by Ray Lewis
After Victor Johnson, I had to wrestle Mark Smalls, his Auburndale teammate, and I found a way to beat him, too. At my game. After these two wins, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself—a little too pleased, maybe. It ratcheted up my swagger, conquering these two giants. I wore those victories on my sleeve as I headed into states.
I actually wore my victories around my neck. I had my idiot moments, back then. Absolutely. I guess we were all idiots—because, hey, we were just teenagers. I started wearing all my wrestling medals into the gym before my matches. Also, this jacket I had printed up—a letterman jacket with a white butterfly collar, the zipper down in front so you could see all my medals, like I was Mr. T or Stone Cold Steve Austin. I had it going on. On the back of the jacket, I’d had my named stitched in, and on the bottom, it had these words: RESPECT ME LIKE YOU SWEAT ME.
This was my strut, my swagger—and in those days, Florida schoolboy wrestling was all about the strut, all about the swagger. That’s how I walked into the state tournament that year, done up in all that swag and leather. But those medals, they were like my badges, my stripes. They showed what I’d done, proof of the battles I’d won.
Respect me like you sweat me.
Somebody should have smacked me around some, knocked some sense into me, but this was my game, and I took that swagger straight to the bleachers as the tournament was getting under way, headed right for this one dude from Orlando I just knew I’d be facing in the finals. He was undefeated in the season—33–0, some sick record like that. This kid was all that, and he knew he was all that, and there I was, strutting, all those medals dangling from my neck.
Crazy, right?
I walked over to the kid, introduced myself. He knew who I was, same way I knew who he was, but I introduced myself anyway—said, “Name’s Ray Lewis. I hope to see you in the finals.” Then I held out my hand.
He shook my hand, and I was in his head. The tournament hadn’t even started yet, and I was in his head.
• • •
Those days, the state tournament was at the Lakeland Civic Center, just up the road from where I lived. Still, my mother wasn’t able to make it to the finals. Nobody from my family came. I was out to make history, the first wrestler from Lakeland to win state. I was out to erase my father’s name, and I didn’t have my family with me. It hurt, but I wasn’t completely on my own. My best friend, Kwame King, was there to see me do my thing, along with his girlfriend, his sister, his big brother—might not have been my family there to cheer me on, but it was family just the same.
Coach Poole found me in the locker room before the match—crying, praying. He got down right there with me and cried and prayed, too. He was feeling it, man. Same as me. He said, “Nobody can keep you from this moment, Ray. Nobody.”
I could close my eyes and picture it. The referee, holding up my hand, calling out my name. I could see this kid from Orlando, all tore up, the way I’d been tore up the year before. He wanted it, same as me. He was probably picturing it, same as me. But I told myself I would die before he beat me on this mat. And it would’ve come to that, because this dude was big. He was rough. He was agile.
I’d been wrestling for three years by this point, and I’d never come up against someone like this. This dude, he was like a force of nature—but, still, I would not allow him to compete with me.
So we went at it. First round, we were mostly feeling each other out, seeing what was what. Second round, Coach Poole hollered at me from his corner—said, “Go to work, Ray!”
And boy, I went to work. And what it means, when you go to work against a big-time wrestler like this dude, you shoot, he blocks, you make him sprawl. You work him like that, up and down, over and over. A time or two, maybe he can recover. But you make him sprawl five times, seven, ten and he’s going to be sucking air. And that’s how it played out here. This Orlando dude was a big boy, so when he lost his wind, third period, he was about to crumble. The score was still close, but he was weak. He’d gone from invincible to vulnerable, just on the back of all those sprawls.
Middle of the period I heard Coach Poole again in my corner, giving it to me. He said, “Finish him!”
