Bisciotti finally spoke up. “What I’d really like to do is show Chris a tape of the last forty-five minutes,” he said. “Show him twenty intelligent men sitting around trying to figure him out, trying to figure out how to get him to be the player he ought to be. I like investing in stable personalities. I can tell you guys from past experience that working with someone who has a victim mentality is almost impossible.”
Matt Cavanaugh asked a question to the room: “Does it upset Chris that Ray and Ed get so much recognition?”
“Yup,” Newsome said without hesitation.
“That’s one reason he doesn’t go to Ray’s house on Thursday night,” Thurman said. “That and the fact that he’d rather go out and party.”
They went around some more. Billick instructed Nolan to treat his tape session with the defense that day as if it were training camp. “Correct, don’t yell,” he said. “Yelling isn’t going to do any good at this point.”
As they broke up, Bisciotti lingered to talk to Billick. “How would you feel if I take a shot at Chris?” he said.
Billick thought a moment. Normally, his instinctive answer would be no, that having a player called in by the owner wasn’t a good idea. Now he nodded. “Why not?” he said. “Maybe you can be a different voice for him.”
Billick gave them a pep talk on Monday afternoon. He pointed out that because Denver and Jacksonville had lost, they were right where they had been before Sunday’s games. Of course, Denver had lost in San Diego (the Chargers were 9-3) and Jacksonville had lost to Pittsburgh, which was now 11-1. Neither team had blown a seventeen-point fourth-quarter lead at home.
“So, we have to go to Indianapolis and Pittsburgh and win,” Billick said. “Anyone in this room who doesn’t feel up to that challenge? Is there anyone in here who wants to point fingers right now? Anyone want to blame B.J.? Where would we be without B.J. this season? Anyone want to blame the DBs? How many times have they bailed us out? We aren’t that kind of team. We never have been. Let’s make sure we focus on what we have to do this week, nothing more, and then we’ll let the rest take care of itself.”
The players all knew the season was at a crisis point. They understood they had put themselves in a bad situation by letting the game get away on Sunday. They were angry and frustrated. “We aren’t used to letting games get away like that,” Mike Flynn said. “I think everyone’s searching a little bit right now.”
The defensive meeting, even with Nolan trying to correct, not yell, was tense. A number of the plays on the tape involved breakdowns, especially in the backfield in the fourth quarter. “Guys, you have to play the techniques we’ve taught you,” Nolan said. “You all know what they are, you have to execute them, especially this time of year.”
McAlister sat in his usual seat on the left side of the room, convinced that Nolan was talking to him. Certainly, several of the plays involved him. He was still angry about what had happened at halftime, and Thurman had told him that he should expect a call from Bisciotti, that there were concerns about his lifestyle and about how ready he had been to play on Sunday.
“I was so angry,” he said. “I had a bad game, no doubt about it. That made, by my count, two bad games in six years. Was I the only one who played badly? I don’t think so. It takes eleven guys for us to be good; it took eleven guys for us to be bad. I understand cornerbacks stand out—as heroes and as goats, it’s part of the job. But I really felt like I was being made a goat.”
When the meeting was over, McAlister headed for the parking lot. Corey Fuller chased him down there. Fuller’s lifestyle was 180 degrees different from McAlister’s. He didn’t drink—never had—and he didn’t go out late at night. But he was a cornerback and he knew what it felt like to be singled out after a bad game. Months later, McAlister still remembered the conversation almost word for word.
“I can tell you’re pissed,” Fuller said to McAlister.
“Damn right I am,” McAlister said. “These guys are trying to blame me and me alone for what happened yesterday.”
