by Ray Lewis
That whole week, we were vigilant, locked in. One of our coaches put up a poster with Napoleon Kaufman’s picture on it—he was the Huskies’ main threat, a beast. On the poster it had all his stats, how much he weighed, how much he lifted, how fast he ran the forty, yards per carry—all of that. And it set us off, looking at that poster all week long.
We were fired up.
And then, just like that, the streak was gone. The national championship, some folks were saying that was gone, too. Three weeks in and it felt to us like our season was over. It’s like there’d been a death in the family, that’s how knocked out we all were over this loss. To a man, we took it hard. The football writers started calling the game “The Whammy in Miami,” making it sound like we were cursed—and it felt like that to us for a while.
The game went bad for us at the coin toss. People still talk about that coin toss. What happened was Warren Sapp went out to represent and the officials claim he “deferred” the call. It ended up Washington got the ball twice—to start the game and to start the third quarter. Of course, Sapp did no such thing. He elected to kick off in the first half and to receive in the second half, which is how Dennis Erickson liked to play it with our tenacious defense—you know, to set the tone early. But the officials heard it another way and it ended up costing us. (Who goes out there with any kind of football IQ and asks to kick the ball to start each half? It made no sense.) That opening drive in the third quarter, it changed the game. The Huskies ended up scoring twenty-two points in the first five minutes of the second half, and we were on our heels. That game also changed the way they do these coin tosses, because after that they had microphones out there, so everything was clear.
It just wasn’t our day, man. No excuses, but it was a big wake-up call for our group. We got burned on a couple big plays, both sides of the ball—and we looked ahead to the rest of our schedule knowing we couldn’t afford another stumble.
• • •
That loss at the Orange Bowl, the whole world watching, it left me thinking of what folks mean when they talk about an upset in sports. It was an upset, a big one, but we couldn’t let it upset us if we wanted to make some noise the rest of the way. Anyway, it would not upend our season. We needed to set it aside, start a new winning streak at home. And we all felt that and wound up just going off to make up for that loss.
We shut down those Big East teams, man.
We destroyed Florida State, to make up for the year before.
We ran the table, closed out the season with eight straight wins—some of those teams, we downright embarrassed—and next thing we knew we were back on track to be the national champions. At least, that’s how we saw it. A lot of folks, they saw it another way. See, we finished out the regular season ranked third in the nation. We were set to play number-one-ranked Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. Penn State was ranked second, and they were playing Oregon in the Rose Bowl. Nebraska and Penn State were undefeated, and we had that one loss against Washington, so there was all this talk that even if we knocked off Nebraska we’d still be behind Penn State if they won their bowl game. In those days they didn’t have the BCS format in place, so there were a lot of years like 1994 when there was no consensus national champion.
The BCS bowl system they have now was a long time in coming. It’s great for the game, great for the fans. We could have used that kind of tournament setup, would’ve taken away some of the distractions we all felt, leading up to this Nebraska game. It would’ve settled the matter off the field, so we could focus our full attention on settling the matter on the field.
We didn’t buy into this talk, of course. Our thing was, Hey, if we’re already ranked third and we beat the number-one team in the country, that makes us the number-one team in the country. End of discussion. Far as we were concerned, the Orange Bowl was the national title game—didn’t matter what the so-called “experts” had to say. Didn’t matter what the Penn State folks had to say.
It was our title to win—and if you had a problem with that . . . well, you could just take it up with us after the game.
