Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Bisciotti had thought at various times about getting a game ball whenever his first victory as an owner came, but he had been so involved in the ups and downs of the game that any such thoughts had vanished by the time he walked into the locker room. He had a big grin on his face as he caught the ball. At that moment everyone in the locker room was smiling. It had been a long seven days since the loss to Cleveland. The next seven wouldn’t seem nearly as long.

  15

  God and the NFL

  ON THE NIGHT BEFORE the Steelers game, twenty members of the Ravens gathered in one of the downtown Hyatt’s third-floor meeting rooms. It was 8:30 in the evening, half an hour before the start of the special teams meeting. On the Ravens’ itinerary for the weekend, Saturday night always begins with Fellowship. This is not a formal chapel service, but it is certainly a religious gathering, led by Rod Hairston, the team chaplain.

  The group that attended the Fellowship meeting each Saturday was almost always the same. Brian Billick sat in the back of the room in a chair pulled back and away from the rows of chairs that were lined up in front of Hairston. Several assistant coaches were scattered around the room: Mike Nolan, Johnnie Lynn, Mike Singletary, David Shaw, Wade Harman, Matt Simon, and Phil Zacharias attended weekly. Ray Lewis always sat near the back of the room, flanked by Corey Fuller and Deion Sanders. Almost all the players in attendance were African American. The only white players who came every week were placekicker Matt Stover and backup offensive lineman Tony Pashos. In one sense, that wasn’t a surprise. For the most part, the African American players, many of them from the South, had grown up with very strong roots in their church.

  “It was just an automatic in your life right from the start,” said Ray Lewis. “My certainties in life were simple: family and God. Everything else came after that.”

  Hairston, who has at times been a controversial figure within the team, was conscious of the racial makeup of his Saturday night flock and candidly admitted that it was something that concerned him. “I would like to think that it has nothing to do with race, mine or theirs,” he said. “But there are times when I wonder.”

  Religion plays an important role on every football team—more so, it seems, than in any other sport. At times it can bond a team or at least certain players on a team. It can also be divisive, especially if there are those in the locker room who feel that everyone else should believe the way they do. Why religion is so important in football is the subject of considerable debate. Some believe it is because of the sport’s violent nature, that the potential for serious injury causes players to look for comfort and to want to believe that some kind of higher power is protecting them, even in those moments when a serious injury occurs. There is also the southern influence. A lot of pro football players are from the South, and as Ray Lewis pointed out, many come from deeply religious backgrounds. Most football teams take their cue on all subjects from their leader, and there is no question that Ray Lewis leads the Ravens. When he stands in the middle of the locker room and shouts for everyone to form a circle and hold hands for the pregame prayer, no one is likely to argue with him.

  Brian Billick is keenly aware of the importance of religion to his football team. He is not one of those football coaches who invokes God when discussing his team’s successes and failures. He is quietly religious, someone who makes a point of making it to Fellowship each Saturday but almost never discusses religion publicly. He rarely pushes any of his players when it comes to religion, although he will occasionally bring up to the team a message Hairston—called Rev within the team—was trying to get across in Fellowship. Billick and Hairston consult each week about the topic of Hairston’s Saturday night sermon. Hairston sends Billick an e-mail each week telling him what he plans to talk about. Sometimes Billick will make a specific suggestion about relating the sermon to whatever the team’s circumstance is that week. “I try to be sensitive to where we are as a team,” Hairston said. “My message can have something to do with sticking together or not giving up or taking responsibility for one’s life.”

  Hairston’s athletic career was ended prematurely by an eye injury he suffered as a teenager in Norfolk, Virginia. He went to Virginia Tech, where he became friendly with a number of the athletes on campus through a Bible study group called Campus Crusade for Christ. That was when he first began to think of the ministry as a career and was first involved in talking to athletes about their relationship with God. He graduated with a degree in finance and spent two not-so-happy years working as a commercial banker. “I knew that wasn’t what I was meant to do,” he said. “I had believed it in college, but it took me two years to figure it out for sure.”