And I did, and all this time later I catch myself wishing I had a tape of that match, because for the first time in my life I felt like I had mastered something. That’s why I always loved those Bruce Lee movies, because the man was such a master. Nobody could touch him—and you could see it in his eyes that nobody could touch him. He knew. That’s the way I felt as the clock clicked down—like nobody could touch me. I knew. I was on the absolute top of my game, everything was flowing, just right. It’s like I was floating, those last couple minutes—working it, working it. Just like we’d done it in practice. Just like I’d pictured it. And then there was this thought, knocking on the door of my thinking: I’m gonna be state champion! It just hit me, and it grew, and it grew. The match was still going on, and here was this thought, growing inside my head, and underneath that thought I could hear Coach Poole, off to the side, telling me, “Thirty seconds!”
I heard that and went into beast mode. I rushed this dude, picked him up—boom! Let him up, picked him up again—boom! Then I got on top of him, hooked him, and let the clock run out.
It wasn’t about pinning these dudes anymore. Once I’d snapped my father’s record for the fastest pin, once I got so dominant, Coach Poole didn’t want me pinning anybody—said it cheated me of all that time on the clock, time I could have used to work on my game. A wrestling match is supposed to be six minutes of hell, he always said. Made no sense to let my opponent off the hook, all those extra minutes. Made no sense to give back all those extra minutes. Got to where he started making me run extra if I pinned somebody. He was a technician, a craftsman. And here he’d turned me into a master—a state champ.
And this right here was my finest moment as an athlete. Hands down, no doubt. Those two Super Bowl victories? They were probably sweeter for the fans. Those Super Bowls will probably live on a little longer, a little louder, but for me there will be no greater high than that state title at the Lakeland Civic Center. No, sir. After all, it was just me. Ain’t nobody dropping no pass. Ain’t nobody throwing no ball. No, it was just me and this other young man, walking out on a mat and finding some way to deal with each other.
First thing I did was race into Coach Poole’s arms, and as I pulled him in close I said, “His name is forever over.”
Coach knew what I meant. He knew what this moment meant to me. Wasn’t just about wrestling. Wasn’t just about the beauty of hard work, and pain, and chasing demons. It was about setting my father aside, burying his name—and freeing me to live my life my own way, here on in. On my own terms.
FOUR
One Alligator
Alongside of wrestling, there was football.
I always tell folks that wrestling showed me how to truly channel my heart and mind, but it was football that woke up the sleeping giant inside of me. Little League, Pop Warner, that was one thing. Street football, that was a whole other battle. It went all the way back to those “Pick ’em Up, Bust ’em” games we used to play in the streets. And when I say streets, I do mean streets. We played on the grass when we could, but we mostly played on bumpy little dirt roads, little back alleys, driveways, wherever there was a stretch of mostly empty space and a way to mark it out, pole to pole. However many guys turned up to play, that’s who played. Whatever we had to work with as markers—street signs, light poles, parked cars—those become our first-down lines, our end zones. We had our little rivalries, kids from other neighborhoods, other projects, but there were no set teams, no set rules. If you showed up, you played. If one side had too many kids, we’d swap out, try to make the teams even—but if it was a grudge match, we tried to keep those grudges going.
The only rule was if you were on the field and the ball was live, you could get hit. Didn’t matter if you were on the grass, on the dirt, on the asphalt—you were going down. And we hit hard. No pads, n
o helmets. And none of that touch football nonsense. We played tackle, and we played it for real. There weren’t always enough guys to put together a full front line, so we played that you could rush the passer on a certain count. Other parts of the country might have counted by Mississippis or one thousands, but in Florida, you counted by alligators. That’s just how we did it—no reason, except it’s how the big kids did it, our older brothers and cousins, so we could only follow.
When we were little—seven, eight years old—we might have to count to four or five alligators. You had to give the play a chance to develop, right? But by the time we got to junior high, we’d thrown a single blocker on the line and moved the count to one or two, and after that it was just a straight rush.