But all that talk, it turned out to be beside the point because we couldn’t get it done. The Cornhuskers came in—to our house!—and took it to us. Tommie Frazier, Lawrence Phillips—those dudes came to play. They game-planned us. We jumped out to a 10–0 lead, but they came clawing back. They took our strength and found a way to make it a weakness. And as good as we were on defense, I had to admit, that Nebraska team had a strong offensive line. Best in the country, people said, and I didn’t doubt it. Wasn’t enough to shut us down, but they did manage to slow us down a little bit, in spots. And—now this was the game-planning part—they knew how to pick those spots and jump on them. Really, the reason we lost that game, it came down to just a couple plays. Tommie Frazier found a soft spot in our defense at a key time. Warren Sapp was so fast off the ball, he penetrated so fast, that Tommie was able to spin out and hand off to Cory Schlesinger, who rolled behind our defense on a trap for a fifteen-yard touchdown run early in the fourth quarter—after the two-point conversion, it tied the score at 17–17. Then, those two came back late in the fourth and did us the same way—another trap, this time for a fourteen-yard touchdown run.
We got the ball back inside our own twenty with a little less than three minutes remaining, but we couldn’t get anything going. We moved the ball on a short pass on first down, but then Frank Costa was sacked twice, Nebraska got a pick on fourth down, and Tommie Frazier took a knee the rest of the way while the clock ran out on our season.
Final score: 24–17, Nebraska. And we could only look up at that scoreboard and fall to our knees, too.
• • •
Hurricane football. The winds blew another way after that 1994 season. I stayed to play another year, but it felt to me like I was the only one. Sapp was gone. Rat was gone. Patrick Riley, gone. Even Dennis Erickson announced a couple weeks after my sophomore season that he was leaving to coach the San Francisco 49ers, so we got real young in 1995.
Our new coach was Butch Davis—one of Jimmy Johnson’s boys, he’d followed Coach Johnson from Miami to the Dallas Cowboys, where he was the defensive coordinator. Me and Butch, we didn’t get along. Felt to me like he was always out to teach me a lesson, make an example of me in front of all these young players. In fact, he called me out right away—only, not by name, not directly. He took the whistle and made his presence known. One of our first practices, he called the team over for a talk—said, “There’s gonna be some changes round here.”
Those changes? No celebrating on the field. That was it—his big contribution to Hurricane football.
I heard that and thought, Damn! I thought, You can’t come in and do us like that. It was part of the culture, man. The right celebration, at the right time, was spontaneous, joyous, infectious—and it could spark our whole team. And the thing of it is, I heard this as a knock on me—because, wasn’t no secret, I could get into it better than anyone out there.
I just kind of filed that away, told myself we’ll see what happens. And sure enough, first game of the season, we were out in California against UCLA, and at some point early in the game Karim Abdul-Jabbar took the handoff and I shot the gap and flattened him for a loss. So what did I do? I stood up and started doing my thing, same as always. It just kind of happened. The way I played the game, with so much emotion, so much energy, it spilled out in all these ways I couldn’t always control—only here, got to admit, I was looking for a moment to show Butch he couldn’t keep us from doing like we’d always done.
Right after that, he pulled me out of the game, and I didn’t think anything of it at first, just assumed he was putting in a new package, giving me a blow, but on the next set of downs, I was still out. I went over to Randy Shannon and asked him what was up, me sitting out like that.
He said, “Butch told me to pull you.”
I said, “Seriously?”
He said, “For celebrating.”
So I grabbed my helmet
and said, “Man, the hell with him!” And I ran back onto the field. Wasn’t like me to go against a coach like that. I’d been raised to respect authority, but I got it in my head that this man didn’t deserve my respect. To come in to my house! To change my program! To take the joy and passion from my game! Yeah, he was the head coach, but this was my team. That was my attitude—not saying it’s right, not saying it’s wrong, but there it was.
Butch Davis, his hands were tied. But it set me off, man—it did. Already, I was on tilt. Losing that game to Nebraska. Losing my boys like that. It felt to me like the torch had been passed, and this was how I chose to carry it.
It ended up we lost that game to UCLA—by a big score. But I told myself I didn’t care. I told myself I was gone.
When we got back to Miami, Butch called me in to his office for a dressing down. He told me how things were gonna be on his watch. But I cut him off before he could get all the way through his talk. I said, “It don’t matter. I’m going anyway.”
