Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  “No, Coach, I don’t. But I’m not done chasing.”

  There was no small talk as Kelly left the office. “He thinks we screwed up,” Billick said after Kelly had walked down the hall to do his turn with Newsome. “He’ll leave here believing we didn’t give him a chance.”

  Kelly had a minor injury, which meant he would have to negotiate an injury buyout with Newsome. Billick was standing in the doorway, watching Kelly walk down the hall, when he saw a familiar face approaching.

  “I’m back,” Chris McAlister said, shaking hands with Billick.

  “Good to have you back,” Billick said to his All-Pro cornerback who hadn’t been in training camp for a single day because of his ongoing contract dispute with the team. “When you get done with your physical, let’s talk.”

  “Absolutely,” McAlister said. “I’m ready to go.”

  The Ravens’ prodigal-son cornerback had come home. The Hall of Fame cornerback was due to arrive any minute. Fourteen lockers were being cleaned out. Fourteen men would be making the drive of shame along with dozens of others who hoped to make their living playing pro football. Their names would appear in small agate type the next day in newspapers around the country under the heading “Waived.” Perhaps the words “Dream Shattered” would be more appropriate.

  The Ravens had one final preseason game to play. Chris McAlister would play in that game. That made everyone in the organization happy since he was a key part of the defense. What’s more, everyone understood why he had waited so long to show up. Each year, NFL teams have the right to “franchise” one player who is eligible for free agency, meaning that if he signs somewhere else, the team has the right to match the offer or be compensated with two first-round draft picks if the player ends up leaving. In return, a franchise player must be paid whatever the average salary is for the top five players at his position. McAlister was in his sixth NFL season and had been franchised twice by the Ravens. In 2004 he would be paid $7.1 million.

  The Ravens had talked with McAlister about a long-term contract, but they had been reluctant to agree to the kind of money—notably, the kind of signing bonus—they knew it would take to secure a player of his caliber and reputation. The reason was simple: they just weren’t sure what they would be getting if they made that kind of commitment. There was no questioning his ability to play the game. He was the prototypical lockdown cornerback, gifted with speed and size (six-one, 206), a nose for the football, and a penchant, like safety Ed Reed, for making big plays.

  But McAlister wasn’t like Reed, who hung out with Ray Lewis, looked up to Ray Lewis, and seemed mature beyond his years. McAlister wasn’t like anyone on the Ravens. He hung out with no one and had no role models. He was a loner—at least, in the locker room—a high-strung personality who frequently clashed with the coaching staff. In 2003, when the Ravens had spent the week in San Diego prior to playing there because a hurricane was sweeping through the East Coast, McAlister had been the one player on the team who had ignored Billick’s request that the players remain on an East Coast clock, meaning he wanted them in their rooms at seven o’clock, lights-out at eight, and awake for breakfast at five. McAlister made a point of missing the curfew, made sure everyone knew about it, and then walked into the morning meeting the next day late.

  Billick isn’t exactly Tom Coughlin when it comes to rules, but he does expect players to be on time and he does not expect them to make a point of ignoring what he tells them to do. He called McAlister in after the morning meeting and told him he was sending him home. “You aren’t playing Sunday,” he said. “You’ve let your teammates down. I let you play, I’m letting them down, too.”

  McAlister was stunned. He had expected to be yelled at and to be disciplined, but he hadn’t expected Billick to simply tell him to go home. He was angry. Only later did he understand why Billick did what he did. “I was an asshole,” he said. “I was trying to prove something, although I’m not exactly sure what. The only thing that saved me is that the team went out and won without me. Thank God. Because if they had lost, I think it would have been very difficult for me to walk back into that locker room. It wasn’t easy as it was. I had to go around and apologize to everyone, but at least I could look them in the eye, tell them I was sorry, and there were no lingering hard feelings because I didn’t cost us a game.”

  No lingering hard feelings, but lingering doubts. McAlister had always been the gifted kid who tended to make things harder for himself than they should have been. He was the son of a great football player, James McAlister, a star running back at UCLA who later played for the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots. He still remembered when he was little his dad showing him film of his playing days. “He would get out this reel-to-reel stuff and show it to us on the wall,” McAlister remembered. “It was snowy and hard to see, but you could tell he was great.”

  The son was a natural athlete just like the father. Chris played everything as a kid, but he always wanted to be a football player, to be just like his father. He was heavily recruited as a high school senior after being named California player of the year while playing quarterback at Pasadena High School. He rushed for more than 1,000 yards and threw for more than 1,000 yards as a senior. A lot of colleges thought his future was as a running back. His father put an end to that talk. “He said to me, ‘You don’t want that, it beats your body up,’” McAlister remembered. “I knew he knew firsthand. I was already six-one as a senior in high school. He pointed out that there were very few defensive backs in the NFL over six feet. He thought that might be the best route for me even back then.”