Fuller nodded. “That’s exactly right, they are. You know why? Because they are paying you a lot of money and they made a commitment to you for a long time—which is what you told them you wanted them to do. For the money they’re paying you, they don’t expect you to play well some of the time, they expect you to play well all the time. They don’t expect you to be ready two-thirds of the time or three-quarters of the time, they expect it a hundred percent of the time. And if we lose a game and you play bad and you’ve been out during the week, then you can expect them to blame you. You give them the chance to blame you by going out. If you don’t go out and you play bad, it’s one thing. If you go out—and you know as well as I do that they know when you’re out—and you play good, it’s not a problem. But if you play bad, it’s a big problem.”
McAlister listened to Fuller. He had always respected him, knew he had overcome a lot in his life and never made excuses for his mistakes. He had certainly had his battles with the coaches—specifically Nolan—during the season and yet he was telling him that he had set himself up for this by staying out late and coming to work on some mornings with alcohol on his breath. “You think people don’t notice that?” he said. “Of course they do.”
The two men stood in the darkened parking lot and talked for more than an hour. McAlister went home that night and did a good deal of thinking. It took a while, but he finally reached some conclusions. He had been angry at the team for not giving him a contract, and he had acted out at times because of that. Now, they had given him a contract. He had a responsibility to give them their money’s worth. Plus, from a selfish standpoint, he wanted to be in the league for as long as possible. He certainly wasn’t headed in that direction.
“I had spent most of two years being angry,” he said. “I was angry because I didn’t have a contract, and that led to what happened in San Diego. Then I was angry during the off-season and came to camp still angry. When they gave me the contract, I was happy. Then I got hurt and I was frustrated. Was I behaving as badly as they seemed to think I was? I don’t think so. But Corey was right: if I did it all, which I did, I gave them a reason to single me out if I didn’t play well. That’s what I needed to make go away. The Chris McAlister who played in the Cincinnati game ceased to exist after Corey and I talked,” he said. “He gave me a lot to think about. And I did think about it.”
Little did the coaches, the scouts, or the owner know it, but the person who could get to McAlister had been found—in a place where they had never even thought about looking.
Ray Lewis was also searching. As the team’s leader, he felt he had somehow let people down by not helping the defense find a way to stop the bleeding on Sunday. On Tuesday, the players’ day off, he sat at home with his red spiral notebook in front of him. Lewis carries the notebook with him everywhere. When he thinks of something he wants to remember or hears something he thinks worth repeating, he writes it down in his notebook. Frequently, during the Saturday night Fellowship sessions, he would write at length in the notebook. Now he sat with his notebook, trying to think of something to say to his teammates that might get them back where they needed to be for the season’s final weeks. He needed a theme. He started writing down his thoughts.
The word life came into his head. One of his many sayings in the locker room was “we’re living our lives together.”
He wrote down living, as in “we’re living our lives together and making a living at the same time.”
He stared at that for a while and then wrote down instruments, as in “we are instruments of God given a special gift to play football.”
More staring and thinking. Then free, as in “we are still free to accomplish what we started out to accomplish this summer.”
He knew now where he wanted to go. The last word he wrote down was emotion, which was “what we need in order to achieve what we want to achieve.”
He had four words: Living-Instruments-Free-Emotion, or LIFE.
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br /> That was the message he delivered to the team early Wednesday morning before the weekly game-planning meetings began. He wanted to remind everyone that their future was still in their own hands if they didn’t give in to the frustration they all felt. “It’s all still out there for us if we stay together,” he said. “Let’s worry only about ourselves and what we think, not what anyone else thinks.” He paused. “I’ve got one other four-letter word for you: game. This is a game, still a game. But it’s a game we all play together. We can’t win it unless we do.”
That seemed to set a good tone for the week. They could make the case that this was a chance to start over again. They were healthy and they still believed that when they were healthy, they could beat anyone, anyplace. That included Indianapolis and Pittsburgh on the road. It would have to.
There was one new injury that caused some concern: Joe Maese. Outside the team, only the most hard-core fan would have any idea who Maese was. But he was a key component in the offense. He was the team’s long snapper.