My thing was to play barefoot. Wasn’t ideal—you’d get stepped on, tore up, but it was better than the alternative. None of us could afford decent running shoes, so we’d kick ’em off and run on the ground. We thought it made us faster, and I guess it did, but it’s a wonder nobody got seriously hurt, running barefoot up and down those dirt roads, hitting the hell out of each other without any pads.
I never had my own football—come to think of it, I never knew anybody who had his own football. And yet, somehow, there was always a ball. Don’t know how it got there, don’t know who brought it home with him, but there it was. Always. Like magic.
And here’s the thing: everything about our game was spontaneous, same way it was with the football just showing up like that. It all happened by word of mouth, like the games were some kind of force of nature. Nobody set them up. Nobody had to call nobody. You just came out and played. Nobody was in charge. The games just kind of sprang up on their own.
We had our field generals, kids who liked to call the plays, but it was always changing. A lot of times, a lot of neighborhoods, the best athletes would run everything, but that wasn’t how it was with our group. We all had a shot. Me, I was a little louder than most, because I was always a little louder than most, and because football was my thing. My game did the talking. I saw it all a little differently than everyone else, even then. If we didn’t have anyone on our side who could throw the football, I’d be the quarterback. If we didn’t have anyone who could run with it, I’d take the ball. If we didn’t have someone to match up with the fastest dude on the other team, the biggest dude on the other team, whatever it was, I’d get the assignment. And if you didn’t pick me first when we were choosing up sides—well, then it was about to be a bad day for you.
I’m sorry, but that’s just how it was.
I used to run my mouth on defense—I’d say, “Long as you don’t put that ball in the air, you’re good.” This was me, trash-talking, but it wasn’t really trash. It was the truth. If you tried to throw the ball on me, nine times out of ten I’d come down with it. Nine times out of ten I would make you pay.
At some point in there, I started watching football on television. In the 1983 NFL season, the Washington Redskins were trying to defend their championship, win their second Super Bowl in a row. That was my team. John Riggins, he was like a battering ram coming out of the backfield. He was the man. Nobody could stop that guy. Couple years later, the Chicago Bears won it all, and it was the same thing all over again, only this time it was an entire team of beasts, out to beat you down. The more I watched, the more I took back out on the field with me, back out on the street, next time we played. Even in the pros, even at the highest level, it was still just a game of one-on-one battles. It was man-on-man. So that remained my mind-set, but as I got older, as I played at all these higher levels, it took in a deeper way: Oh, you busted my nose—that’s okay, I’m good. Oh, you busted my lip—that’s okay, I’m good. You had to do a whole lot more than that to keep me from what I was trying to do, and what I was trying to do was hurt you.
In my head, I was climbing a ladder, a way up and out. And it ran through the game. This was back before I started to wrestle, so when that happened it kind of changed things up for me. But through it all, there was always football. The game might have had to fight for my attention a little bit in there, might have even taken a backseat for a while, but football never stopped mattering. Wrestling might have been a way for me to stand on my own and beat down the name of my father, but football was the path I was meant to follow. It’s how I took my measure. If you beat me playing football, I would look at what I did wrong, what I could do better. If you outran me on the field, I didn’t moan over losing a footrace—no, I figured out how much you beat me by, what I could do to cut that distance the next time we ran.
I was on a journey. Like I said, it was all about climbing that ladder. If I was playing on the Pop Warner D squad, I watched the kids on the C squad, tried to learn from them. On the C squad, same thing—I looked to the B squad for my next moves. I started to realize that football was a lot like life. If you want to get to a certain level, you have to study how folks are doing it ahead of you, model your game after theirs, kick it up a notch.
