I Feel Like Going On

by Ray Lewis

  He stepped up, man. He came through. He said, “Ray, whatever you need, just let me know.” Wasn’t like me to ask anybody for anything, but I was down and out. Money was tight, just then. I’d made a bunch of money in the league, had a bunch of money coming, but this trial was putting a squeeze on me. I hadn’t had to pay out all those court costs just yet, but the meter was running. That kind of money, I just didn’t have it lying around. On top of that, I’d been paying child support—probably $20,000 a month in those days. I could stay out in front of my own living expenses, I could pay off those court costs, give a little something to those grieving families, but Shannon helped me out with some of those custody payments that first year after the trial. I couldn’t thank him enough, hated to have to ask, but he was happy to do it—and I was happy to be able to pay him back, as soon as I got out from under.

  But Shannon Sharpe did more than just help me out financially. He also opened up his home to me, and I ended up staying with him the rest of that off-season. We worked out together, and this was huge, because coming off of those two and a half weeks in prison, all that time sitting in court, I was out of shape. Out of my mind and out of shape. I don’t think I’d lost too much in terms of strength, but I was behind on my cardio, didn’t know how I’d get my wind back. Plus, my nutrition was shot. Wasn’t just that I’d had to live on those orange slices for all that time, but I’d never paid that much attention to what I ate. Food was fuel to me, man. When I was hungry, I fed the machine. Without a thought, I fed the machine. When you’re young, you can get away with that type of thing, and I was still young, just turning twenty-five, but it was time to start paying attention to my diet, so Shannon helped me out in this way as well. Guys who find a way to stay in the league a long time, to keep playing at that high level, at some point they have to start thinking seriously about their nutrition, because it’s all tied in. And here, with Shannon, it was tied in to me staying with him. It was one of those do as I do deals, so since I was living with Shannon, I started to eat like him. Dry lima beans. Half-cooked chicken. No food after eight o’clock at night. He had a whole system, and I was meant to follow it.

  Shannon was like my life coach, man—a true godsend. A year before, we only knew each other to say hello, talk a little football in those weeks leading up to the Pro Bowl, but circumstances threw us together, and now we’d been thrown together as teammates, and more than anyone else he helped me set aside the stress and struggle of these past couple months and start focusing on football. At the time, he used to work out with this guy everyone called Ropeman—a former bodybuilder who lived in Atlanta and trained a lot of professional athletes—so he designed a program for us. The dude’s real name was Ty Felder, and he knew his stuff. Folks came in from all over the country to train with him, and he had us doing a mix of cardio, weight training, nutrition. The whole deal. Me and Shannon, we went at it, hard. Ropeman, he was relentless—no letup. We’d go to the track and get our speed work in. We’d hit the gym—although Shannon had most of what we needed for our workouts in his gym at home, so we’d do a lot of our sessions right there. Then we’d get up the next day and do it all over again.

  Little by little, I was back into football mode.

  • • •

  This time in Atlanta after the trial, it’s like I was rehabbing from an injury—I wasn’t hurt, but I was hurting. And the scars from that hurt would never leave me. I carry them to this day. I carry them proudly, because they remind me of what I was put through. But they would get worse before they got better—really, it took a while for those wounds to start to heal, because all these new hurts started piling on the ones I was just getting used to. I didn’t know the vitriol that would find me once the season got under way and we started to make our way around the league. The venom, the evil—oh, I’d gotten plenty of hate mail. I’d heard my share of taunts on the street, on talk radio. My name was in the mud, all over. The worst things you could say about a man, the worst things you could think—folks were saying and thinking those things about me. But it took hearing all this hatred rain down on me from inside enemy territory, from opposing fans, for me to really feel what people were saying and thinking. The same way these Atlanta cops had prejudged me in this case, that’s how folks were prejudging me in Pittsburgh, in Cincinnati, in Tennessee. And they were using it like die-hard fans, to get me off my game.

  Pittsburgh was already a rival town, and those fans kicked off the 2000 season with the most intense hatred I’ve ever experienced. I was prepared for this, on some level, but you can never steel yourself against the kinds of things those Pittsburgh fans were shouting at me as we walked through that tunnel at Three Rivers Stadium to take the field.

  Murderer!

  Nigger!

  Child killer!

  Each taunt was like a dagger, and my teammates, they picked up on it. They were right there with me, man. Our head coach, Brian Billick, he was right there with me. In fact, I was walking side by side with Coach Billick when we passed this one kid, couldn’t have been more than thirteen, fourteen years old. The kid caught my eye as we were walking through the tunnel, stepping to the field—said, “We’re the only ones round here who murder niggers.”

  Coach Billick could only look at me—what do you say to that?

  And when we got to the field, he was still looking at me, so it was me who finally said something. I said, “They don’t know what they just woke up.”

  And it was in those low moments that I came up with a new way to approach the game, to approach what my life would become. I kept telling myself, My smile represents my past. My heart represents my future. And in those words, I lifted myself up, up, up—past the evil that found me in that stadium. In all those stadiums.

