I Feel Like Going On

by Ray Lewis

  There are certain spots you look for in a game, certain moments, that change the whole conversation. Sometimes, it comes down to just one play. Sportscasters, they have a name for these moments—they call them game changers, and that gets us pretty close to it.

  Me, I had my own name for these moments. I called them mine.

  I’d gotten to a point in my career where I’d started playing against coordinators—meaning, it wasn’t enough to line up across the ball and outhit, outhustle, outrun my opponents. No, I had to outthink the other team’s coaches and coordinators, too. I had to predict what they would do, to get and keep an edge. You have to realize in football, it’s all about finding that edge and laying claim to it, so here I knew there was this one play the Titans would be looking to run, and if I could read it, anticipate it, I could put myself on that edge and change the game.

  Already, in our last regular-season matchup against the Titans, I’d gotten to the head—laid the groundwork for how this playoff game would go. I had it all figured out, all the way back in November. Don’t think the offensive coordinators are the only ones drawing up a game plan, predicting how things would go. No, a lot of us players do plenty of studying. Plenty of planning. Up in the press box, these coaches think they’re so smart. They think, Just last week, we ran this play against this other team, it worked so well, let’s run it again. For real? Come on, man. Nobody catches me napping. I even pulled Rod Woodson aside and told him it was coming, told him I was laying in the groundwork. He’ll tell you the same story. I said, “Paco, I’ve studied it.” (For whatever reason, I called him “Paco”.) I said, “They run this one play, Paco, this game is ours. They run this one play, Eddie George is ours. Every time we see him, here on in, Eddie George is ours.”

  This one play in that final regular-season game was a flare screen to Eddie. Second and ten, third and ten, this was their deal. Frank Wycheck, the tight end, runs to the middle. If he turns to face the quarterback, the ball isn’t coming to him. That’s the tell, the way he turns on that route. If he runs right at my middle linebacker spot, if he pushes up to me, hard, tries to get some separation, it’s a different story—the ball’s coming to him. But if he simply turns his back to me, it’s going to Eddie.

  So I was looking for this spot in the game, same way I knew the Titans’ coordinator was looking for this spot in the game. Steve McNair—rest his soul—was looking for this spot in the game. Eddie, too. Eddie loved to get his hands on that ball. I was dialed in during that Week Eleven matchup. I was ready. And here it was. Frank Wycheck lined up, and I could see it in his eyes that he was coming to me, so the key to the play was in the way he’d run his route. Eddie was in the home position. There were two wide receivers, back side. Here it was . . . Here it was. And sure enough, Frank Wycheck came through the middle, stopped just short of my spot, and turned his back to me. He couldn’t sell the play, because he’d never needed to sell the play, because all season long they’d been running it at their own will. But they hadn’t been running it against me, so I knew, as soon as Frank Wycheck spun and showed me his back, that Steve McNair was throwing this little screen to Eddie.

  And just to be double sure on this, I could see the offensive tackle lined up with his right leg fully open, which told me he was ready to sprint in the other direction. He wasn’t coming toward me—he was headed to where Eddie was going.

  All of this came to me in a split second—that’s how fast you have to read a play like this. Boom, boom, boom . . . you snap all these pictures in your mind, line everything up, take it all in. I was on it, yes I was. Frank Wycheck started to turn his back, but before I could read his name on his jersey, I took off. I ran to a point on the field, and I ran hard. It was all in the timing. I had to get there at the same time as Eddie, same time as the ball. I wasn’t looking to bust up the pass—no, that would have been easy. I was looking to bust up Eddie—not to hurt him, but to rattle him. To make him think twice about touching that ball if he knew I was anywhere close to him.

  That’s how you play the game. You put some doubt in there, you make him hesitate, the beast can’t help but stumble.

