by Ray Lewis
Folks were scattered around the house, but here in this one room there were maybe ten or twelve of us. We were sitting on the bed, on the floor, all over. And as the game got going, I caught myself getting a little sick in the head, a little jealous, because there on the field were the Tennessee Titans, one of our division rivals. Seeing that team, in those familiar jerseys, got under my skin. Even though I didn’t view our last season as a disappointment, once I saw these guys that I had been going up against all year long on this grand stage, doing their thing, it started to tug at me. So a part of me was watching that game thinking, Dang, Eddie George! What’s he doing out there on that field? Thinking, That should be me.
Like I said, we were rivals. And I respected Eddie—I did. We had our problems, but we were cool. Still, I didn’t like that his team was playing and my team was not. It got to me. We had some wars, man. Me and him, we played each other hard. There’s a lot that goes on between a running back and a linebacker that doesn’t come across in the stands, on television. You’re connected in battle, all game long. For one to survive, the other has to falter, so we had our history, and that history reached up and grabbed me while I was watching the game.
And it was some game. Better believe it, folks will be talking about that Super Bowl for generations to come—it was one for the ages. The Rams jumped out early, but the Titans came clawing back, and midway through the second half Eddie ran it in from short yardage for a touchdown. The Rams had him stopped, dude had his hand on Eddie’s helmet, but Eddie just kept fighting it and fighting it until he burst into the end zone.
At just that moment, I heard one of Marty’s actress friends call out, “Oh man. Eddie George is a beast!” It was almost like a scream.
She was a fan. That’s all. She was excited—Eddie had just made a great play in a big spot. But I heard that voice and it set me off. Again I thought, Dang, Eddie George! I thought, I got to get into this game! Of course, the only way to do that was to get to the head. Only road to the Super Bowl, in our division, was through Tennessee. That’s how it had been my whole time in Baltimore. When I came into the league, they were the Oilers; now they were the Titans, and Eddie George was a monster. That’s just facts. He was the force at that time—the force I had to deal with, anyway. So that’s what I mean when I say we had to get to the head, because that’s how you cut down a beast like that. You get to the head.
Now, that history we had, me and Eddie, went all the way back to college, when he was at Ohio State. We had some words—and not even on the field. What happened was we were both named College All-Americans, and they flew us all to Los Angeles for some press events and appearances. A bunch of us became really close, went on to big careers, and back then we knew we were going on to big careers, so this was a special time, a special trip, our lives just kind of unfolding in front of us. It ended up that one night we were at a party at a nice house in Hollywood. Eddie got us playing a game called “Smashers”—said he played it all the time at school. The deal is you take a vodka, mix it with a soda, and then you shake it up and smash it against the table. Then, when it explodes and fizzes, you have to drain it—easy enough, right?
After a while things started to get a little competitive. We were competitive dudes. Add a little vodka to that and what do you expect? So at one point, I was going up against Eddie, and he looked across to me and said, “Man, you too small to see me.” Like he was calling me out, giving me attitude.
I said, “Hold on, brother. Let’s not go there. We just playin’ a game.”
What he meant was that us Big East players couldn’t touch Eddie and his Big Ten boys. You too small to see me. We were small-time, he was saying, so we went back and forth on this for a while. Some of the other guys joined in, and it was all in good fun. I was giving as good as I was getting—but then Eddie pushed a little too hard. He said, “Man, I’m telling you, you don’t never want to see me.” Meaning, once we got to the league.
All night long—the whole trip, really—the talk had been about what we would do to each other once we got to the league, how we would strut, find a way to dominate like we’d dominated in college. At Miami, Ohio State, wherever we went to school, we were all masters of our little domains, big men on campus, and now we were getting ready to amp things up, play with the best of the best.
I got my back up—said, “Eddie, if I ever see you, I will end your career.”
It was just something to say, but the heat got turned up after that. Eddie, he wanted to throw down. He kept saying, “We can go on the grass right now. We can go on the grass right now.”
