In the fifth month of his football sabbatical, Rick Smith pulls his black Mercedes SUV into the parking lot of a Houston strip mall. He steers away from the pho restaurant and the crawfish spot, toward perhaps the last place on Earth one would expect to find a thriving NFL executive on a workday morning in April, three weeks before the draft: a Shaolin temple.
Inside the sanctuary waits Shi De Shan, whom Smith refers to simply as “Master,” an accurate description for a 31st-generation Shaolin monk who trained under some of the world’s most famous grandmasters. (Shan, if you believe your eyes, or YouTube, is capable of moving a parked van using only a spear wedged between the vehicle and his sternum.