  He joined Athletes in Action, the ministry group that puts together barnstorming basketball teams made up of players who give their religious testimony at game sites around the country. He was initially a fund-raiser, but one night when the team was in Roanoke, the minister traveling with the team turned to Hairston and said, “Boy, do you preach?” Hairston said, “I can, sir,” and he did. After that he was hooked on the idea of becoming a preacher. “It was infectious,” he said. “I took speech classes to help me get better at delivering my message.”

  His first assignment as a minister was at Howard University (where he met his wife). From there he went to UCLA for six years before joining a church group in Carey, North Carolina, in 1998. When the ministry closed the next year, a friend of his named Mike Bunkley, who had worked as a chaplain with the Carolina Panthers, told him that he had heard the Ravens were looking for a chaplain. Joe Ehrmann, who had been the team chaplain, was leaving and looking for a successor. Hairston met with Ehrmann and then with Brian Billick, who told him he saw the chaplain as another resource who could help the team.

  In hiring Hairston, the team brought in someone who was vocal and charismatic, in many ways an old-time southern preacher who, while he might not bring outright fire and brimstone to his sermons, certainly brought passion and deep belief. Many of the players, especially those raised in the South, were drawn quickly to him and greeted his presence with great enthusiasm. Others weren’t as comfortable, thinking that Hairston wanted more control over the religious direction of the team than a chaplain should ask for or be granted.

  By 2002 there was a clear division within the locker room. Matt Stover and Peter Boulware, best friends and two of the more devout members of the team, wanted to start a separate Bible study group. Hairston generally met with players for Bible study on Thursday nights. Stover and Boulware wanted to form their own group that would meet on Wednesday night, a group led by a friend of Boulware’s named Darryl Flowers who worked with Champions for Christ, a group that was in essence a competitor of Campus Crusade for Christ, the group that Hairston had worked with since his college days. Hairston objected to the presence of the people from Champions for Christ inside the team. Stover and Boulware objected to his objections, and angry words were exchanged.

  “I had experience with Champions for Christ when I was at UCLA,” Hairston said. “They were very aggressive in the way they approached players and dealt with players. I saw players hurt by them, by the fact that they wanted to be extremely controlling. There was one kid they told not to date a woman because she couldn’t speak in tongues. They have a belief that true believers can speak in an unknown language to God. I have great respect for Peter and Matt, but I was uncomfortable with Champions for Christ and I told them that. Peter, I know, was very angry with me about it. I told Peter that if Darryl wanted a separate ministry and they wanted to be a part of that, it wasn’t any of my business. But within the team, Brian and the Modells had asked me to provide religious leadership and I intended to do that.”

  A meeting to try to mediate the dispute was set up in the home of tackle Harry Swain. More angry words. Boulware and Stover accused Hairston of being controlling and territorial. He responded by saying he wasn’t comfortable with people he didn’t know coming in to form a ministry in a place where he had been hired to be the
minister.

  The dispute finally landed in Billick’s office, about the last thing he wanted to deal with during the season. He sided with Hairston. “Rod is the team chaplain,” he said. “He works with me during the season, and I’m comfortable with the messages he’s trying to send to the players. I certainly can’t control what players do away from the facility. I don’t want to control what they do. But anything that was happening in our locker room, in our facility, was going to go through Rod. But I told them if they couldn’t all work together, I’d just abandon the whole thing completely. Religion should unite people, not divide them.”

  A lovely thought, even though history has proven that religion divides at least as often as it unites. Stover and Boulware eventually agreed to follow Hairston’s lead and not form any kind of separate Bible study group. Both men now say they regret what happened. Stover always attended the Fellowship service on Saturday night and Boulware was planning to attend again when he was healthy.

