by Ray Lewis
Those fans were hungry, man. And we fed off that hunger. Sadly, we weren’t a very good team. I’m sorry, but we just weren’t. But for this one day, at least, we were able to put up a decent fight against another team that also wasn’t very good. They were up by a touchdown at the half, but we shut them down the rest of the way, tacked on a couple field goals in the third quarter to make things close. Then, fourth quarter, Earnest Byner ran it in from the 1-yard line to put us ahead. At this point, the scoreboard said we should go for a two-point conversion, push the lead back to a touchdown, but we couldn’t get the ball back in the end zone, so with time running out we were sitting on a 19–14 lead.
This was where I first got to show Marvin Lewis and the rest of the Baltimore organization that they had backed the right guy. My first big play in a Ravens uniform. Folks still want to talk to me about this play. Oakland was driving, and the Raiders tight end, Rickey Dudley, came off the line on an up and out. He tried to do a little shake route on me, but I was able to read it early and stay on his hip. And as soon as the ball hit his hands, I reached out and made sure it hit my hands, too—it ended up I just kind of ripped the ball from Rickey’s clutches and grabbed onto it for myself, right there in the end zone.
Let me tell you something—the roar that rose up from that hungry crowd was like nothing I ever experienced. I couldn’t hear myself think. That place just erupted. First real football game in that stadium in just about forever, and this rookie out of Miami seals the deal by ripping the ball from the enemy at the last possible moment.
That interception, with time running out, it was the AFC Play of the Week—made all the highlight packages, sent a message around the league that we were in business. Told all those scouts and general managers who’d looked past me on draft day that maybe they should have paid a little less attention to how tall I stood and a little more attention to how big I played.
My Ravens teammates went a little crazy, too. We were a veteran team full of a lot of journeyman-type players and a lot of players who’d been all that in high school and college but hadn’t won anything in a while. And in that one play there were all these waves of emotion up and down our sidelines, because this brand-new team in this brand-new city meant a fresh start. Fans, players, coaches—it was a new day for all of us. A brand-new day. And we were all caught up in it.
Off of that one play, Bennie Thompson hung a nickname on me. He started calling me UPS. Why? Because I always delivered. Because I was always on time. Before long, every time I saw Bennie he’d say, “UPS! What you got for me today?”
Down in that end zone, the game in my hands, Memorial Stadium about to burst, a T-shirt with a picture of my buddy Red pressed close to my chest beneath the 52 on my new Baltimore Ravens jersey—it felt to me like I’d arrived. All those years, all those drills, all those push-ups and sit-ups, all those hours in the gym, all that time studying film, learning the game from every possible angle all led me to this first big spot of my professional career. So what did I do? I celebrated, man. I’d always been big into celebrating these big-time plays, and here it just came pouring out of me. Didn’t even have to think about it. Just happened. There was a song out at the time—“C’mon ’n Ride It,” by the Quad City DJs. It was playing all over, and it had this great Woo-woo! Choo-choo! lyric, so I just started chucking my fist like I was pulling on a big old train whistle.
C’mon ride this train!
Hey ride it!
Woo woo!
And the crowd was all the way into it. Everybody was feelin’ it. The stadium was thumping, man. We were bringing light to the city. We were all riding the train, excited to see where it would take us.
• • •
That first year, the train didn’t go very far. We only won three more games the rest of the way, but each week the culture of that Ravens team moved a little further from what it had been in Cleveland, a little closer to where we needed to be here in Baltimore.