  More than anything, McAlister wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps to UCLA. The problem was his SAT score. “I never even thought about SATs until I was a senior,” he said. “Then I realized I had to take them. First time, I bombed. Second time, I got better. Third time I was 760, which under the old rules would have made it. But that was the year they changed the rule, so instead of 700 being good enough, I had to make 810. My parents got me a tutor. I studied, I learned how it was better not to answer questions if you weren’t sure, the whole thing. Took it one last time. Made 1010. Hallelujah! I’m going to UCLA! Sent them the score and waited for the call saying welcome to UCLA. Instead, I get a call saying, ‘Admissions is concerned about the jump in your score. They’re sending it to the NCAA to be investigated.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was crushed.”

  UCLA’s decision to submit McAlister’s SAT for investigation “froze” his score, meaning he could not use it to gain admission to any college. His father was so upset that he divorced himself, for all intents and purposes, from his alma mater. McAlister went into a funk. “They had taken my dream from me,” he said. “I didn’t want to go anywhere, do anything. I spent the whole summer around the house, just sulking.”

  It was mid-August when his mother came into his room one day with neither tea nor sympathy. “You’ve got a choice,” she said. “You can go enroll in a junior college and get yourself eligible to play college football or you can go get a job. But you aren’t going to sit in this house and do nothing.”

  “Surprisingly enough,” McAlister said, smiling, “I opted for the chance to play football again.”

  He enrolled at Mt. San Antonio College, not that far from his home. He played that fall but didn’t really bother with school. He was still seething about the SAT, so, in protest, he didn’t bother going to any classes. At the end of his first semester, word came down from the NCAA: his test score had been verified. He was free to go to any college in the country. There was only one place he knew he wasn’t going: UCLA. He opted for Arizona in the second recruiting go-around, in part because it was warm and not far from home, in part because the Wildcats had recruited him from day one as a defensive back.

  Before he could get there, though, a moment of immaturity —“actually, stupidity,” he said—landed him in trouble that would linger through his college years. Walking out of a department store one day, McAlister spotte
d a jacket he liked. Money was never an issue in his life, so the thought of getting something for free wasn’t what caused him to try to walk out of the store with the jacket. “I looked around and thought, ‘I wonder if I can get away with this,’” he said years later. “Don’t even ask me why I thought that, because I don’t know. I just did it.”

  And got caught. “Probably lucky,” he said. “If I’d gotten away with it once, I might have been tempted to see if I could do it again. They stopped me in my tracks right there.” He was charged with petty theft and sentenced to fifteen hours of community service. Except he didn’t bother going back to serve those fifteen hours. In the fall of 1998 the judge decided that if McAlister didn’t want to bother with his community service time, he could serve ten days in jail instead. By then, McAlister was an All-American cornerback for the Wildcats and a surefire first-round draft pick.

  The petty-theft charge was not a major concern to most NFL teams. The rest of McAlister’s record was clean, and his talent was unquestionable. The Ravens liked the way he played—very hard, very intense; he was clearly someone who loved to play. “That has always been Chris’s strength,” Ozzie Newsome said. “He’s made some mistakes, but we’ve always known when it was time to work, time to play football he was going to be there.”

  McAlister made the usual rounds for interviews with teams that might draft him. He expected the shoplifting issue to come up. He didn’t expect to walk into the office of newly minted Redskins owner Dan Snyder and have the conversation begin with “So, I understand you’ve got some jail time coming up, huh?”

  “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Boy, do I hope this guy doesn’t draft me,’” McAlister said. “Even though they were picking number seven and it would have been a big deal to go that high, I just instantly disliked the man. I mean, look, I was embarrassed by what I’d done and I told everyone who brought it up how dumb it was. No debating it. No excuses. But that’s not the way you expect someone you’ve just met to greet you. If he thought I was such a bad guy, why fly me in for the interview in the first place? It was as if he wanted to make me feel small right away. I didn’t like that.”

  McAlister was relieved when the Redskins used their pick to take Champ Bailey and was delighted when the Ravens, picking tenth, took him. McAlister didn’t start the opener, but in his role as the nickel back, he had an interception that he almost returned for a touchdown. “Rod Woodson, peeling back to block, tripped me up on the two-yard line,” he said. “I told him he was just trying to keep me from doing something he hadn’t done.” He was in the starting lineup by the fifth game and finished the season with five interceptions. He soon became established as one of the better cornerbacks in the NFL, someone who could come up and stop the run but was also difficult to throw against. In his second season, the Ravens won the Super Bowl. McAlister was established as a star, and he behaved like one.

  “I was absolutely living the good life,” he said. “I traveled all the time and I spent a lot of money wherever I was. I had the money, so why not spend it? When my first contract was up, if my football career had ended at that moment, I wouldn’t have had any money at all. I spent everything I had.”

  It was that lifestyle along with his loner style in the locker room that concerned the Ravens. No one in the organization thought he was a bad person; in fact, almost everyone liked him. But his moodiness was a concern, as was the incident in San Diego, which to many was a microcosm of who McAlister was. It didn’t alienate McAlister from his teammates, but it did distance him even more.

