by Ray Lewis
People my age. She didn’t mean it that way, but the words stung.
And here’s a funny thing—only, funny is probably not the right word. It was more curious than funny, but I kept smiling. The more the doc looked me over, the more she flashed me this worried look, the more I could only smile. Finally, it got to where she said something—said, “Why are you smiling, Ray? This isn’t good. Your triceps is torn.”
I said, “I’m smiling because we’re gonna win the Super Bowl. I’m smiling because this injury is nothing.”
She said, “You’re not hearing me, Ray.”
I said, “Oh, I hear you, Doc. But you’re not hearing me. I’m gonna be okay.”
Right there on the sideline, the game still going on, my mind was off in a whole new direction. I was smiling because, throughout my career, whenever I had an injury, I used to call it my “cocoon time.” I had this whole little science project worked up in my head. Don’t ask me where it came from, this type of thinking, but I’d always been fascinated by butterflies—at first, they were just something to wonder about. I’d watch them flying around on a nice summer day and I’d study them, wonder what they were up to, so I started reading up on them. I learned that the life-span of a butterfly was about ninety days—that’s all, just ninety days. And that’s at the long end. Some die after just a week or so, some make it about a month, but they get a whole lot done, whatever time they have. As caterpillars, they’re able to make one of the purest silks found on this planet—something man can’t make, but it comes out of the mouths of these little old caterpillars. Really, they’re the most amazing creatures, capable of doing the most amazing things, and probably the most incredible thing about them is the way they’re able to transform themselves. They spin themselves this little cocoon and shut themselves inside. They can’t take their mamas with them. They can’t take nobody with them. They’re on their own, and they tuck in and wait. That’s all they do, just wait. And in the waiting, that’s where this strange magic happens.
These were the kinds of things I used to think about when it was time for me to heal. Told myself it was like a gift, an opportunity to block my mind off, to wrap myself in this nest of hope, possibility, whatever you want to tell yourself is going on inside that tight cocoon. You can’t take anyone in there with you. It’s just you, alone, facing that long slog back to recovery. People called it rehabilitation, but I called it rejuvenation—the way I set it up in my mind, it wasn’t a hard road, but a journey. I’d tuck in and be by myself and just deal with it. I’d just wait—for this strange magic to happen. So when I started going through my surgeries, recovering from various injuries, I took the time to turn inside myself and really heal. Kept telling myself it was my time. Kept telling myself there was nothing to worry about—in fact, the only folks with something to worry about was whoever had to deal with me once I got back to the field, because I’d had all that time to rejuvenate.
I’d come back refreshed, recharged, repurposed.
Don’t know when I started smiling through my injuries, but I do remember one time, a game against Cincinnati, when I snapped my finger so bad it looked like it was hanging by the skin. But I kept on—said, “Tape it up, let’s go!” Because my finger was just my finger. End of the game, no matter what, it would still be hanging like that, so might as well play through it. Might as well see it to the end and smile through. That’s an old-school way of thinking I got from guys like Ronnie Lott. You tell yourself the pain don’t matter—and, just like that, it don’t. And once you buy into that, there’s no going back. So this injury to my triceps, I would just find a way to deal with it.
Meanwhile, my boys had to deal with this game. The Cowboys were driving, down just one possession, time running out. Tony Romo kept dinging us with short passes, finally connected on a four-yard touchdown pass to Dez Bryant with about thirty seconds on the clock. The two-point conversion failed, would’ve tied the game at 31–31. But then they got the ball back on an onside kick, and we got called for pass interference on the very next play. It put the Cowboys in field-goal position, but they missed a fifty-one-yarder and we held on for one of those sigh of relief–type wins, 31–29. And let me tell you, there wasn’t anybody in that stadium with a sigh of relief louder than mine, because I knew what that win could mean on the string of a long season. I knew what it cost us, me not being on the field for that last series. I knew I might be out for a while, knew I had some work to do. But I knew I’d be back, and that we were still in this fight together, and we were headed to the Super Bowl.
These things, I knew.
That night, I spent some time with my family, tried to make it a celebration. I had everyone together—they were all at the game—and it was meant to be a joyous time. They could see I was hurting, they took turns being down, but I kept trying to lift them back up. One by one, I told them we were good—told them it was all good. I didn’t let on how serious the doc thought it was. I didn’t let on that there was any cause for worry. There would be time for all that.
For now, we could only look ahead—all of us, together.
• • •
Next morning, I went to see Dr. Curl. We did an MRI, looked at pictures. She told me what we were looking at, but I was like the doc on this. I didn’t need an X-ray to tell me what I already knew. Wasn’t anything she didn’t already tell me down there on that field, except here she could point to the film so I could see for myself what she was talking about. Here she started talking about surgery—there was no other choice, she said. Even if I never played another down of football, I’d need surgery. She talked about the long odds against me. She used that phrase again—people your age—set me off the first time I heard it, and here it set me off again. Still, I heard her out, and when she ran out of things to tell me I said, “You done?” Like I was impatient, itching to move on.
She said, “Ray, this is serious.”
