Friday, October 19, 2001

Smith says he wants to stay a Cowboy
By Stephen Hawkins
Associated press

IRVING — Emmitt Smith doesn’t want to play anywhere else, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says the NFL’s second-leading career rusher won’t.

Comments Smith made in an interview broadcast by ABC-TV at halftime of the Cowboys’ 9-7 win Monday night against Washington raised some speculation about his future.

Smith, who was part of three Super Bowl winners in the mid-1990s, said that he would do whatever he could to help the Cowboys win again. Even if that meant being traded away from the team for which he has spent his entire 12-year NFL career.

“I’d be lying to you to tell you that I wouldn’t be hurt to go somewhere else,” Smith said Wednesday at the team’s practice facility. “But sometimes you have to do what’s best for the organization. I don’t know what the answers are, but I just hope the answers include me being here for the duration, whatever that may be.”

The Cowboys (1-4), who are off this weekend, haven’t had a winning season since 1998. The last of their five Super Bowls was six years ago.

Jones has said that he doesn’t envision anything that would send Smith to another team before the running back retires. Smith has 15,481 career yards, 1,245 short of NFL career leader Walter Payton.

The trading deadline for this season has passed, but Smith would be hard to trade because of his large contract. The 32-year-old Smith is making $4.77 million this season, and that increases to $6 million in 2002, $7 million in 2003 and then $10 million in each of the last two years of the contract.

“I’m already locked up. I’d just like to see the end of the contract,” Smith said. “I can’t go nowhere unless he deals me somewhere. I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

Jones says nothing is going to happen. Smith is staying in Dallas.

“I just don’t see anything, absent injuries, that would cause him to go to another team,” Jones told The Dallas Morning News in Thursday’s editions.

“I like the way Emmitt is playing,” Jones said. “He was a significant factor the other night in that ballgame, and I can’t see that not being the case next year. We both want him to finish his career with the Dallas Cowboys.”