  Even in 2004, two years removed from Hairston vs. Stover/Boulware, there was still some tension. Later in the season, when the Ravens went to Philadelphia, Deion Sanders told Hairston he wanted to bring Irving Fryar, the former wide receiver who now has a ministry, to speak on Saturday night. Hairston doesn’t often bring speakers in. Clark Kellogg, the former NBA player turned TV commentator, would speak to the team in October, and Chris Zacharias, younger brother of assistant coach Phil Zacharias, would speak to the team on Christmas night in Pittsburgh. That was it. Hairston told Sanders he would prefer he not invite Fryar.

  “Why not?” Sanders asked.

  “Because I don’t know him,” Hairston said. “I like to know people who come in and speak to the team.”

  “But you know me,” Sanders said, not happy.

  The dispute landed—again—on Billick’s desk. Again he backed Hairston. “Nothing against Irving Fryar,” he told Sanders. “I just don’t think this is the right time.”

  Hairston often likes to finish his sentences when he’s preaching by saying, “Can I get an amen on that?”

  He always gets his amen. Some just say it louder than others.

  The victory over the Steelers was a morale boost for everyone. One of the things that makes football different from other sports is that every game really does matter. Winning hides concerns; losing magnifies them.

  Even so, there was genuine concern about the two key injuries that had occurred on Sunday: Todd Heap’s ankle and Deion Sanders’s hamstrings. The good news was that Heap’s ankle wasn’t broken. The bad news was he had a very serious ankle sprain; in some ways a clean break would have been better. The estimate was that Heap would be out at least two weeks, perhaps as long as six. The hope was that he would be back after the bye week—meaning he would miss the games against Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Washington.

  There were few people on the team more important than Heap. What the Ravens lacked in wide receivers, they made up for—to some degree—in talented tight ends. Heap was the key to that strength, a soft-handed receiver who was a tough matchup for defenses and could get deep into the secondary. He was one of the Ravens’ poster boys, a six-foot-five, 250-pound, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mormon with an easy smile and a friendly demeanor. He loved to talk at length about his two-year-old daughter’s latest achievement and was always on the list of players asked to take part in community relations projects. Heap was so aw-shucks in his approach to people that Steve Bisciotti affectionately referred to him as Howdy Doody.

  The joking stopped when he stepped on a football field. Heap had been the Ravens’ number one pick in the draft right after their Super Bowl victory, an example of their philosophy of drafting the best player on the board regardless of position. The team already had Shannon Sharpe, a future Hall of Famer, starting at tight end, but they thought Heap was too good to pass on. As it turned out, Sharpe left a year later and Heap became a Pro Bowler in his second season in the league.

  “I never thought in terms of those things,” he said. “I remember when I first got to college [at Arizona State] I would sit around with the other freshmen and everyone was talking about when they turned pro, when they were going to be in the NFL, where they thought they might go in the draft. I remember thinking to myself, ‘What are these guys talking about? None of us have even proved we can play in college yet.’ I always took the approach that if I worked hard and reached my potential, good things would happen to me as a player.”

  That was exactly what had happened. Only now, Heap was out and no one knew when he would be back. The good news was that tight end was the Ravens’ deepest position. Terry Jones was a proven player and Daniel Wilcox had been the most pleasant surprise of training camp. But neither of them was Heap, who not only made plays but also helped open the field up for other receivers because he required so much of the defense’s attention. His absence would force the offense to make adjustments.

  Sanders’s absence wasn’t as big a deal but was still significant. In his absence, Chad Williams, a third-year player from Southern Mississippi became the primary nickel back and Corey Fuller again became a factor—as Billick had predicted he would—in the defensive backfield. Sanders had been brought in because the Ravens felt his presence would make life very difficult for quarterbacks in long-yardage situations. Now the team was back where it had been before it signed either Dale Carter or Sanders. What’s more, Sanders’s presence affected the other team psychologically. They had to prepare for him not only in nickel situations but quite possibly on kick returns and even on offense. That threat was now gone, and no one was sure for how long.

  “I’d like to be back on Monday night,” Sanders said, referring to the game in two weeks at home against the Kansas City Chiefs. He smiled. “After all, that is prime time.”