I’d been thinking about declaring for the NFL draft, going pro. Wasn’t anything left for me to prove at this level—and, now that my boys were all gone, wasn’t any reason to stay. But this was the first I talked about it, put it out there, and I was surprised by Butch’s reaction.
He said, “You’re going? You’re going where?” He knew what I meant, but he wanted to push me, make me spell it out.
I said, “I’m out. End of the season, I’m going to the league, man.”
He said, “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.” Like he was scolding me.
I couldn’t believe it. All my life, I’d been around coaches who worked to lift their players up and out and on to the next thing. My dreams were always their dreams—my success, theirs, too. And here was this man, bitter, full of himself, probably a little angry that his best defensive player was telling him he had a foot out the door, shooting me down like I was some punk kid who’d just stolen the family car.
I said, “Wow. You really believe that?”
He said, “Yes, I do.”
I had something to prove to this man, so I piled it on thick—said, “You won’t find a more dominant college player than me. Right now, I’m the man to beat.”
Here Butch went into a long-winded rant about his friends around the league, who’d assured him I’d go in the fourth round—said that was about the best I could hope for. And here, too, I couldn’t believe it. Even if this was true, even if the NFL scouts had concerns about my size, my stature, my ability to play at the next level—why would this man go out of his way to shoot me down like that? What was in it for him, to do me dirt? And why was he even asking around the league, if he didn’t already think I had one foot out the door?
I hadn’t known for sure, going into his office, but as soon as I stepped away from that man, I knew. I was gone.
My thinking wasn’t just about what was going on down on the field. My mind was also on what was going down at home. It had a lot to do with my mom, really. She’d been struggling since I went away to school—got to where she was flat broke. Wasn’t even enough money coming in to keep a roof over her head, so I did what I had to do. At the end of my junior season, I brought my whole family down to Miami to stay with me. I fixed it with a friend who let us use a two-bedroom apartment off campus, in a little complex called the Grove, and we squeezed in and made the best of it—my mother, my sisters, my brother. It was a tight setup, hectic. I stayed there, too, a lot of the time, but I also kept my place in student housing, with my roommates. All of a sudden, college was nothing at all like it had been my first two years—but then, a lot of my buddies were gone anyway, and I was happy to be able to spend all this time with my family.
We were doing okay—really. We still didn’t have enough money, so I was scrambling to keep ahead of our bills. I’d load up on food from the dining halls, from our training table, and bring some of it home. I’d take odd jobs here and there, just so my brother and sisters could have some walking-around money. It was only a short-term setup—once I’d made up my mind that I was declaring for the draft, I knew it’d just be a couple months before there was real money coming our way, so the goal here was to just get by. That’s not always so easy for a college athlete—not when you’re in season, not if you want to take classes. We were amateur athletes—that was a big deal to those NCAA folks—so we could not get paid to play, and we could not participate in any of those television deals the schools and conferences sign. I understood that. We all understood that—that’s the deal we signed up for. But then, a lot of times, there were local car dealerships, local restaurants or clubs who wanted to slip us some cash for some kind of endorsement deal, maybe an appearance fee, but we weren’t supposed to do that, either. And for a lot of us, there were agents lining up left and right, just for the chance to represent us, and a lot of those guys were flashing money around, trying to get with you—another big no, as far as the NCAA was concerned.
Still, there was money to be made in a sidelong way—decent money, once the football season was over. And like a lot of the guys I played with, I needed to make money, man. Life was just too damn expensive, especially down in Miami—and now there were five other mouths for me to feed. The whole time, I was meeting with agents, and they were promising me the sun and the moon and everything in between. Each time out, I made my position clear—said, “I will sit down and listen to what you have to say.”
Said, “I will keep you in mind.”
And I was good to my word—I kept them all in mind.
