Article content continued

Luckily, none of the weights landed on Smith, who was one of 10 Calgary mayoral candidates in the Oct. 16 municipal election, coming second to incumbent Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s 51 per cent of the vote with 43.7 per cent of the vote.

Mary says she wasn’t home, but their son Logan, who is one of their four children, heard the crash and checked on his dad.

“Bill joked, ‘OK, I’m not working out anymore,’ so Logan and Bill played Xbox for a while,” but a severe headache put an end to that activity.

The popular couple has a long-standing New Year’s Eve tradition that includes a party with the same group of friends every year preceded by a dinner with one other couple at Boston Pizza. Mary says she noticed that Bill looked pale.

“I said, ‘Are you OK to go out?’ and he said, ‘I’m fine. I’ll just drink some beer until my headache goes away.’

“He was joking around, same old Bill.”

Part way through dinner, though, Smith announced, somewhat sheepishly, that he thought he might have to skip the party.

“When I texted everyone that we weren’t coming to the party, they were all like, ‘He better have a good excuse, he better have a concussion and he better not be faking it.’ Unfortunately, he does have a concussion.”

What complicates Smith’s current concussion is it’s not his first. The 6-foot-4 former University of Calgary Dinos football player, whose team won the Vanier cup in 1985, has had his bell rung a few times, back at a time when concussions were not taken seriously and athletes displaying all of the symptoms of a serious concussion were just sent back out on to the field on the next shift.