Eddie was all riled. He even ripped off his shirt and started making like these other dudes had to hold him back from jumping me—you know, just a bunch of testosterone nonsense, locker room nonsense, but I was getting all riled up, too. Usually, I let this kind of thing slide. It doesn’t bother me. But we kept pushing it and pushing it, to where the two of us were getting ready to go at it, and that’s when our host came by to diffuse the situation. Duane Martin—a sports agent, trying to sign a bunch of us, it was his place. He became a good friend to a lot of us on that College All-American team. He was married to the actress Tisha Campbell from the show Martin, and last thing he wanted was for this gathering of the nation’s top college football players to end in a brawl, so he brought out these paintball guns he just happened to have lying around the house.
He walked over to me and Eddie and handed us each a paintball gun—said, “Y’all need to chill out. Whatever it is, we can settle it with these.”
Turned out to be a genius move, because after that the tensions seemed to die down. There were no apologies, no handshakes. We just shrugged, drifted away, and that was the end of it, but that’s why it set me off, hearing that actress scream Eddie’s name like that. Eddie George is a beast! We had this history, see. We had this rivalry. And it lit something in me, seeing Eddie in this big spot, scoring this big touchdown, hearing his name called. It got me thinking, I’ve got to get into this game, man! Thinking, I need to be on that field!
Yeah, I know. It was just a Super Bowl party. It was just a game some dudes I sometimes played against were playing on the television. But something was lit in me that night. I told myself that next year it would be me. I told myself that next year there’d be some other dude sitting on this bed, watching me and my teammates in the Super Bowl, listening to some other pretty actress scream in amazement, Oh man. Ray Lewis is a beast!
So it was like that.
• • •
After the game, I went back to my hotel room to change clothes. This was my routine—a different outfit for each stop of the night.
My postgame look was all about style. I put on a suit, a long mink coat. I put on some bling, too—a Piaget watch, a bold lock chain, a jammin’ set of earrings. All that jewelry, plus my mink coat, I must have been wearing about a quarter-million dollars, but those were heady times, man. This was how we rolled, me and my boys, and when you come from nothing like I did, step into all this money like I did, you’re bound to strut a little bit. I was over the top, I’ll admit. Way, way over the top. I get that. I’m sorry. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed about all that now, but this was the mentality, and I only mention it here because it became a part of the story.
All around the league, this was how dudes were dressing. Young players today, I tell them to lean another way. I tell them not to call attention to themselves—because, clearly, I made myself a target, dressing like this. It’s like I had my chest out. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy nice things. But if you’re gonna wear a $100,000 Piaget watch, make sure you’re rolling with other people who’ve got nice watches, too. Make sure it fits with where you are. That mink coat—same thing. Make sure you’re not the only dude in fur.
But other than the mink coat, I wasn’t flashing all that money around. My jewelry wasn’t on display, the way you’d sometimes see. No, I just had a taste for some fine, creative pieces. Some of them, I helped to design. An
d that watch—man, I’ve always been a watch guy, and that one was just a beautiful thing to see.
Another thing it helps to know here is the way people latch on to you in that kind of setting. Kwame and me, as the week went on, we pulled in all these different folks. A couple of gorgeous young females, who started hanging around with us—four or five, by the time we left Marty Carter’s house. A couple other guys we were just meeting at these parties, these events. A friend of a friend. Somebody’s cousin. We put together this loose little entourage—and some of these people, I couldn’t even tell you their names. There were just along for the ride—and, got to say, we were happy to have them. Everybody knew somebody. Together, we were in on the same good time.
This type of thing, it was just a reflection of the times, how I came up in the league. And Super Bowl week, in a city like Atlanta, there was a lot going on. People cut loose in a different way, almost like you were in this big old bubble and the rest of the world was put on pause.
It ended up that we stepped into a club called Cobalt. All the after parties in town, this was the place to be. We didn’t know this, going in, but it worked out. We found the right party. It felt to me like every athlete and celebrity in town for the game had found their way to the Cobalt.