But money became more and more of an issue in those few months I had my family with me, more and more of a worry. Even before Butch Davis took me out to his woodshed like that, this was how I was leaning, so I found the time to talk to my mother about it. A decision like this—I couldn’t make it without her blessing.
Turned out that blessing was hard to come by. I went to her one day, not long after I put it to Butch that I was leaving, and told her what I was thinking. I said, “Mom, I’m coming out.”
She said, “You what?”
I said, “I gotta go.”
She said, “Go where, Junior?”
I said, “To the league. Ain’t nothing for me in Miami. Ain’t nothing for us, as a family.”
She let this sink in for a couple beats—said, “What you gonna do, Junior? What happens if you get hurt? Ain’t nobody gonna pay you then.”
I said, “I won’t get hurt. That’s all.” Then I put the same argument back on her—said, “What happens if I get hurt playing for Miami? That happens, where’s the money gonna come from then?”
She had no answer, so she moved on to the rest of her argument against me leaving—said, “What about college? You can’t leave without your degree.”
I said, “I’ll come back and get my degree. I promise.”
We went back and forth like this for a while, circling around our one real option. I would declare for the NFL draft and leave school after the spring semester. Like I said, it was the only way, and after a long talk, I was able to persuade my mother that it was the only way.
But the thing is, that talk should have been a little longer. There was another piece to my thinking that I wasn’t ready to share—and this was a piece of news I’d just gotten from my girl Tatyana. I was going to be a father. Didn’t think my mother wanted to deal with a bombshell like that, on top of me leaving college early, so I let that one lie. Plus, Tatyana and her, they never really saw eye to eye—maybe because mama saw something in Tatyana I’d yet to see, or maybe because she wasn’t ready to share her Baby Ray with another woman.
Anyway, it was a glorious piece of news, but it was a little too big to share. Still, I added everything up in my head and it all came out to the good: I was going to the league, I was going to be a poppa, I had my family together, and there’d be money coming in. All good things.
SEVEN
Draft Day
Underneath all that good stuff, there was sadness. There was stru
ggle. The way I grew up, it doesn’t leave you. No father. No steady paycheck. All these men, some of them abusive, in and out of our life. No clear path I was meant to follow. And that doesn’t even include the tragedies that happened all around—the violence, the dysfunction, the desperation. The older we got, the kids I was running with, playing football with, the bigger the trouble—the bigger the consequences, anyway. By the time we got to high school, in and around Lakeland, we all knew too many people who’d fallen to drugs, to gang violence.
I carried those folks with me, literally. Had a black panther tattooed by my right shoulder, to remind me of my high school teammate Timmy Moore, murdered just after my junior season at Miami. Had another black panther on my chest, to remind me of a man named Raymond King, who was like a mentor to me when I was growing up. Shot dead by the police a couple years earlier—caught in the middle of a bank job gone wrong.
What all this meant, when I left for Miami, was that I didn’t know what normal looked like. Normal, as in how other folks grew up or how you see on television or in the movies. I didn’t know what it was to grow up without people getting shot left and right. I didn’t know what it was to have a refrigerator full of food, to fill a car with a full tank of gas instead of ten dollars’ worth, twenty dollars’ worth, whatever. I didn’t know what it was for a family to sit down at the same dinner table every night, all together. I didn’t know what it was supposed to be like on Christmas morning. In our house, maybe there’d be one gift, and we’d all have to share it, but that’s just how it was. We were okay with that. We were. But now it was looking like my life was about to pop in a whole new way.
Football, I knew. Wrestling, I knew. Faith, I knew. And faith helped me through it all. But what it was like to raise a family, under one roof, everybody tied in to the same goal, everybody on the same page? These things were all the way outside my experience, so what did I know, after all? I only knew there was no going back. Staying in school, maybe getting hurt, not getting my chance to make it in the league—none of that was an option for me. I couldn’t let that happen. I mean, what did I have to fall back on but the game? My daddy being gone? My mama being broke? Me living in the projects and about to be a father?