  Going back to Cincinnati—injured—made the week bittersweet for Sanders. As the team bus made the trip from the Cincinnati Airport in Covington, Kentucky, to the team hotel in downtown Cincinnati, Sanders recognized the spot on I-71 where he had tried to kill himself seven years earlier while he was playing baseball for the Cincinnati Reds. His seemingly perfect life—rich, two-sport superstar with all the endorsements one could possibly hope for—had gone off the tracks. His wife was divorcing him and he was separated from his children. He was lonely and unhappy and lost.

  “In a way, I should have seen it coming,” he said. “The year before, my wife had taken me to a counseling session, which turned out to be an important point in my life because it was with the man who’s now my pastor and mentor, T. D. Jakes. Even though I knew during that session that my marriage was over, that it couldn’t be fixed, he said a lot of things to me and about me that made sense. At one point he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Deion, you need help. I’m afraid you might be suicidal.’ I didn’t believe him. Of course, he was right.”

  Sanders knew he was searching for something—but he wasn’t sure what it was. He had left the San Francisco 49ers after the team won the Super Bowl because he wanted another challenge. Then he won a second Super Bowl, this time in Dallas. Not good enough. He decided to try baseball again. “I kept looking for something that was going to make me happy,” he said. “Of course, I was looking in all the wrong places. Then, in a year, my dad died, my stepdad died, and I got divorced and couldn’t see my children. I felt miserable and alone.”

  It was a May night in Cincinnati and Sanders was alone in his car and, he thought, in life. He decided to escape and drove his car off the side of the road at a spot where he knew there was a sharp decline, figuring the car would roll over once it landed and that would be that. “Landed perfectly, straight up, like a cat landing on its feet,” he said, laughing at the memory. “There wasn’t a scratch on the car and not a scratch on me. I sat there, thinking to myself, ‘You are so messed up, you can’t even get killing yourself right.’ I actually started to laugh. The police came and helped me get the car out, and I just went home as if nothing had happened.”

  Something important ha
d happened. Sanders knew he had hit rock bottom and needed to change his life. He turned to God. “I knew I needed to put myself in the hands of someone, and He made the most sense,” he said. “It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had religion in my life before that, I did. But not this way. When I was a kid we went to church on Sundays, but I was at church, not in church. There’s a difference. I certainly hadn’t been saved. As soon as I turned my life over to God, things got better. I saw things more clearly and began to have a better understanding of how lucky I am, even if I have had some setbacks. Everyone has them. The question is, how you deal with them.”

  Sanders began dating Pilar Biggers, a woman he had met while playing on the West Coast. They married and he started a second family. He had decided to quit football after one season with the Washington Redskins because he didn’t feel his heart was in the game anymore and because he was convinced that playing for the newly hired (and soon to be fired) coach, Marty Schottenheimer, wouldn’t work for him. “One of Marty’s sons was in a bar or a restaurant someplace and he was telling people that his dad was going to make life so miserable for me in training camp that I’d just quit and walk away from the money they owed me,” Sanders said. “Only trouble for him was, a close friend of my agent was in there and overheard him. When I heard that I said, ‘Man, I certainly don’t need this.’ I called Dan Snyder and told him what was going on. He flew up right away, we talked, and we made a deal. He was good about it. He understood. He only asked one thing of me: if I ever came back, not to come back to a team inside the division. I gave him my word and we parted friends.”

  Sanders had gone on to work for CBS, a job he enjoyed—in spite of his tempestuous relationship with Boomer Esiason on and off the set. Even after he made the decision to come back and play, he still believed there was a chance he would end up working for CBS again. “I liked the people there,” he said. “I had a very good relationship, still do with [CBS Sports president] Sean McManus and with [executive producer] Tony Petitti. If I don’t play again next year, I could easily see myself back working for them again. We all made a business decision. I have no hard feelings and I don’t think they do, either.”