  (Baltimore Ravens/Phil Hoffmann)

  With Ravens owner Art Modell and Shannon Sharpe. They both stood by me and were great support when I returned to play after the low times in Atlanta.

  Oh, and there was also this: that was the year that movie Gladiator came out, with Russell Crowe. I must’ve seen that movie fifty times by the time the season started, no exaggeration. And then, fifty times more, once we got going. I fell into this routine: every Saturday night, before every game, I’d watch that movie, straight through. There was that great scene, where this wise, old gladiator, Proximo, played by Oliver Reed, is training Russell Crowe’s Maximus for battle.

  Proximo says, “I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.”

  And in response, Maximus says, “I will win the crowd. I will give them something they have never seen before.”

  That scene, it inspired me, man. It sent me back into battle with a whole new focus, and it took hearing this hatred from these Pittsburgh fans, it took hearing this cold, racist nonsense from that young kid leaning over the tunnel, for me to put that inspiration into play.

  Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.

  So this became my game plan, and as that 2000 season wore on, my rallying cry. I would win the crowd. I could not respond to every racist idiot who went after me. But I could get back at them in this one way. I could play my game, all out. I could win the crowd. It got to where I worked things out with the folks on the PA system at our brand-new stadium, got them to cut up some footage from that movie and play it on the big screen at an important spot in the game. We grabbed that scene where Russell Crowe is about to head off into battle and says, “At my signal, unleash hell.”

  Up until that season, I didn’t know that kind of racism still existed in the world of professional sports. Those stories guys like Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown used to tell. And what Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson had to go through. I thought that kind of evil was behind us. But here it was, in my face, at every turn.

  After that first game, Coach Billick finally sought me out to talk about what he’d seen. He said, “I get it.” That’s all. And in those three words, I knew this man had my back the rest of the way. The entire Baltimore Ravens
organization, they were all behind me. And the city of Baltimore was, too.

  As for the game—well, we took it to the Steelers, set the tone for the season, shut them down 16–0. Held them to just thirty yards rushing—so we put it out that we would not be denied.

  At my signal, unleash hell.

  I had this new fire blazing inside of me, to quiet this new hatred, and in this I was joined by fifty-two men in battle. My teammates, they stood with me. We were dug in together, riled up together, pissed off together. So we set about it, and this season opener against the Steelers, it sent a message.

  Trouble was, we couldn’t always put points on the board. We had a shutdown type defense, a monster defense—there are a lot of folks who study the game who’ll tell you that this 2000 Ravens team was the fiercest, most tenacious, most dominant defensive team in the history of the game. Not one of the fiercest—the fiercest. Hands down, second to none. And I have to agree with them on this. We posted four shutouts that year—the most since that famous Steel Curtain defense in Pittsburgh in 1976. We allowed the fewest points ever in a 16-game season—165, a record that still stands. We allowed the fewest rushing yards, too—970, which works out to about 60 yards per game, also a record. You just couldn’t run on us.

  But we had a tough time scoring. We were inconsistent. There was one stretch, in October, when we didn’t score an offensive touchdown for almost a month. It cost us three games in a row. We lost 10–3 at Washington, 14–6 at home against Tennessee, and 9–6 at home against Pittsburgh. That string put us at 5–4 on the season—not exactly the kind of record that wins championships.

  In response, in frustration, a group of us went in to see Coach Billick in his office. There was me, Shannon Sharpe, Tony Siragusa, Rod Woodson, and Rob Burnett—the most vocal leaders on the team. We had the respect of our teammates, the fans, the coaches. And our message to Coach Billick was simple: let’s get back to basics. We were having quarterback problems, turnover problems. The thing to do, we said, was run the ball—thirty-five to forty times a game. Let us play defense.

  I said, “We don’t need but ten points, Coach. And if you give it to us early, the whole game will change.”

  Now, Brian Billick was an offensive-minded guy. This was his first head-coaching job, but he’d come to Baltimore from Minnesota, where he’d been the Vikings’ offensive coordinator for a long time, back when they had one of the highest-scoring teams in the league. So he knew we were in trouble, on that side of the ball, and I think he appreciated our take. No doubt, he appreciated our passion. And halfway through the season, he could see how dominant we could be when we were in control. It was just a different way of looking at the game—wasn’t just about scoring, it was about positioning yourself, playing chess, setting it up so the team could find a way to succeed.

  And that’s just what happened. We didn’t lose a game the rest of the way. We switched things up at quarterback, from Tony Banks to Trent Dilfer, started playing more of a ball-control game, more of a pounding game. You’ve got to play to your strength, right? Jamal Lewis started touching the ball twenty-five to thirty times in the backfield, with Priest Holmes backing him up, getting his touches. And some of these games, we won by big, big scores. Only close game we had in there was a 24–23 win over our archrivals, the Tennessee Titans, handing them their first-ever loss in their new stadium, after sixteen straight wins. And we almost let that one get away. We were up by a touchdown, late in the fourth quarter, but then Perry Phenix intercepted a Trent Dilfer pass and ran it back eighty-seven yards for a touchdown. Luckily, the Titans missed the extra point, and we were able to answer with another drive, helped by a couple big pass-interference calls, and Dilfer found Patrick Johnson on a two-yard pass play for the score, and the extra point gave us that one-point lead.