  That didn’t mean the Ravens didn’t want to sign him. They just weren’t ready to make the kind of commitment to him that they normally would make automatically to a player of his caliber, the kind of commitment they had already made to players like Ray Lewis and Jonathan Ogden and would almost certainly make in a few more years to Ed Reed and Todd Heap.

  McAlister hadn’t helped the situation in June when he had been quoted as wondering why the Ravens wouldn’t give him a long-term deal when he wasn’t one of the players on the team who had been arrested or been in trouble during his pro career. Those comments were upsetting on two levels: they were a swipe at his teammates, and McAlister had the shoplifting incident in college, had been suspended by his team, and had once tested positive for marijuana and had been charged with DUI—although the charge was later dropped. None of the incidents by themselves were that serious, but they hardly made McAlister a poster boy for good behavior.

  No one on the team was upset with him for staying out of camp. That was what franchise players did. Since they didn’t have a contract, they didn’t receive a signing bonus—the key to all NFL contracts these days. NFL players receive their entire salaries during the seventeen weeks of the regular season. That means a franchise player would be putting his body at risk for the roughly $1,000 a week players receive during the exhibition season. That makes no sense, so they stay out of camp until the last possible moment. Coming in before the last exhibition game was an indication to his teammates that McAlister wanted to be ready for the season opener on September 12 in Cleveland.

  “I don’t have any problem with you staying out of camp,” Billick told him on that first day back. “Business is business. You and I don’t have to be friends, but we do need to work together as business partners because that’s what we are. I don’t want to hear that the media has been able to get you to rip your teammates. You need to not do that again.”

  McAlister said he understood. He was there to work and help the team. “I really was glad to be back,” he said later. “It felt weird being out on the West Coast, sitting around knowing my teammates were going through two-a-days. Then, watching the exhibitions on TV, I was saying to myself, ‘Hey, I’m on that team, what am I doing here?’ I really wanted to get back to playing football. I missed it.”

  McAlister was warmly greeted when he walked into the locker room. All the Ravens knew one thing: prodigal son or not, McAlister made them a better team. Which, in the NFL, is what matters.

  “It’s just football,” Ray Lewis always said.

  With McAlister in uniform, Lewis’s football team was now capable of playing better football.

  The last exhibition game was a headache for almost everyone. The players and coaches really didn’t want to bother with another game. They wanted to start getting ready to play real games. Everyone worried about someone getting hurt while playing a meaningless game. The coaches were concerned about getting through the game without injuries and with minimal playing time for the players who mattered most. Many of the players who would play in the second half would be cut the following day. Some had been kept on the roster for the final week for the specific purpose of using up minutes so that starters and key backups could stay out of harm’s way.

  Traditionally, the Ravens have played their last exhibition game against the New York Giants. It is a logistically easy trip for whichever team travels, and since Billick and Jim Fassel were friends, they made sure to get through the game as quickly and painlessly as possible. “I’m not sure either one of us ever used a time-out,” Fassel said.

  This trip would be a little bit different. For one thing, Tom Coughlin was now the Giants’ coach and he took pregame meals seriously, not to mention something resembling a football game. Coughlin was already getting hammered in the New York media for his inflexible ways, personified by his decision to fine a player for being five minutes early to a meeting because, in his mind, five minutes early wasn’t early enough. The game would also be a homecoming for Fassel, returning to the stadium where he had been the head coach for seven years.

  There was also one more problem: the Republican National Convention was winding up across the river in New York City that night and, with President George W. Bush scheduled to speak, security everywhere within a hundred miles of New York was airtight. The Ravens had already been told the only way they could leave Giants Stadium after the game was by bus. No planes or even trains were being allowed into
or out of the area until one hour after Bush finished his speech. Football teams are not accustomed to traveling by bus except to and from an airport or hotel or stadium. Normally the Ravens would charter a train into and out of Newark for a game at Giants Stadium. That option would not be available for the return trip.

  The most important thing was getting through the game.

  And the arrival of Deion.

  Newsome and Eugene Parker had finally agreed on a contract the previous weekend, with Sanders getting $1.5 million guaranteed, plus incentives. He was planning to report Tuesday, take his physical, deal with the media onslaught, and then travel with the team to the game on Thursday. Once he signed, the Ravens would have to cut an additional player, someone who was going to be cut anyway but would have been available for the Giants game if Sanders weren’t on the roster. There had been a lengthy conversation on Sunday before the initial round of cuts about holding off on signing Sanders until Friday. That idea was eventually abandoned. Parker and Newsome had agreed that Sanders would report Tuesday. It was too late to change the plan.

  Sanders ended up traveling to the game on his own because Billick and the coaches wanted him to get in an extra workout after the team left for New Jersey. He arrived at Giants Stadium a couple of hours before kickoff, looking every inch of Prime Time, hugging the players he already knew, shaking hands with the ones he was meeting for the first time. He walked onto the field for pregame warm-ups dressed in a black shirt, with a gold crucifix around his neck, shorts, and a brand-new Ravens cap. “There’s a part of me that wants to ask him for an autograph or something,” cornerback Gary Baxter said. “I mean, that’s Deion Sanders we’re talking about, not just some nickel back we just signed.”