Debra Pickett

And so, without glancing at the menu, he orders up some scrambled eggs with cheese, sausage, hash brown potatoes, wheat toast with strawberry jam and a large orange juice.

I'm hoping the presence of all that food will help Smith forget that my notebook and tape recorder are on the table. Because I really want to get him out of postgame press conference mode.

As it is, he's giving me all the standard NFL head coach comments: "progress is being made," the team is "a super group," "next season, we'll take another step," Chicago has "the best fans in the country," and, oh yes, regarding bad athlete behavior, "we had a few incidents this year."

But Smith, 47, loosens up a bit when I ask him about his Southern background, growing up in Big Sandy, Texas, right in the heart of "Friday Night Lights" football-as-religion territory.

Parents 'never missed a game'

Being surrounded by that kind of intensity, even as a high school player, was good preparation for Chicago Bears football, he says. And his Texas childhood prepared him for his current job in another way, too: he learned to hate the Green Bay Packers.

"Green Bay," he says, with something that might pass for a snarl were he not incredibly well-mannered. "They beat my Cowboys in the Ice Bowl. Never forgot that."

He also never forgot the lessons of his parents, who were relentlessly supportive of their talented middle child.

"They never missed a game," he says. "And they waited up at home to talk through it afterwards. Never once did they tell me I'd done anything wrong. It was always positive, always praise."

Smith, who is one of five siblings, was one of those kids who takes on a certain maturity very early.

"My father struggled with a lot of things," he says. "He was an alcoholic when I was coming up."

So Smith remembers feeling like he had to be the man of the house sometimes, and he still remembers the time when his mistake -- being a little too rough when tightening a thermostat valve -- meant the family car was out of commission indefinitely.

"You don't have time to feel sorry for yourself," he remembers being told. "It was just, 'Start walking.'"

That attitude -- "when there's a storm, people want to see you calm" -- has carried Smith through the vagaries of a professional sports career.

"It's what allowed me to get out of Big Sandy," he says, and then corrects himself because there is a part of him that hasn't fully left that small town behind. "No, that's not the way to say it, [it's] what allowed me to grow in my profession."

'I couldn't have had a better dad'

He says he's only recently passed the point of thinking of his father, who got sober when Smith was in college and passed away in 1996, on a daily basis.

"But, sometimes," he says quietly, "you do feel him behind you. ... I couldn't have had a better dad."

He remembers, with something like amazement, that "Friday nights, he always cleaned up for my [high school football] games."

Smith himself has only missed two of his youngest son Miles' games at Lake Forest High School, but, with his two other boys, "I'm ashamed to say I've missed whole seasons."

When he does attend, he says, "I cheer when something good happens," and, in contrast to some of the more intense suburban parents, "that's all you'll hear out of me."

'We're so different'

Smith admits to some initial trepidation about having his son attend Lake Forest High School. When the Smiths, a biracial family, first moved here, they sent Miles to Loyola Academy.

"Lake Forest, bunch of rich kids, that's what you hear," Smith says, adding that he has quickly come to enjoy the small-town environment and that Miles has a great group of friends at the local high school, where he transferred after growing frustrated with the commute to Loyola.

For this smooth adjustment, and basically all things family-related, Smith gives full credit to his wife, Mary Ann, a Des Plaines native, whom he met on a blind date as a senior in college.

"We're so different," he says. "And I'm not talking about the obvious black/white thing. I mean culturally, she's a Chicago city girl. I'm from the sticks."

But somehow, they've lasted for 25 years.

"She's very patient," he says simply. But then, when he thinks about it, he decides there's something more to it. Because "patient" sounds too passive.

"You go down to Soldier Field, and there's 60,000 people there, and you can hear her voice over them all," he says, his voice full of wonder and love. He is often soft-spoken, but he is rarely this emotional.

Smith is the kind of guy for whom the word "man" means something quite specific.

Whether speaking of himself ("People don't usually say critical things when they approach me. I'm not 5-foot-8, 140 pounds. And I'm a man") or about his players ("I'm dealing with men. I'd like to treat them like men") or his staff ("They're men. Most of them are family men; they've got a job to do"), he uses the term to embody something traditional, something strong and tough.

He doesn't like it when I pick up the check.

Still, he seems to have enjoyed our nearly two-hour-long breakfast and the chance it's given him to talk about things that don't always come up at press conferences.

"I've had a storybook life, you could say," he tells me, in all sincerity.

He's wanted to be a coach since the fifth grade. He didn't imagine he'd ever make it to the NFL, but his mother, whom he describes as "one of those ladies who maybe has more of a direct line to God," had a dream that her boy would be an NFL head coach one day. She told him about it when he took his first college coaching job.

He smiles, saying, "It didn't seem real then."