Week Two, we got into it. We went to Pittsburgh to play the Steelers, and for the first time I got what it meant to make your mark as a team. Over the years, we would have a great rivalry, Steelers versus Ravens, but it wasn’t a rivalry yet. No, it was just a team with all this history going up against this team with no history at all. But it gave us a taste, man. It was a motivating thing, an inspiring thing, to walk into Three Rivers Stadium and feel all that history. It was in the air, all around. We were inside the Steel Curtain, and that building just reeked of defense. That’s how it goes in the league, I was learning. You develop a reputation as a team, you play a certain way, and it stays with you—and here it was on us to figure out how we’d be known. And the thing of it is, that first year, we had one of the top offenses in the league—Vinny Testaverde passed for over 4,000 yards. Our defense wasn’t much. In fact, our defense was pretty terrible. But ask someone to tell you what the Baltimore Ravens stood for back then—what the Ravens continue to stand for—and they’ll tell you it’s defense. But that didn’t happen for us that first year.
No, that first year it was all about these grudge matches taking shape, about making an impression. For me, it was staring down Jerome Bettis two times a year in that Steeler backfield. Eddie George two times a year at Houston. The next season, it’d be Corey Dillon two times a year at Cincinnati. That AFC Central division, it was fierce, hard-nosed football, all the way. When I was a kid, starting to watch football, they called it the Black and Blue division, and that description still applied. We were a division of bruisers—we kept taking turns putting a hurt on each other, but now it was on us to start dishing out some of that hurt. It was on me. So we got all these rivalries going, and the seeds of those rivalries were laid down that first year. It got to where you’d go in to one of those divisional games and you’d be thinking, I’m gonna knock somebody out today. That was the mentality, and you couldn’t see it on the scoreboard just yet. You couldn’t see it on the stat sheet. But we were making strides, moving toward something, and looking back I think it came out of that first draft, before the Ravens had their colors. We would make our mark in the trenches—Jonathan Ogden on one side of the ball, me on the other. A lot of teams, that situation, they might have looked to build around a quarterback, a running back, a headline-type player, all flash and flair. But Art Modell, Ozzie Newsome and them, they went another way. They went gritty. They went down and dirty. And it just worked out that Jonathan wasn’t a voice the way I was a voice. He was a cornerstone, a future Hall of Famer, a game changer, but it wasn’t his style to play to the crowd, to rally his teammates. Me, I was primed for that role, and it just kind of fell to me as that first season played on. It started in training camp, and it built from there, and after that opening-day interception in the end zone, me pulling on that big old train whistle, it got built up even further.
I got along great with Ted Marchibroda, but my relationship with that coaching staff was really with Marvin Lewis. He took to me those first couple years in Baltimore, called on me away from the field to talk about the team. He even had me coming to his office every morning to talk through what we needed to be doing on defense, to look at some of the personnel moves he was considering, because he was determined to brand our team as a defensive force and he saw me as the dude who could help him do it. Don’t know why, but he trusted my take, wanted to hear from me how things were going in those trenches.
So that whole first year, you couldn’t really call it a disappointment. Yeah, we only won four games. But we lit up the crowd. We moved the chains a little bit on how we wanted to be known around the league—we even beat up on the Steelers, second to last home game of the season, so we were putting it out there that we meant to be a force. We weren’t there yet, but we were on our way. Slowly, the culture of the team started to change, and Marvin Lewis kept coming to me with all these free agents he wanted to add—guys he was just plucking off the scrap heap. He talked to me about guys he was looking at in the draft. More and more, folks around the league were taking us ser
iously—taking me seriously. I even got myself an invitation to the Pro Bowl, my second year in the league, and this was a real initiation. In the bar at the Ihilani hotel in Hawaii, where everybody stayed, that’s where you made your bones. That first year, I remember sitting on the fringes, a little bit off to the side. I was like a kid being let into the grown-up party, and I was careful not to overstep, and at one point, me sitting there, Derrick Thomas—one of the greatest pass rushers to ever play the game—called over to me.
He caught my eye—said, “Home Team, don’t you bring your young butt over here. You ain’t earned your stripes.”
Home Team—we were both from Florida, so we were connected, but even though we came from the same place, Derrick was telling me I hadn’t earned my way to his side of the room. He was just razzing me, but there was a truth to what he was saying. I’d gotten my foot in the door, but I wasn’t ready to step all the way inside.