  So I ran to that spot, and Steve McNair tossed that little flare to that spot, and Eddie spun to that spot. And we all arrived at exactly the same time. And it ended up that I put a hit on poor Eddie that folks still talk about. Eddie, he probably dreams about it. And not in a good way. I hit him in a place no running back likes to get hit—by the side of his head, over the ear. A hit like that, everything goes silent. A hit like that, in the cartoons, you see stars, hear goofy music, waddle off. A hit like that, in a game like this, you can only peel yourself up off that turf and shuffle back to your teammates.

  Oh, he caught the ball—held on to it, too. That’s what beasts do. But he paid for it. He did. And I stood up over him and looked at his teammates and said, “Come get him!” I said, “It’s over!”

  And it was, man. Better believe it, it was. I was in Eddie George’s head after that big hit. For two months, I was in his dreams. For two months, I was lurking around every corner. For two months, I was at the end of every play he ran in scrimmage, every play he ran in games. I was. And here in this playoff game, coming off of that one hit, Eddie George was still rattled. I was still in his head. The battle between us, it was still over. I’d gotten to the head, man. I’d slain the beast—and there was nothing for those Titans to do but fold.

  • • •

  That divisional-round game against the Titans was probably the most intense game I ever saw. Forget games I actually played in. This was a grudge match. This was war. And it had already turned on this one teeth-rattling play. Those Titans, they put up a fight, but the heart of the team wasn’t in it. They went through the motions. But it had taken the life out of them, that one play. It took the life out of Eddie, that’s for sure. He was shaken, playing scared. Of course, we weren’t able to do much with the ball. Trent Dilfer had a difficult time that day, only completed five passes on sixteen attempts. We couldn’t move the ball, couldn’t score, and we were deadlocked at 10–10 to start the fourth quarter. But this was where our special teams got special. This was where our defense started to defend. Anthony Mitchell grabbed a blocked field-goal attempt and ran it back ninety yards for a touchdown to give us the lead.

  Then, Tennessee took over and began to march, with about eight minutes left in the game. Steve McNair moved the chains on back-to-back first-down tosses to Derrick Mason, so the Titans were driving. They were on the move. And that’s when that monster hit to Eddie came back into play. That’s when the groundwork I’d laid a couple months earlier started to win this playoff game for us. I had changed his whole thought process. So here in this game, when he came out of that backfield, second and long on the Titans 47-yard line, and Steve McNair tried to hit him with a short toss, I was good and ready. And Eddie could sense it. And the ball hit his hands, but he kind of took his eye off of it for a moment, because it bounced free, and as it bounced, I grabbed it, and galloped with it fifty yards to the Tennessee end zone.

  The crowd had been into it at the start of that drive, trying to get their Titans going. Man, that place was rocking. But as loud as that stadium was, it was now deathly quiet. You could hear a rat piss on cotton, that’s how silent the stadium was, all of a sudden. As I ran, my head was filled with every possible thought. I covered those fifty yards in no time flat, but it was all the time in the world for me to think back on everything I’d been through that season, going all the way back to Atlanta. I was churning, and churning, running to glory, thinking, God is amazing. All those thoughts, they folded into just this one. God is amazing. And as I crossed that goal line, He spoke to me. He did. He said, “Don’t say a word.” Of course, I listened. When He tells you to hush, you hush. So I brought my finger to my lips and made a grand old shhhing gesture to the crowd.

  Say nothing.

  Let your actions speak.

  Win the crowd.

  Unleash hell.

&nbs
p; And in that one small gesture there was a powerful message. It said, “Don’t judge a book by its cover. It might just surprise you.”

  • • •

  The AFC Championship Game wasn’t much—not on the field, anyway. Going in, there was all this talk about the Oakland Raiders and their top-ranked passing game, their top-ranked running game. They had one of the best offenses in football that year. Rich Gannon was playing out of his mind. Tyrone Wheatley was a force. Tim Brown was a potent deep threat. They were riding high, and the talk in Oakland was how the Ravens could ever hope to win in “the black hole”—that’s what all these die-hard Raiders fans called themselves, picking up on the team’s silver-and-black colors. The black hole? Like that was supposed to get us thinking. Please. I heard all that talk and thought, They can’t be serious. I even said as much during one of those press conferences they made us do leading up to the game. I said, “We don’t give a damn ’bout no black hole, ’cause we got enough money to buy flashlights.”