I said, “I know it’s serious. I’m serious.”
She said, “You got that look.” Meaning, I was smiling, planning something.
I said, “Hell yeah, I got that look.”
She said, “What are you going to do?”
I said, “I’m gonna do what I always do.”
I got on the plane the next morning for Miami, went to see Dr. John Uribe—only orthopedic surgeon I trusted around me with a knife. He was our team orthopedist at Miami, and he’d done every one of my surgeries—actually, every surgery but one.
(The one he didn’t do? I’d torn the labrum in my left shoulder, and I had that operated on in Vail, Colorado. But Dr. Uribe was at the knife for every other surgery: on my thumb, on my back, on my left shoulder, on my right shoulder, on my right ring finger, on my right hamstring, on my wrist—too many to count, almost.)
I flew down with my X-rays, with Dr. Curl’s report, and as soon as I handed the material over to Dr. Uribe, he knew what I was facing, what I was planning.
He said, “Don’t tell me, Ray.”
I said, “Just look at the film, Doc. Tell me how soon you can fix it.”
He popped the X-ray onto this little light box in his office and gave it a quick look—said, “Ray, it’s gone.” He showed me a picture to explain what he was seeing, and the way he described it to me was the same way Dr. Curl had described it—said it’s like that muscle was a piece of meat. Once I’d snapped that ligament, the muscle just kind of rolled up, like a snap cord on a vacuum cleaner. There was no good way to roll it back and expect it to hold—not under the stress and strain of the game.
He said, “Forget football. Let’s just worry about getting you the use of that arm.”
I said, “Forget football? Doc, you serious?”
He said, “This is a major tear, Ray.”
I said, “So let’s get to work. When can you do the surgery?”
He said, “I can do it in the morning.” He was resigned to it—couldn’t tell me no.
I said, “Well, then I’ll see you in the morning.”
This was on a Tuesday, two days after the game against the Cowboys. Wednesday morning, I was in the operating room at Doctors Hospital in Miami. Dr. Uribe, he told me he could repair the shoulder, but he couldn’t guarantee that I would play football again. It was a question in his mind—but it wasn’t a question in mine.
He said, “Ray, if you re-tear this, you might not get back the use of that arm. It’s a big risk.”
This was him talking to me before the surgery, before he put me under, telling me how it would go.
I said, “Don’t mind that. Just tell me how soon I can get back.”
He said, “Best case?”
I said, “Best case.”
He said, “Twelve weeks.”
Twelve weeks would have put me into the postseason. When you’re playing, you don’t need to look at a calendar. You count the time by the games on your schedule. We’d just played our sixth game, had a bye week coming, so twelve weeks meant my season was gone. Twelve weeks meant my teammates had a job to do, had to hold up their end, find a way to take us to the postseason. If they could get us to the playoffs, I could come back and help the rest of the way. But it would be on them, for now.
The surgery went the way it was supposed to go. Dr. Uribe did what he was supposed to do. Now it was on me to do my job, and as I came to in that hospital bed, I set my mind to what lay ahead. A lot of folks, they change things up when life gets hard—but me, I’m cut a different way. I always tell people that if you show me your failures, I’ll show you your future, and here I would not let myself fail. After all, it’s your struggles that define you, and compared to what I’d been through this was nothing, so I started in on my cocoon time, turned my full focus on getting back to whole.
First couple days, I was in traction. They had my arm up in a fixed brace, rested on a pole pressed into my hip. I looked like a soldier returned from battle. I wouldn’t take any of the pain medication they brought for me—my thing was to just deal with the pain, find a way to set it aside. As soon as I could travel, I arranged for a driver to take me to Orlando, and from Orlando the plan was for me to take a private jet to a clinic in Arizona, where I was putting together a full-throttle rehab program. I talked to everyone I knew, everyone I’d ever played with, everyone who’d gotten close to a similar injury. I was determined to work with the best of the best, so I got recommendations coming and going, up and down. But first, I arranged it so I could go to Junior’s game—another reason to smile. That’s why I flew through Orlando. During the season, I didn’t get to sit in the stands and cheer on my boy, so I wasn’t about to miss this chance. Even an injury like this one to my shoulder, it comes with a silver lining—you just have to know where to look for it. So I sat there in the stands, a stool up under my arm to support that pole, keep that traction going.
And Junior just tore it up down there on that field. It was something to see, so I took in this blessing. Counted myself lucky that this little piece of goodness was coming out of this injury. Here I was, spinning my little cocoon, but I was doing a better job than those caterpillars, because I’d found a way to take the people I love inside. My whole career, football season kept me away from my kids, this time of year. My son was making all this noise on his high school football team, and I couldn’t even watch him play, so this was part of my healing. This would make me stronger.
I stuck around after the game, just to check in with Junior, have a little time together before I took off. And here’s the thing: once I brought Junior into that cocoon with me, I wasn’t about to let him go, so I kept shuttling back and forth from Arizona to Florida—didn’t miss one of his games the whole rest of the season. The way I worked it was I’d put a pin in my rehab routines, get on a plane, do what I could while we were in the air, and sit myself down in the stands and let some of that proud dad medicine help with the healing.
