Greenwood’s Julia and Lamar Edwards will watch today’s Super Bowl with great interest.
They made the trip to New Orleans Saturday and will have a close eye on their grandson Aldon Smith, a stud defensive player for the San Francisco 49ers, this evening in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
Smith’s 49ers will face off with the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII.
Julia Edwards expects her pre-Super Bowl tailgate party today to consist of 100 friends and family members from Mississippi, Georgia and Texas.
“We’re just so excited to see Aldon get a chance to win a ring,” Edwards said. “I spoke to him Wednesday and told him to stay focused and keep his eyes on the prize.”
The 49ers players and coaches voted the second-year linebacker out of Missouri the team’s most valuable player, coach Jim Harbaugh said Monday.
Smith, who was born in Greenwood but moved to Iowa when he was about 2 years old, set a franchise record with 191/2 sacks this season, all of them coming in the 49ers’ first 13 games.
Smith, who is battling a shoulder injury, hasn’t recorded a sack in the past five games. However, he still is finding ways to be effective, Harbaugh said.
“I’m getting double- and triple-teamed more, and guys are chipping me, too,” Smith told the San Jose Mercury News. “Even though I haven’t been getting sacks, I’m happy because I feel I’m doing a lot of other things well. I’m covering guys really well, I’m making other plays, I’m doing a lot of things that are making a difference.”
Harbaugh agrees.
“Aldon got a game ball from our team off of his performance in the Falcons game,” the coach said. “He had a number of pressures and hurries and really played the run extremely well. He recovered a fumble. It was a very good and thorough game from Aldon.”
Even though he was named the team’s MVP on Monday in a vote of the coaches (the Bill Walsh Award), Smith wasn’t getting a lot of traffic at his media day podium Tuesday. OK with him, he said. He hopes he’s become a forgotten man, which will create more opportunities in today’s game.
The Bill Walsh Award, which was established in 2004, recognizes outstanding individual performance. Past winners include Bryant Young, Frank Gore, Patrick Willis and Justin Smith, who won the award in 2011. Aldon Smith said it’s the first time he’s ever won a team MVP, dating all the way back to his high school and college days in Missouri.
“(It means) a lot because you have a lot of guys on this team who are all-stars, who have made Pro Bowls consecutively,” Smith said. “You have Patrick Willis, Vernon Davis, Frank Gore, I can go on. I come in my second year and I get the MVP, it means a lot.”
Smith’s mother, Kim Ellis Smith, and father, Thurston Smith, are both graduates of Greenwood High School in the late 1980s.
• Contact Bill Burrus at 581-7237 or bburrus@gwcommonwealth.com.
Follow on Twitter:@Bill_Burrus.