  So there was this war of words going on, back and forth, on both sides. We were all having fun with it, getting into it. But then, we walked into the Coliseum on game day and what did I see? There in the stands, stretching across an entire section, covering about fifteen rows, was a giant banner—a picture of me, a knife in my hand, fixing to cut the necks of two babies. It took the wind out of me, that banner. The same way I’d gotten into Eddie George’s head in Tennessee, these idiot Oakland fans had gotten into mine—only, not in a good way for them.

  Yeah, it stung. Yeah, it put me on my heels. But I was used to all that by now. I’d heard all those taunts, all those slurs. Wasn’t anything new here—only, I couldn’t believe the Raiders front office didn’t make these idiots take that banner down. I’m not saying the Raiders were behind this attack, and there’s no way to control what kinds of things your fans yell down onto the field—but this? This was a little much, left me thinking the Raiders, the league, everyone was looking the other way. This was the AFC Championship Game. The whole football world was watching. And here was this giant banner, taunting me, disrespecting me, calling me out.

  All I could do was rise above it. All I could do was think, They just woke up a sleeping giant.

  It put me in mind of a line from scripture, Psalm 23: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies . . .”

  So I thought, Okay, so they want to watch, huh?

  It was fine with me, because we were about to shut those boys down. And we did. Once again, we couldn’t do much on offense—but the Raiders, they could do a whole lot less. We forced four interceptions—five turnovers in all, including a fumble I recovered in the fourth quarter that led to our final score. We held them to just seventeen rushing yards. And Tony Siragusa knocked poor Rich Gannon clear out of the game with a ferocious hit.

  Wasn’t the most exciting game, but it did the job for us—and it sent us to the Super Bowl, only here, too, this game against the Giants was a bit of a letdown after that war with Tennessee. That was the real battle for us. These final games, they were just something to get past on our way to the championship.

  The Super Bowl was in Tampa that year, twenty minutes up the road from where I grew up, so that was a personal thrill, to be playing on such a big stage, so close to home. A lot of athletes talk about these big moments and say they’re surreal, but that’s not how it was for me. No, this was as real as it gets, and I savored it, drank it all in. Couldn’t quite believe, after the year I’d just had, the trials I’d just had, that I was standing on this field, at this moment.

  Those two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, we made a highlight video of our team on defense, watched it every day. It got us going, that video, and as we watched it, as a unit, we made up our minds that the New York Giants would not score. Kerry Collins? Are you kidding me? Tiki Barber? Are you serious? It was a joke to us, this game. It wasn’t even an issue, this game. And we bashed these boys. We dominated. The final score was 34–7, so the game was never in doubt. That one touchdown for the Giants came on a ninety-seven-yard kickoff return, so we were good to our word on defense. They didn’t score on us. And we answered right back with a kickoff return of our own—eighty-four yards, courtesy of Jermaine Lewis, a wide receiver out of Maryland. First time in Super Bowl history there were back-to-back kickoff returns for touchdowns, and that got started because Duane Starks, my fellow Hurricane, had himself a pick-six off a Kerry Collins pass intended for Amani Toomer, so you had this flurry of three touchdowns in about thirty seconds and not a one was scored on offense—got to think that’s some kind of record, too.

  I’m sorry, but that game was never in doubt. From the moment the matchup was set, it was never in doubt. We won that thing going away, in what was basically my hometown stadium, and it worked out that I was named the game’s Most Valuable Player, which was an important validation for me, coming off the year I’d just had.

