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Day in the life: Michele Smith
When you're a softball star on two continents, Olympic training camp is the perfect place for a reunion -- and a victory.
By Richard Deitsch
The most wrenching decision of Michele Smith's life can be traced to the parking lot of an express mail company in Eugene, Ore. It was the fall of 1992, and Smith, one of the top softball pitchers in the world, held the future in her hands: Should she send off her contract to play professional softball in Japan or applications to medical schools at the universities of North Carolina, Oregon and South Florida? "Had I chosen medical school," Smith says, "I would probably be working somewhere as a thoracic surgeon."
Instead, she went to work in Kariya, Japan, pitching for the past eight years for the Toyota Automatic Loom Work Company. With her lefty delivery, impressive wingspan—6'3" fingertip to fingertip—and four pitches (her rise ball has been clocked at 74 mph), Smith can be a nightmare for hitters. She's just as daunting at the plate. Last year she led the league in hitting and is a two-time league MVP. When she takes the mound in Japan, thousands of fans greet her with chants of Su-mi-su-san (Smith).
On this February day in San Diego, though, Smith, who played for the gold-medal-winning 1996 U.S. Olympic team and is on the 2000 Olympic squad, is mowing down the Japanese national team in an exhibition near the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif. Though she looks sharp in the 3-1 win, Smith is still smarting later that evening about giving up a run. "I believe I'm one of the best pitchers in the world—I know I am, as far as results go," she says. "But you can't live on your legacy. Every time I step on the mound I have to prove it."
At 32, Smith no longer dreams of a career in medicine and plans to open her own softball and baseball academy when she retires. "I think about how much I wanted to go to medical school prior to the 1996 Olympics and how I struggled with that decision," she says. "But I've come to realize that I don't have to have a scalpel in my hand to make a difference in this world. I can do it with a softball."
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