The notion of keeping someone on the roster strictly for the purpose of long snapping is a relatively new one in the NFL—and in football. For years most teams simply had their starting center snap the ball on placekicks and punts. But snapping a ball exactly eight yards to a kneeling holder or fourteen yards to a punter is a lot different skill from snapping it to a quarterback who is directly behind you. There was also the wear-and-tear problem: long snappers get hammered on every snap: because they have to take their eye off the man in front of them for a split second to make certain their snap is true, they inevitably get pummeled. The life of the long snapper was perhaps best described by Gary Zauner one night in a special teams meeting. Addressing Bart Scott, who often lined up against the other team’s long snapper, he said, “Bart, if you hit the guy and knock him flat every single time, sooner or later he’s going to make a mistake.”
Not wanting their starting centers knocked flat ten to fifteen times a game and hoping to find someone who could get the ball back to their punter or holder consistently, coaches began looking for specialists. By the early 1990s almost every team in football had someone on the roster who was a long-snapping specialist. Occasionally he played another position. These days every team has someone on the roster whose only job is to long snap. The importance of the long snapper had never been more evident than in 2003, when the Giants’ inability to get the ball snapped properly in kicking situations had cost them a playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers.
Maese had grown up in Phoenix, the eldest of Joe and Donna Maese’s three children. He always wanted to play football, but his mother wouldn’t let him, afraid that he would get hurt. “When I got to ninth grade, I just told her I was going to do it,” he said.
Things weren’t great at home in those days. According to his eldest son, Joe Maese Sr. was a drinker. “He was either the best guy in the world or the worst,” Maese said. “It was sad. But it got to the point where it was a relief when he wasn’t home. I was actually kind of glad when he and my mother split up.”
That was during Joe’s sophomore year in high school. He and his mom argued often after the split. It was only later, after Joe was out of college, that his mother told him that the tight rein she tried to keep on him was the result of concerns that he would follow in his father’s footsteps and find trouble. During his senior year in high school, Joe moved out, finding a small apartment of his own. He supported himself by working as a bouncer in a local bar. By then he was long snapping for his high school football team, a job he had inherited as a junior when the team needed a new snapper. “I was terrible at it at first,” he said. “Really bad. But I wanted to be good, so I really worked at it. By the end of the season, I was pretty good.”
He was too small (six feet, 235 pounds) to be considered for a Division 1 scholarship as either a defensive lineman or a linebacker, and most schools weren’t recruiting long snappers out of high school. He enrolled at Phoenix Community College, where he played on defense and became the team’s long snapper. By his sophomore year, he was attracting attention from D-1 schools as a snapper—but no scholarship offers. He was majoring in fire science—he wants to be a firefighter someday and often goes on ride-alongs with fire departments—but he still wanted to pursue football. Arizona State’s coaches told him they would give him a chance to make the team if he wanted to walk on. But the special teams coach at New Mexico made what sounded like a better offer: “They had a snapper, but they weren’t that thrilled with him,” Maese said. “He told me if I came there and beat the guy out and became the starter, they would scholarship me. I decided to take a chance even though it would cost more to go to school there than if I stayed in-state at ASU.”
By the end of New Mexico’s preseason training camp, Maese was the first-string snapper. But he didn’t have a scholarship. “They said it was a numbers game,” he said. “I was tempted to leave, but I was already enrolled in school and I wanted to play, so I stuck it out.”
He never did get a scholarship, so he continued to work on the side to pay for his tuition. He dug ditches some of the time and continued working as a bouncer. When the coaches complained to him that they didn’t like him working late hours as a bouncer, he told them, “Give me a scholarship and I won’t need to work anymore.”
By his senior season, he was attracting attention from pro scouts. The Ravens had just won the Super Bowl, but they needed a long snapper. They had used two different players in that role in 2000 and weren’t convinced either one was a long-term solution. Ozzie Newsome has always believed that if you have a need, you should draft for it, especially if you think someone specific is the answer to that need. Maese’s consistency impressed everyone in the organization. He was almost never off target with a snap. The Ravens drafted him in the sixth round in the 2001 draft—the only long snapper drafted that year—and he became their snapper from the first day of training camp. He had been the snapper since then, except for missing the last game of his rookie season with a knee injury.