It was a good trade all around. Whatever time I lost in therapy I made up for in restoring my spirit.
In Arizona, I probably averaged about three hours of sleep each night. All day long, I had therapy. If the doctors suggested two sessions each day, I pushed for four. As soon as they cut off my cast, I hopped on the bicycle and did what I could to keep up my fitness level. I wasn’t just working to get my shoulder back in shape. I had to keep the rest of me in football shape so I could hit the ground running once I was cleared to play. A lot of folks, an injury like mine, they would have used a stationary bike—but, no disrespect, a stationary bike is for people who play tennis. Us football players, we have to move. We have to feel those miles in our legs, climb those hills, drop those gears and max out the resistance—otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels, man.
Let me tell you, I experienced more pain in those first weeks after my surgery than I’d ever known—and it was all because I was pushing myself way past what these doctors and therapists were telling me. That twelve-week timeline? It wasn’t quick enough for me, so I had to double down and dial in. Somewhere in there, I even found time to fly to Switzerland for some cutting-edge plasma therapy, let the doctors over there take my blood and spin it around for a while in a centrifuge before injecting it back into my shoulder—it was supposed to speed the healing process, and I was determined to try anything.
Every waking moment was given over to my rehabilitation. Back in Arizona, I’d be out of bed at six o’clock each morning, out the door by six thirty, in the gym by seven. I’d work out for two and a half hours, go to therapy, take a quick lunch, do a couple hours on the bike, therapy again, another workout, and on and on. In between, I’d find time to run through my deck of cards—sit-ups only, to start, until I was able to build up and start back in on those push-ups. End of the day, I’d have to ice for two hours, just to cool down from all that activity, and when I finally climbed into bed my mind would be racing a million miles a minute and I’d toss and turn for another few hours before I could fall off to sleep.
Next day, I’d get up and do it all over again.
The whole time, the Ravens left me alone to do my thing. My rehab schedule, my doctors, my therapists were all on me. I directed my care, the whole way—paid for everything myself, too. Only thing I asked of the Ravens was to keep me off the Injured Reserve list. The way it works, you go on IR, you’re out for the whole year. That’s it—you’re done. So this was the one thing I told Ozzie Newsome I needed. I said, “You have to trust me on this.”
And to Ozzie’s great credit, he did. It cost him a roster spot to carry me the rest of the season, and I’m sure he caught some flak for it around the league, but he knew I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think I could make it back—and of course there was no reason for me to be busting tail like this if I wasn’t eligible to come back and rejoin the team.
That whole time I was working to get myself back in shape, I kept thinking of that great Denzel Washington movie about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Carter was this middleweight boxer wrongfully convicted of murder and finally freed after twenty years in prison, and there’s this powerful montage in the movie where Denzel was putting his body through all these insane paces, turning himself into a machine. That’s the picture I kept in my head while I was working out, rehabbing. I was in the middle of my own movie, getting my body back to where I needed it to be, turning myself into a machine.
And as I pushed myself, as I rode that bicycle, as I powered through my routine, over and over and over, I kept hearing this voice inside my head—going, They don’t know. Going, Nobody knows.
I was coming back, willing myself back. And I was coming back pissed. I was on a mission, because this was my last ride out of here.
And I had to make it count.
• • •
The whole time I was out, there was talk in the papers, talk on the radio about how I was done.
Ray Lewis will never play again—those words stung, too.
I’d try to tune all that out, but of course the negativity was bound to creep in—and when it did, it got me riled. I’d think, These people
don’t know me.
My teammates, they knew me.
The Ravens coaching staff, they knew me.
The front office staff, they knew me.
And they knew to steer clear. I’d given them all my word, told them I’d be back. And I would not be diminished. I might not be back at full strength—but even if I could only come back at 60 percent, 70 percent, it would be enough to get it done. Nobody would know I wasn’t all the way healed, because I’d find a way to beat you, no matter what.
Underneath all that talk, I started to hear a buzz about how I’d come back—when, in what kind of shape, in what kind of role. We were looking ahead to the postseason. My teammates—to their great credit—they were doing their part on the field. Oh, the Ravens stumbled a bit right after I was hurt—losing big to Houston, 43–13, Week Seven of the season. But after that they went on a sweet little momentum run, with victories against Cleveland, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and San Diego—that last one in overtime. That put us at 9–2 on the season, so it was looking like a playoff spot was in reach.
I returned to practice that week—no plans yet on when I’d be ready to play, but it was good to be back with the team. It was good to be back in pads, getting my work in. And the guys, they were happy to have me back in the fold. That was my locker room, and I was a powerful force inside those walls. I most certainly was. Even if I wasn’t contributing, I found a way to contribute—you know, to make myself heard. Every chance I got, I reminded folks of the promise I’d made to them after that loss to New England in the championship game the year before. The promise I made to the city of Baltimore. They didn’t need reminding, but I reminded them anyway.
This ain’t over . . .