Making it to the Pop Warner A squad, that was my first real goal. That was the ultimate. It never quite worked out that way, because my time on the A squad would have come during those years I was sent to live with my cousin in Mulberry, seventh and eighth grade, but for a time it was all I ever wanted out of the game. Every chance I got, I watched these older players do their thing. There was this one kid, Charles Hilary. We all knew him as Mickey, and he used to play quarterback for the Lakeland Patriots. He wore number 11. The team colors were red, white, and blue, but Mickey was the only one who wore a red helmet—only he didn’t need the red helmet to stand out. He was all about the extra effort, didn’t have an ounce of quit. I was ten years old, watching this kid in a red helmet maybe two or three years older than me, realizing I didn’t have to be the biggest, or the fastest, or the strongest—all I needed was to put in the best effort.
All I needed was to be relentless.
Ceon Carr was a dude I remembered from my time in Mulberry, living with my cousin Tony. Ceon wore number 3 for the Mulberry Buccaneers. Their team colors were orange and white, modeled after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Ceon could tear it up out there. I could watch him do his thing, squint my eyes just a little bit, and imagine he was tearing it up for Tampa Bay—that’s how dominant this kid was. And he had a teammate with him, a dude named Anwar Hardy, number 33. Together those two kids were unstoppable. To look at them, you’d think they could compete with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for real. That’s what the difference of a couple years can mean to a little kid. It can set it up in your head that these older kids were playing at a level just out of reach, like they were playing a man’s game.
The more I watched, the more I started to see all these different levels of play.
I always tell people to go at it all out, all the time, because you never know who’s watching. All the way to the NFL, last snap in the Super Bowl, I played like there was some little kid out there, eyeballing me through the rusted metal of a chain-link fence, modeling his game after mine.
• • •
My first high school coach was a man named Grady Maddox—and he was old school, all the way. Hard-nosed. Ram-tough. All of that. I only played for him my sophomore year, but the man gave me my first real shot—and for that, I’ll always be grateful.
I came up just around the time our high school program started to struggle—and looking back I have to think those struggles started off the field. Coach Maddox, he had some glory days at Kathleen High School, some championship-type teams. He sent a lot of players off to college careers—even a few on to the NFL. For years, Lakeland had been a real proving ground for a lot of athletes, but the community was hit hard by drugs, alcohol, and gang violence. In this way, we were just like every other community where folks were struggling to get by, but I knew these folks, so it felt different to me. It felt like it was happening in Lakeland and no place else. A lot of our very best athletes got caught in a swirl of some very bad decisions—going back to my father, my uncle, and that whole
generation, and continuing up to the kids I used to watch through the fence on those squads ahead of me. It was like a cancer.
One by one, these dudes started falling off that ladder. We still had a bunch of good athletes when I got to high school—some big, big dudes, some big-time players. Coach Maddox put me behind an upperclassman named William Campbell, at rover back. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t argue—I was just a sophomore, and that’s how it goes when you’re just a sophomore. You have to wait your turn. I was busting my butt in preseason, working harder than anyone in practice, dictating the play, doing my thing, and Coach Maddox couldn’t help but notice. I’ll never forget, one afternoon I heard him chew someone out and say, “I need more players like Ray Lewis.”
He just said it in this tossed-off way, and I just happened to be in earshot. But it lifted me, hearing a comment like that, even though it didn’t earn me a starting job. That only happened when Campbell got into a fight and ended up breaking his jaw. The starting spot was mine, but only in this backdoor way, and this became a kind of recurring theme for me. Every chance I ever got on a real football field, it didn’t come about because I’d earned it outright. It didn’t come about because I was picked first to fill this or that spot. No, it came about because of an injury and because I was good and ready when the guy ahead of me went down. This first time that theme came into play happened before our first game of the season, against Clewiston. Coach Maddox called my name, and I stepped in at rover back. Back then, a lot of Florida high schools played with a rover back—kind of like a strong safety. If you were playing rover back, you were the dog, so it was a big deal. And in that first game I found a way to shine, man. I recorded twenty-two tackles. Twenty-two! That’s the kind of number that’s just off the charts, and this was back when they didn’t keep such thorough statistics like that. But this was how I kept score, man. I was counting—better believe it, I was counting, and twenty-two was how far I got before the final whistle.