My drink at the time was Remy VSOP—wouldn’t touch nothing else. So I had the bartender pour me one and I went to check the place out. The music, it was thumping. The people, they were jumping. It was a good, good time, all around, and I’d shaken all that Eddie George jealousy, now that the game had ended. I’d shut down all those thoughts about our season running through Tennessee. The day wasn’t about rivalries anymore. Wasn’t even about the big game. It was about celebrating with my friends, being young, on top of the world, all of that. Back of my mind, I was thinking, Baby Ray, life is good. And, really, it was. I was twenty-four years old, making good money, a good name for myself, looking ahead to a time when folks would be dancing and celebrating after one of my Super Bowls—a time that was close enough to taste. And the next day I’d be heading out to Hawaii with my kids, meeting up with my mom flying in from Baltimore.
It would be a great week—another bunch of events and parties, all of us together, in the sun, a long, long way from how things used to be.
So that was my mind-set at the time, and as the crowd at the Cobalt started to thin, we made our way outside. We still had some of those folks from our loose entourage with us, and we all talked about keeping the party going back at the hotel. We weren’t ready for the night to end, for all this good feeling to fall away, so we gathered our things and started making our way out to the limo, which was parked just down the street—and this was when the night started to turn.
As we left the club we ran into this one girl, looking like she wanted to make an impression. She had on this sheer turquoise top. She was a beautiful girl, tough not to notice, and as we walked past I saw these other dudes starting to hassle her, harass her. Wasn’t anything, really, but it was something to notice. She was with this other girl, said it was her sister. So I turned to the girl with the sheer top and said, “Probably ain’t good for y’all to be walking out here, just the two of you, looking like that. Lemme give you a ride.”
And just like that, our loose entourage got a little bigger. Wasn’t anything planned. Wasn’t anything to discuss. These two girls just decided to roll with us, and I walked the rest of the way to the limo with one sister on each arm. We were having a big old time, all of us, and who knows how the rest of the night would have gone if it weren’t for what happened next.
Instead this other bunch of dudes came up to our car as we were piling in, making a bunch of noise, roughhousing. Six, eight, ten of them. I couldn’t tell how many, wasn’t really paying attention. Dudes like this, we see them all the time when we’re on the road during the season. Making noise, making trouble. They were just hanging around outside, hassling, harassing. At the time, I just saw them as trouble—nothing we couldn’t handle, nothing we hadn’t seen before, but trouble just the same.
I got to the car first and held the door open for our group, waiting by the curb while they piled inside. Can’t say how many we were, either, but a bunch of people climbed in. Then, just as I was about to set down myself this one dude from the group ran toward me. He was all worked up, agitated. He turned to his friends and said, “Man, f*** Ray Lewis! Kill that nigger, dawg!”
It took me back, hearing this kind of ugly talk—from a black dude, no less. But I could see him and his gangbangers starting to circle, so I said, “Hey, look man. Ain’t nobody doing all this right now. Let’s just move on.” Right then, I took this as my signal to get everybody out of there, and all hell broke loose from that moment. Remember, I was dressed out, had my jewelry on, my fine mink coat. I wasn’t about to start mixing it up looking like that. That’s a general rule of thumb when you’re doing the town and looking good. The nicer you’re dressed, the less inclined you are to get in a fight—that is, if you’re even inclined in that way to begin with. Anyway, we’d all been down this way before, knew enough to know it was just a bunch of noise, just a bunch of nonsense, so the thing to do to diffuse all that noise and nonsense was to show each other what you had. It was like a standoff-type situation, and there really wasn’t any more to it than that. Only thing flying around was words, but at the same time there was trouble in the air. You could kind of feel it.
