfillment — of developing relationships, through conversations and connecting with people. You can’t do this all through a phone and a keyboard. That’s the other side of what we live with now.”

Smith’s final season at Louisville did not go as hoped. It was a rebuilding, non-tournament season for the program, having lost tons of talent to the pros. And shortly after Smith’s first conversation with Corbin, he suffered a flexor tendon injury in his throwing (right) arm. His velocity decreased. The bite on his changeup and breaking pitches weakened. He went 3-4 with a 5.85 ERA in 12 appearances. His professional prospects faded.

But Corbin didn’t just make a friend when he reached out to Smith in 2020. He joined a group of mentors who have poured into a hopeful career. Smith is back home in Champaign, in his first season as Parkland College’s pitching coach.

“This is my calling,” Smith said. “I think I’ve had some pretty good lessons and coaching influences to share with these kids.”

(Top photo:  Andrew Woolley / Four Seam Images via AP)

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