  The win put us at 7–4 on the season, and it set us up for a grudge match against the Titans in the playoffs—but we didn’t know that just yet. We still had some work to do.

  • • •

  Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.

  I was still hearing it, all around the league. The Baltimore fans, they couldn’t have been more welcoming—it wasn’t them I needed to win over. No, it was the folks in Cleveland, in Cincinnati, in Tennessee. All over. But as we imposed our will on these rivals, as we dictated and dominated and had our way, it wasn’t about winning the crowd so much as it was beating those teams into the ground.

  It was around this time I started doing “the dance”—this on-field celebration that became a real signature for me and for the entire Ravens organization. It came about like no big thing. You see, when I got to Baltimore, it was a different time. Players were starting to pump up the crowd, their teammates, themselves with these joyous, raucous routines after a big-time play. These days, the league has put in all these restrictions on this type of thing, but back then players were free to express themselves in this way.

  Now, we used to do this dance back home called “The Squirrel.” In high school, in college—it was just a fun, crazy dance, and once I started playing in the league, I used to go back home to Lakeland in the off-season and folks would come around to say hello, check me out. There was this one dude, Kirby Lee, and whenever we’d get a party going he’d start in on this squirrel dance. And the joke between us was that, one of these days, I’d take that dance back with me to Baltimore and do it in one of our games. It was like he was challenging me to do it—and folks in Lakeland knew I was up for any challenge, so I kept telling him I’d find a way to do it.

  He’d always say, “Oh no you won’t.”

  I’d always say, “Oh yes I will.”

  And we’d go back and forth like that for a while.

  Finally, a couple years into my career, it just came out of me one day on the field, during the introductions before the game. I came out last—and let me tell you, the crowd just lost its mind. People went crazy for it. Had nothing to do with football, but it had everything to do with rallying the crowd, letting loose. And as our team started to grow, as we started to strut, play with a little more confidence, we were all trotting out these little dances—during the introductions, after a big play, whatever. It got to where we were even choreographing these moves, setting them to music, to movie clips—like I started doing with the scene from Gladiator.

  A sack, a big tackle, a turnover—I used to run and jump and do all these crazy things, but then I started mixing in these moves I copied from Kirby Lee. The Squirrel, man. People just loved it, and it was mostly this wild romp, but underneath all of that it came to hold a lot of meaning. See, with everything I’d been through that year, that trial in Atlanta, the taunts that were finding me at every away game, I started to look on this dance in a spiritual way. It was my war cry, absolutely. But it was also my prayer. When I slid to the left, that was for the Father. When I slid to the right, that was for the Son. And when I came down the middle, that was for the Holy Spirit.

  And out of all that, a phenomenon happened.

  • • •

  We were playing with such confidence, such drive, it didn’t matter to us who we faced, here on in. There was this one moment, last game of the regular season, Chris McAlister picked off a pass from our old friend Vinny Testaverde, who was now playing for the Jets, and ran it back ninety-eight yards for a touchdown to give us our first lead of the game, time running out in the first half, when we were all starting to feel invincible. We still couldn’t get out of our own way sometimes on offense, but our defense was crazy, and once the postseason matchups were set, we kept hearing that the one team you did not want to meet in the playoffs was the Baltimore Ravens.

  No, sir. We was problems, man. You ran into us, it was a bad day for you.

  We drew Denver in the Wild Card game, at home. A problem for the Broncos, you can be sure. There are some games, you just know. There are some games, you see how things line up, and it’s there for the taking. Our front seven? Against that team? Are you kidding me? This was our game.
In our house. We told ourselves, We can bang these boys. We told ourselves, This is no contest. And it wasn’t. Held that Denver team to just forty-two yards rushing. Kept them out of the end zone—the first time ever that the Broncos didn’t score a touchdown in a playoff game. In team history. Established our ground game early, got our points early, and took that game, 21–3. Really, we put such a beating on those Broncos that I’m sure there were folks in Denver switching off their television sets by the end of the third quarter.

  One of the things you’re not supposed to do in postseason football is look ahead to your potential matchups. You’re supposed to take it one game at a time, because at this level, day of the game, anything can happen. But we had no time for supposed to with this Bronco team. We looked right past them. We did. Because the Titans had that first-round bye and they were waiting for us in the divisional round. It was the rivalry of rivalries, and we all knew our season would come down to this right here.

  The road to the Super Bowl, it ran through Tennessee, so we couldn’t wait to get there and get cranking.

  Eddie George is a beast!

  Those words still rang in my head. They rankled. And as we strode into Adelphia Coliseum I had but one thing on my mind—to get to the head of that beast. I thought, Eddie, I’m at your crown! This six-foot-three, 240-pound bruiser was the roughest back in the league, no question, and my one thought going into that game was to run into him at full speed, find a way to hit him so hard it would change his whole thought process. Eddie George, he played with confidence. That same swagger we all had on the other side of the ball. If we hoped to win, we could not let that confidence stand.