This dude talking trash, he had this Moët bottle in his hand—just kind of hanging off to the side. One of the people with me, Reginald Oakley, the dude must’ve thought he stepped a little too close, moved in on his personal space, because he drew back that hand with the bottle in it and came down hard with it on the top of Reginald’s head. None of us saw it coming, Reginald least of all, but there it was, and it was on. Reginald’s head was just split, and he was bleeding all over the place, and people were yelling and menacing and scuffling. Those next few moments—maybe thirty seconds, maybe a full minute—were just crazy on top of crazy, but I didn’t engage with these dudes. No, sir. I tried to disengage, pushing the girls back in the car, and we all piled inside. Reginald was able to separate himself from the mix and join us; we started to drive off.
I remember there was this big old oak tree on the sidewalk where we’d been parked, and I looked out the window and saw these dudes—four or five or six of them—pushing each other around underneath that tree, still going at each other, mixing it up, jawing. I could hear them, too, but then their voices faded as we shut the door and started to pull away.
Reginald, he was in a bad way. He was bleeding all over the backseat, talking his own trash, wanting to go back outside and deal with this dude who hit him with that bottle, but just as we started to put that big old oak tree in our rearview mirror, we heard these shots ring out—pop, pop, pop! Wasn’t clear to me straight off what they were, but then I knew. Very quickly, I knew. First, there were just a few, then a whole bunch more—pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop! And they weren’t just ringing out. No, they were hitting the trunk of the car, the side panels. Everybody got down in their seats. Folks were screaming. My driver, Dwayne—he stomped on the gas. It was a terrifying thing, and the shots came out of nowhere—pop, pop, pop, pop, pop! And then, just like that, it stopped—almost like whoever had been shooting at us had emptied their clips.
One of those shots ripped into one of our back tires, it turned out, so we were rolling flat—but Dwayne, he kept us moving. We weren’t stopping for no one, no reason. We rolled for about a mile, past a Holiday Inn, so Dwayne just eased the limo into the driveway and came to a stop, figured we could take care of the tire and take care of Reginald. But instead of all of us spilling out of the car and helping out, most everybody took off in all these different directions. Those two sisters? Gone. The other girls who’d been running with us? Gone. The other dudes in the car? Gone, gone, gone. Even Reginald Oakley took off—bleeding all over the place, still.
Only ones left were me and Kwame and Dwayne, and we couldn�
��t figure out what the hell had just happened or what the hell we were supposed to do about it.
• • •
First things first, we needed to take care of the car, so we called a tow-truck company. I stepped into the Holiday Inn lobby with Kwame and the few folks left from our loose entourage. We were shell-shocked, man. Stunned. So we sat there and tried to figure out what had just happened, where things went wrong, why. And the thing of it is, nobody thought to call the police—not because we had anything to hide, but because there was nothing to say. Where I come from, you don’t call the police, tell them shots were fired, until you know the deal.
Nobody’d been hit, far as we could tell. Nobody’d been hurt, other than Reginald upside the head—and he’d already taken off. So we waited on the tow truck with Dwayne, finally made our way back to the hotel around three o’clock in the morning, and as I walked through the lobby I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the mirrors. There I was, all dressed out in my mink coat, my fine suit. Dude dresses like that, he’s not looking for a fight. Matter of fact, he’s doing everything he can to stay away from a fight. How I was dressed, it made no sense with what went down, those shots being fired, all of that. Forget what kind of statement my clothes might have made. Forget that I might have been a little loud, over the top. Point is, when you’re dressed like that, you’re off to the sidelines, and here were these gangbangers stepping to us from the shadows, looking to make trouble—but it was a trouble we drove right past.
I was wired, man. Couldn’t sleep. Turned on the television when I got to the room, thought I could maybe fall asleep to that, but as I was flipping around I caught a local news report saying the cops were looking for a black Lincoln Navigator that had been involved in a shooting outside a local club—my Lincoln Navigator! I shot straight up in the bed. I had all these racing thoughts, kept coming back to the one that said these gangbanger dudes must have clipped somebody—only thing that made sense to me. But there was no more information on that one channel, so I kept flipping around, looking for another local station, finally found one telling me the cops were looking for a black Lincoln Navigator that had been involved in the stabbing deaths of two young men.