The NFL player who helped his wife deliver their baby

THE FIRST THING HE HEARD was a person standing across his bedroom at 4 a.m., breathing fast and violently in the darkness, almost panting, and it sure felt like the cold open of a horror movie.

“Whew.”
Silence.
“Whew.”
Silence.
“Whew.”
Silence.

In the middle of that night, Oct. 19, 2021, Dawuane Smoot needed a full three seconds to orient himself and realize that he was not, in fact, on the set of “Halloween Ends.” The giant Jacksonville Jaguars defensive tackle sat upright in bed, gathered himself and realized what was actually happening.

He recognized the outline of his pregnant wife, Aumari. She was eight-plus months at the time, so he assumed she must have begun having contractions. Smoot hustled out of bed and asked her what she needed.

“A shower,” she said, still whewing hard.

She told him that while she showered, he needed to gather their stuff to go to the birthing center they’d booked, and she wanted him to alert their midwife and then get their babysitter to come over and watch their 2-year-old son, Ahmir. “This might be it,” she said.

As Smoot got started on his tasks, he heard the water turn on … and then turn off again 30 seconds later. He was in the living room when Aumari came downstairs in a dress and said the last words he was ready to hear.

“We’re having the baby right here, right now,” she said, and she began to fall backward. Smoot helped her ease slowly to the floor. He thought maybe she was exaggerating — how could they possibly go from whewing to full-on childbirth in two minutes?

But as he lowered her to the ground, he saw the top of their baby girl’s head popping out and realized it was very possible: The Smoots were going to have to deliver their own baby.

THE SMOOTS TRIED TO BREAK UP. They really did. Repeatedly. But they couldn’t.

Aumari starts telling the story of their love by herself, in an Airbnb in Jacksonville that she and her husband own. Dawuane is running a little late, so Aumari begins a solo journey through what’s been a roller coaster that wobbled but never completely came off the tracks.

They’d started dating as 16-year-old kids going to two different high schools in the Columbus, Ohio, area. Dawuane got his license first, so he would drive them around to do fun stuff. At the end of every hangout, he’d pull into her parents’ driveway, and then the date would just keep going. She’d just sit in the car with him for hours, and they’d talk and listen to the Temptations and Marvin Gaye. Just a pair of teenage old souls.

Aumari was reluctant at first to be officially boyfriend-girlfriend. She had had one boyfriend before him and considers it to have been a toxic relationship, especially for a teenager. As she began to fall for Dawuane, she kept expecting him to stop being so kind and loving.

And he never did.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she says. “Some people don’t believe in young love. He was my best friend. He still is my best friend. I’ve never met anyone that I meshed with so well. It was such a bond.”

But she thought that bond had to break after high school. She was going to stay home in Ohio and go to college at the University of Akron, and Dawuane had a full ride to play football at Illinois. Aumari sat him down one evening in her parents’ kitchen and said it was over.

“This is where we split,” she said through tears. “You’ll be seven hours away. We have to end the relationship. We’ll have our separate college experiences and if it is meant to be, we’ll come back together.”

Dawuane started crying, too. But he shook his head.

“No, let’s give it a shot,” he said. “No.”

Aumari tried to stand her ground. She didn’t really want to end it, but she also thought they couldn’t survive four long-distance years.

“This is going to be too hard,” she said. “I don’t want either of us to have trust issues and worry about infidelity. We have to break up.”

“No, Aumari,” he said, squeezing her hands into his massive palms. “No. We’ll be fine. We love each other. We can make it.”

He just kept refusing to let her go, and Aumari eventually let him not let her go. And for their freshman years, things seemed fine. Aumari hadn’t been able to get to many of his games at Illinois, so they didn’t see each other until the summer. “The first year was OK,” Aumari says. “But it was hard.”

Then one day, late at night the following fall, Dawuane called. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in forever. We have to break up.”

He was firm about it, but before they even hung up, Aumari had started packing a bag. At the end of the call, she said, “I’m coming to see you.”

She drove all night and knocked on his door early the next morning. They cried together and hung out all day. “I was there to fight for our relationship,” she says.

She drove back the next day and talked to Dawuane on the phone that night. He told her it was great to see her … but he still wanted some time apart.

“I was so hurt,” she says. “But you have no choice but to respect it. He did meet another female when we took that break, and he had a fling.”

A month later, Dawuane called her again. He said he missed her so much, that the fling was over, that he never wanted to be apart again. “I know for a fact now that there’s no one else out there for me,” he told her.

Aumari’s heart caved in because she felt the same way, but she wasn’t sure how she could get past the month without him. “You can’t just fish in the sea for a while and then come back like this,” she told him.

They hung up that day still not sure what would happen next. They kept talking on the phone for a few months, and they both felt an even stronger connection growing between them. Aumari was still struggling with how the breakup had unfolded, though, until a conversation with a wise aunt of hers.

As she hits this point of the story, Aumari pauses for a moment on the Airbnb couch. It’s a signature moment in her life, one of those conversations that is 25 seconds long but impacts you for 50 years. She wants to tell it just right.

She told her aunt that she wanted to be back with Dawuane, that he was the love of her life and they both knew it. But she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to move on from that one month when they were broken up.

Her aunt told her that she could do whatever she wanted, get back together or stay apart, but if she elected to reunite with Dawuane, she needed to forgive the fling. “He’s a sophomore in college,” the aunt said. “If you get back with him, you have to let that go. You’re either in, or not.”

She was in, and they’ve never looked back. On this September day, as she finishes up that story, the front door opens and Dawuane walks in. He apologizes for being late for the interview — it’s a Tuesday, typically an off day for the Jags, and a physical therapy session had run long.

“What all did I miss?” he says, giving her a kiss.

“I was just telling him about the fling you had when you were at Illinois,” she says, and she smiles.

Dawuane’s eyebrows instantly raise. “You told him about the fling? Oh no …” he says, but he’s smiling, too. “I was in the doghouse for a while. But it all worked out.”

This is one of those conversations buried in a love story where you sometimes can see the seams, the place where resentment can grow. But that’s not what is on the faces and in the voices of the Smoots. They seem to genuinely appreciate more what that bump in the road did for them than to them. It’s somehow become a warm memory for them both — a scar can be a wound and a sign of strength, the old saying goes.

For the next half hour, the Smoots tell the rest of their love story. They started dating again and Aumari left school and moved in with him during his final year at Illinois. The Jags drafted Dawuane in 2017 at No. 68 overall, so they relocated to Jacksonville, where they’ve been for all six years of Dawuane’s NFL career.