  But then, before I could celebrate, before I could reflect on the suffering of that season, this happened: as my name was called for MVP, I saw the film crew that had set up on the sidelines to capture footage for Disney World. Remember those ads they used to run at the end of every Super Bowl? They’d show the MVP, all that confetti showering down on him, all that noise and celebration, and in the excitement of the moment someone asks the champion, “What are you going to do next?” And Joe Montana, Emmitt Smith, Tom Brady, John Elway—whoever was the star of the game, whoever was the MVP would answer, “I’m going to Disney World!” They’d been doing those spots for over fifteen years, it was a Super Bowl tradition, but when my name was called the folks on this crew just kind of spun on their heels and turned away. They didn’t want anything to do with me. That tradition? It would end with me. The Disney people went and pointed their cameras at Trent Dilfer instead. Trent Dilfer? Nothing against Trent, a good guy who’d just quarterbacked his team to a Super Bowl championship, but he wasn’t the MVP—not even close. But with the taint of those charges against me, with the public perception that I had somehow gotten away with murder, those Disney people wouldn’t go anywhere near me.

  That’s just how it was—my new reality.

  One of the production assistants had the decency to double back and tell me what was going on—said, “I’m sorry, but they don’t want to use you. There’s too much controversy.”

  Too much controversy?

  Well, I guess that’s one way to look at it. And I guess there was too much controversy for the Wheaties folks, too, because they checked in the next morning and told my manager they didn’t want my picture on their cereal box—another Super Bowl tradition that didn’t quite fit with my new reality.

  Some people would say it was bittersweet, that victory. But not me. I say it was as sweet as it could get—because, hey, I was standing on that field, twenty minutes from where I grew up. Redemption is sweeter when people got to watch it. It means so much more that way, don’t you think?

  You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

  I hadn’t realized this was enemy territory. The Super Bowl is meant to be played on neutral ground, but what I was realizing was that everywhere outside of Baltimore was now enemy territory for me. It went beyond football, beyond Super Bowls. I would have to live up under these new shadows for the rest of my life.

  It made no sense to me. But there it was.

  ELEVEN

  I Feel Like Going On

  I can’t say for sure when I got the itch to call my father, but I can say for sure when I first scratched it. I was in North Carolina, headed to speak at a conference during the off-season. I knew that my father lived somewhere in the state, so this was the right moment to reach out. I was thirty-three years old, established in the league—a father myself, six times over. It was time.

  I got him on the phone, told him where I was, told him I had some time if he wanted to hook up.

  Of course, he did. My father wasn’t a bad man—just a bad father. He didn’t have the tools. That’
s all. He didn’t have the frame of reference. He could be a daddy, because that was just genetics, biology, whatever. But a father? He didn’t have it in him—basically, because his father didn’t have it in him. And my granddaddy’s father, he didn’t have it in him, either.

  The man hadn’t been in my life in just about forever—so, yeah, it was time.

  Now, I wasn’t expecting to call on this man. I wasn’t holding on to his phone number, waiting for the right moment to reach out to him. I just knew I was near where he was, and I found a way to connect with him, and next thing I knew he was coming up to see me at the hotel where I was staying. He pulled up in this little van he used to drive, and as he stepped out I caught myself looking at him, up and down. He was checking me out, too, and he crossed to where I’d been waiting on him. We didn’t hug, didn’t shake hands, didn’t do much of anything, really. We just kind of stood there, checking each other out, not really saying much. What was there to say? Finally, he said, “What else you got going on?”

  I said, “I’m done for the day. Wide open.”

  He said, “Want to take a ride?”

  I couldn’t think of a reason not to take a ride with him, so I shrugged, made a loud exhale, like I didn’t really care either way. Don’t know what had come over me, because I’d wanted to see him—hey, it was me who’d made the call!—but I was putting it out there that there were like a couple dozen places I’d rather be.

  After a while I said, “Alright. Got nothing else going on.” Like I was doing him a favor.

  We ended up driving over six hours. He never told me where we were going, and I never asked. I don’t know that I could have, because the man was talking a mile a minute. I didn’t say a word, except to nod my head every once in a while, maybe offer up a one-word answer to a two-word question. (“You hungry?”) The man wasn’t interested in what I had to say, but at the same time he expected me to be interested in what he had to say. He told me his life story: women, drugs, ball, everything.