The Pro Bowl, that’s where we took our medicine. Forget the game. It was in the bar of the hotel, where we sat at the feet of these great legends and soaked in what it meant to play at the highest level, what it meant to be great—not just for this one season, but for all time. And it took a couple years for me to feel like I belonged. On the field, back in Baltimore, that was my turf—very quickly, I owned that team. But here in Hawaii, among these giants, I was in awe, intimidated, still feeling my way. And yet somehow, that first trip to Hawaii, I started to feel a little more at home among this group, a little more like myself, to where I finally went up to Junior Seau—may he rest in peace as well—and started to give as good as I was getting. I said, “I’m coming for you, Fifty-Five. You know I’m coming. I ain’t coming to no more Pro Bowls as your alternate.”
• • •
Running up to that first Pro Bowl, me and Jonathan got a lot of play in the Baltimore papers, the two of us representing our new-look Ravens. Right around then I started to see the effect around town, away from the stadium. I had a routine in those days where I’d stop in for lunch at this great crab place on the water by the Inner Harbor—by myself, usually. They had this dish they used to make, a nice piece of grilled fish, a lump of crabmeat on the top, and I thought it was just the greatest meal in the world. I would have eaten it every day if I could, and I used to love sitting there, on my way to the stadium, on my way back home, and treat myself in this way. For the first time in my life, I could sit down at a nice restaurant, order up a nice plate of food, and not worry what it cost.
So there I was, sitting down for an early lunch, and the place was mostly empty when I sat down. But then, when I got up to leave, there was this mad crush of people off in the corner—kids mostly, pressing into the doorway. I’d never seen so many people crammed into such a tight space, couldn’t think what was going on. What happened was, word had gotten out that I was inside, and this little crowd had started to form. And then it got a little bigger, and a little bigger, and finally there was this mass of people—hundreds, probably. I looked through the window of the restaurant and could see the crowd was for me, so before I stepped outside I called my mama.
I said, “Mom, you’ll never believe what’s going on out here.”
She said, “What’s going on, Junior?”
I said, “All these people. I’m just here having lunch. And outside, there’s a whole crowd gathered to see me.”
She said, “Well, what do you know . . .” Her voice trailing off, like she was giving this some thought, what it might mean.
And just then, I couldn’t know what it might mean, couldn’t know I’d never again be able to walk through the streets of Baltimore without drawing a crowd, without folks turning their heads. All of that, it didn’t happen overnight. It had been a slow build, over those first couple seasons. But this was the first time I realized that my world was forever changed.
NINE
Atlanta
Four seasons in, my career was going good. Every year, we inched a little closer to competitive. First year, 4–12. Second year, 6–9–1. Third year, 6–10. Fourth year, 8–8. Led the team in tackles every year. Led the league in tackles twice, put it out there that the Baltimore Ravens defense was a force. Those first few years, we might not beat you on the scoreboard, but we would beat you down on the field.
The word they use in football to describe an 8–8 team is respectable. I always hated that word—left me thinking you’ve been wracking your brain to come up with something nice to say and this was about the best you could do. So on the one hand it was a good thing, to have fought our way back to respectability, but on the other hand it was a knock, because it told us how far we still needed to go—in people’s minds, at least. End of the day, we were average, middle of the pack. We were nowhere. But we told ourselves nowhere was okay, long as we were headed somewhere. As long as we were rising. And we were. As a team, we were on the move—just look at how things were about to pop for us that next season.
Me, I was headed out to Hawaii for my third-straight Pro Bowl, but the plan was to fly from Atlanta, right after Super Bowl XXXIV—which was being played there in the Georgia Dome. Tough to keep track of all those Roman numerals, but that was the year the St. Louis Rams beat the Tennessee Titans 23–16, time running out as Kevin Dyson was tackled just a couple inches short of the goal line. Folks remember that Super Bowl, man—but that final drive was just one reason they remember it.