Maese’s only weakness as a snapper was a chronic back condition that occasionally flared up. This was hardly surprising for a man who made his living bending over a football, snapping it, and then getting hammered by a defensive lineman the instant he released the ball. Like a lot of specialists, Maese had a routine during games that he never violated. Anytime the Ravens had a third down, he would find a clear spot on the sideline, wipe his hands with a towel, bend over, and snap an imaginary ball between his legs. Then he would grab the towel again and either walk back to the bench if there was no kick or dry his hands once again, toss the towel on the ground, and trot onto the field to snap.
Now, though, Maese’s back was sore and there was concern that it might go on him during the game on Sunday. The question was whether he could make it through the game. If he couldn’t, the Ravens could be in trouble since there was no one else on the roster who could long snap.
Enter Mike Solwold.
Solwold was the long snapper who had been cut on the first day of training camp after recovering from a torn muscle in his chest, suffered during the first minicamp. “As soon as I told ’em I was healthy, they cut me,” he said, laughing. “I guess they didn’t want to wait for me to tear it again and get stuck with an injury settlement.”
Solwold had no problem with business being business. In 2003 he had made the Ravens’ practice squad as a backup tight end and as insurance at the long-snapper spot in case something happened to Maese. With three weeks left in the season, the New England Patriots offered him a chance to sign with them and be placed on the fifty-three-man roster. Solwold told the Ravens about the Patriots’ offer. They made a counteroffer: stay with us and we’ll put you on the fifty-three-man roster and guarantee you a spot there for the last three games of the season. That was an offer Solwold couldn’t refuse. Even though he might have gone to the Super Bowl with the Patriots if he had stuck the rest of the season, he had no regrets about the decision.
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p; “Three games on the fifty-three meant I’d be fully vested,” he said. “Even though Joe was fine and I didn’t get activated for any of the games, it got me vested. For someone like me, that’s a big deal.”
Solwold is part of that portion of the football-playing population that flies well under the radar of those who watch games on Sunday. His only appearances in the newspaper through the years had been in the agate-type portion of the sports page every day that reads, “Transactions.” He had appeared in transactions frequently since graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 2000. There, he had been a backup tight end and the long snapper on back-to-back Rose Bowl teams while majoring in history. The life of Mike Solwold, professional football player, could be summed up by his appearances in “Transactions”:
• Signed by the Minnesota Vikings as a rookie free agent, 8-25-01
• Waived by the Vikings, 8-27-01
• Claimed off waivers by the Dallas Cowboys, 8-28-01
• Waived by the Cowboys, 9-3-01
• Re-signed by the Cowboys, 11-14-01
• Waived by the Cowboys, 4-23-02
• Signed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 5-6-02
• Placed on injured reserve (broken foot) by the Buccaneers, 10-1-02
• Contract with Buccaneers allowed to expire, 2-28-03
• Signed by the Baltimore Ravens, 6-9-03
• Waived by the Ravens, 8-25-03
• Signed to the Ravens’ practice squad, 9-1-03
• Signed to the Ravens’ active roster, 12-8-03
• Re-signed by the Ravens, 3-5-04
• Waived by the Ravens, 7-29-04
He had been with the Vikings just long enough as a rookie that he found himself standing next to Kory Stringer on the practice field on the day the massive offensive lineman collapsed and died. “I’ll never forget that moment or that day,” he said quietly. “Obviously I didn’t really know Kory; he was a vet, I was a rookie. But I was standing with him when he went down. Your first thought was ‘he’s just dehydrated.’ It was one of those brutally hot days. But when they took him away in the ambulance, it was frightening.”
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