JACKSONVILLE -- In his heart, the one organ no surgeon need ever worry about having to repair, Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Jimmy Smith kept hoping that one of his teammates would pop him as he ran through the seven-on-seven segment of Tuesday afternoon's practice.

All right, so maybe Smith's abdomen, criss-crossed like a small-town road map by the scars that serve as a daily reminder of the travails visited upon the eight-year veteran over the last six months, wasn't quite ready for that first dose of contact since the 2000 season finale.

	Jimmy Smith caught 91 passes for 1,213 yards last season.

But on nearly every pass pattern, as he streaked through the secondary, Smith rendered a private supplication and then hoped one of the Jaguars safeties might heed it by osmosis.

"I kept thinking, 'C'mon, guys, somebody hit me, please, just once,' " Smith said after the two-hour practice was concluded. "I really wanted someone to bang me around a little. The fact that they didn't, since they all know what's been going on, didn't surprise me. I mean, after all, they are my teammates. But this is still football, and part of football is being hit, and I'm still a part of football, OK?"

Uh, very OK, Jimmy. Especially since few observers expected the four-time Pro Bowl performer to be ready for the start of the season, let alone be nearly recovered by training camp, from three offseason surgeries to address a nasty blockage in his small intestine. During a combined stay of 28 days in a hospital here, Smith's weight dropped from 208 pounds to about 180 as the surgeons cut into him on three different occasions.

Given the cryptic nature of press releases on his condition, and his own demands for privacy, the rumors of his demise were rampant. One local radio host suggested Smith, 32, would never play again and, worse, might never walk out of the hospital. Coach Tom Coughlin acknowledged he fretted more about Smith's long-term prognosis than whether the league's most prodigious wide receiver over the past five years would ever make it back onto the field.

Recalled Smith: "I know when guys came to visit me, they thought it was pretty bad. You could see in their eyes, they were thinking, 'Oh, man, he's so skinny.' And they were right."

Yet there was Smith on Tuesday afternoon, working on selected routes in the non-contact drills, back up to his normal playing weight, preparing to participate in the "team" segment of practice by as early as next week, hoping for real contact the week after that and pointing to the Sept. 9 season opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

A few months ago, it might have been ridiculous to suggest that Smith would be rehabilitated in time for the opener, and conventional wisdom held that he would begin the campaign on the "physically unable to perform" list and miss at least the first six games. Apparently, conventional wisdom was unfamiliar with the unconventional Jimmy Smith.

"Nah, I'm not surprised, not with him," Coughlin said. "You're talking about a different kind of guy there, you know? There's nobody like him."

Indeed, the classy Smith is one of the best and best-liked players in the NFL, save maybe for the cornerbacks forced to try to check him. In the last five years, Smith has 450 receptions for 6,599 yards and 33 touchdowns. It is one of the best stretches by any pass-catcher at any time in league history. A man of faith, who was sustained through his trials this spring by the confidence of his parents and his wife, Smith sees no reason why he won't put up big numbers again in 2001.

So respected is he around the league that most opponents agree with that assessment.

"He is at the top of his game and he works so hard that I can't imagine he'll let the surgeries get to him," said Ravens cornerback Duane Starks. "All he'll do is work harder to get back to where he was, that's all. You look at some games he's had against us, you'd think he's unstoppable. But then, he does that to a lot of people."

It is testament to Smith's perseverance that he's even still around the league, and that doesn't even take into account the hurdles he had to navigate this spring. The second-round draft pick of the Dallas Cowboys in 1992, Smith caught exactly zero passes in his first three NFL seasons. As a rookie, he played in seven games, predominantly on special teams late in the season after he had recovered from a broken fibula. In '93, Smith was sidelined the entire season by an emergency appendectomy. When his recovery from a surgery that nearly killed him stretched into the next summer, he was waived by Dallas and out of the game until signing with the Jaguars in '95.

Ron Hill, a former Jacksonville personnel chief, allowed that Smith was "an afterthought" at the time. Six years later, he is a receiver noted for his afterburners, a precise route runner who relies on textbook double-moves to turn around a cornerback and on a fluid burst to sprint past him.

	“	He is at the top of his game and he works so hard that I can't imagine he'll let the surgeries get to him. All he'll do is work harder to get back to where he was, that's all. You look at some games he's had against us, you'd think he's unstoppable. But then, he does that to a lot of people. ”
		— Duane Starks, Ravens cornerback

Smith said Tuesday that the appendectomy in '93 was a far worse experience that the one he went through this spring, and attributed the recent health problems to the earlier operation. The surgeons removed only part of his appendix and the accumulation of scar tissue over the years led directly to the intestinal blockage. Smith said he "heals differently" than most people and that the effects are internal.

If anything he "overheals," and the result in past years was severe cramps. He knew, though, that the problem was much more acute when it manifested itself earlier this spring. Adding to the pain of a prolonged period of inactivity was that his wife, Sandra, prematurely delivered twins during his hospitalization. While he was in one room, Sandra and the twins were down the hall. At that point, though, Smith wasn't capable of running even the short hook route it would have taken to see them.

"It was a really difficult time for him," said fellow wide receiver Keenan McCardell, his closest friend on the team. "He was hurting physically, emotionally, every which way you can hurt."

That explains, in part, the fervor with which Smith attacked his job again Tuesday afternoon. If his malady hadn't been so well-publicized, one might never suspect that this was the same Jimmy Smith who spent his entire offseason vacation in the hospital and then the weight room. After all, it looked like the same Jimmy Smith, period.

"Training camp never felt so good, to be honest with you," Smith said. "A lot of people have been through here talking to me about all the problems I had. I don't mind telling the story again, because it might help somebody who is going through the same thing. Hey, this could happen to me again, because I'm susceptible to it. Ten, 20 years from now, I could go through it again, but I hope that doesn't happen. I just want to put it behind me."

If the Tuesday workout was an indication, the three abdominal surgeries will be relegated to the rear-view mirror for Smith.

So will most cornerbacks.

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.