What a lot of folks don’t remember about that game was that there was a major snowstorm up and down the East Coast. That whole week—January 25, 2000—flights were being canceled every which way. The day I was supposed to leave Baltimore, it was bad upon bad. You couldn’t get out of that airport for trying. I had a good mind to cancel my trip, to just sit tight, but I had a week’s worth of commitments lined up—an “NFL Experience” event, autograph signings and all these different appearances I had to make. I hated to cancel, because I needed the extra money, and because I’d given my word. Folks were counting on me to show. All these wheels were in motion.
I remember talking on the phone to my mother as I was scrambling to leave Baltimore, find another flight. She said, “Don’t go to Atlanta, Junior.” Three times, she called to tell me to stay put, ride out the storm, head out to Hawaii from Baltimore after the game. It’s like she had a premonition, and she said it clearly: “Junior, it’s crazy out there. You don’t need to be going nowhere.”
No, I guess I didn’t.
But I’d made all these commitments, set my mind to it. Trouble was, my mind couldn’t put my flight back up on the board, so I called my driver at the time, Dwayne, asked him to check on the roads. The driving was tough, a mess of snow and ice, but he put some chains on the tires of his black Lincoln Navigator and we were good to go. We stopped in North Carolina to pick up my boy Kwame King—just a little detour, because his flight had been canceled, too.
The weather was nasty the whole way to Georgia. Wet, cold. Just nasty. But we made it there, eventually. Got there in time to settle in at the hotel before my first event, so I went up to my room and started in on my outfits. One thing you should know about me: when I travel I have my little routines. For Super Bowl week and those different events I needed about ten different outfits. I’m sorry, but this is one of my quirks. I like to look good. I had a daytime outfit, a nighttime outfit. I had a formal outfit, a casual outfit. I had something to wear for the day of the game, something to wear to the clubs, something to wear on the flight to Hawaii. I’ve been told I’m obsessive about this, and I guess I am. The way I do it is I set everything out beforehand and as the week goes on, every couple days, I pile up all the outfits I already wore and ship them back home. Who wants to think about all this with everything else going on? Who wants to deal with all that mess? Who wants the hassle of carrying all that stuff around if you don’t have to? So this was the system I’d worked out—I still do it everywhere I go.
I called my mama, told her I’d made it to Atlanta safely, laid out all my clothes, headed to my first event—le
ft the inside of my room looking like a trunk show, all these clothes set out just so. Came back, stepped into another outfit, went out to the next event. The long drive had set me back a bit, but now I was good. I was into my routine, doing my thing, and as the week wore on the city began to fill. That whole Super Bowl vibe, the circus atmosphere, it started to take over, and it was a good time for me to be in the middle of all that. A lot of years, your season ends in a disappointing way, you don’t make the playoffs, you lose a first-round game, you go to all these Super Bowl events and you’re torn. You feel like it should be your team out there, playing for the championship. But this year didn’t feel that way to me, because we hadn’t earned the right to be disappointed. Not yet. We’d just had a good year. We were on the rise. Things were coming together for us, so this time in Atlanta was a chance for me to look ahead, check in with my friends around the league, reflect. Good things, all.
And it was a chance to be with my kids. My two oldest sons were meeting me in Atlanta with their mother, and then traveling with me out to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl, where my mother was fixing to meet us, so this was another good thing—a great good thing.
Let me tell you, that Super Bowl week was shaping up to be a sweet little exclamation point, and it came around at just the right time. There were good things to celebrate, good things to come—at least, that’s what I thought.
• • •
Day of the big game, I went to a party at my boy Marty Carter’s house. Marty played for the Atlanta Falcons at the time. Wasn’t one of those off the chain parties, where nobody pays attention to the game. No, Marty did it up just right. The catering, just right. The dancing, just right. The people, just right—a nice mix of guys in the league, guys from college ball, friends, family. Nothing crazy. Even so, I did catch myself dancing on the pool table at one point—got myself into a little dance-off with this girl, and we were moving pretty good.