by Ray Lewis
In some ways, the pain I put myself through was like my comfort zone. It was my way out. With every push-up, I saw the light. With every sit-up, I saw the light. Every time I flipped the last card and shuffled up that deck to start in again, it was like my world was brand new. Anything was possible. And everything else fell away. All the bad stuff, it was gone—just, gone. All there was in front of me was the deck of cards, and in those cards, however they fell, however they turned, there was my escape. Our escape. It got to where I’d get a cramp in my stomach and I could only suck it up and tell myself the pain I was feeling was nothing like the pain waiting for me on the other side of that door, so I kept going. Why stop? All night long, I flipped those cards, did my thing. Some nights I couldn’t sleep but for a couple hours at a stretch, and in between those stretches I was back at it. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Just wishing for an ace, a joker, so I could taste a little extra pain. Told myself that the more I worked, the more I would get back in return.
Every night, I’d work my way through that same deck of cards. Over and over. I was relentless. Seven of spades. Jack of clubs. King. Ace. Joker. I wore those cards out, man. And when that happened, I’d start in on another deck. Over and over. Some of those decks I took away with me to college, when I started playing at the University of Miami. Some I took to Baltimore. Some I carry with me to this day.
Turned out the last battle with this man had nothing to do with me or my cards. I was about three years into my routine. I was good and ready. But on this one night he came after my mother. My mom was in the kitchen, fixing us dinner. It was a Friday afternoon, and he was already into it. He walked over to where my mother was standing and slapped her, just for nothing. And my mom, she snapped. This was her one time too many. She got her back up, in a way I’d never seen, flashed him a cold, hard look that said she’d had enough. It was a look of strength, resolve—I’ll never forget it. And this man, he shrank from it, backed off.
He left soon after that. Maybe he saw I was getting bigger, tougher, stronger. Maybe he didn’t like that there were no more easy wins with me. Maybe he was just a coward, wanted to pick himself an easier battle. Whatever. The guy was gone.
• • •
One more thing, about my name: the story behind it tells what it meant to grow up without a father, to represent the fourth generation of men in my family to grow up without a father, to grow up in a house with three sisters and a brother, everyone with a different name. My mother, with a different name. All these other men—two of them my stepfathers, even—all of them with names of their own. And me with the name of a kind stranger who just happened to be there on the day I was born.
That kind of thing, it leaves you wondering who you are, who you’re meant to be, how you fit. Anyway, it left me wondering. And like I said, my father left some pretty big footprints in and around Lakeland. Even though he didn’t come to see us, he was still in touch with the friends he left behind. When I started playing football in high school, he knew. When I started wrestling, he knew. Word kept coming back to him, the kind of noise I was making on the field, in the gym, and after a while he must’ve started thinking some of that noise was meant for him. I was his son, after all.
So the man went out and changed my name—to his. Without even telling me, without reaching out, he hired a lawyer and changed my name to Elbert Ray Jackson Jr. The papers came in the mail one day, telling me what he’d done. No phone call. No heads-up. Nothing. He just sent them over, thinking we would accept this change like we’d seen it coming. My mother showed the papers to me, and I went off. Really, I was furious. I marched those documents out of the house, like the papers themselves could pollute the air, infect our lives with the stink of this man who’d left us for nothing.
My mother, she’d never seen me so upset. Even with all those beatings, at the hands of that other guy, I never let my anger show the way I let it show here. I’d grabbed a book of matches from the kitchen and set all those official papers down on the driveway, flattened them to the asphalt with a stomp of my foot.
I can’t be sure, but I think I was crying—tears of rage, mostly. Tears of fury.
My mother walked over to where I stood on the driveway, saw I was fixing to light a match—said, “Baby Ray, what you doin’?”
I said, “I’m gonna burn these papers, Mama. I will never live a day in that man’s name.”
And my mom, she just kind of sidled up next to me on that driveway as I set a match to those papers. There was nothing to say, really. She put her hand on my back, and we stood there watching those papers burn—didn’t take but a long moment for the fire to burn all the way through, and in that long moment I could see the whole of my life in the thick black smoke that curled to the sky. I can still see that plume of smoke. I close my eyes and there it is, and as it reaches up and up and disappears I can see myself shaking the hand of the man whose name I do carry, the man whose name I’ve chosen to celebrate.
I can see me talking to him. I can hear my voice.
Thank you for giving me your name, sir. I will make it great.
TWO
Pick ’Em Up, Bust ’Em
Things were better for a while.
Soon, there was another man to take this guy’s place. He wasn’t so bad. Then there was another man, and he wasn’t so bad, either. The violence, the not knowing if you’d get whooped or menaced or called out. All of that fell away, a bad dream none of us wanted to remember. We still had a roof over our heads—that was the main thing. Everything else, we’d find a way to deal.
Somewhere in there I started playing football. First team I played for was the Lakeland Lumberjacks. I was ten years old, in the sixth grade. I wore a tore-up jersey with the number 85 clinging to the back in bits and pieces. It was the last jersey they had, because I was late to sign up.
Football—real football, organized football—couldn’t have found me at a better time, because I needed to get out and do my own thing, find some way to channel all those emotions building up inside of me. I mean, when you grow up on the wrong end of a beatdown, you look for ways to put some of that rage and frustration back into the world, and football became my release.
I might not have signed up at all if it weren’t for the coach—a good, good guy named Biscuit. He noticed me one day while I was running around in the park playing in a pickup game. I wasn’t the fastest kid in the neighborhood, wasn’t the quickest, wasn’t the strongest, but when we got a game going I could figure it out. It was easy for me—reading the other players, getting to where the ball was headed. Don’t know why, don’t know how, but the game unfolded for me in this crystal-clear way, and what I couldn’t figure out right away I learned soon enough. Mostly, I learned by watching, seeing the whole field—and not just the field I was playing on at the time. The park was just across the way from where the high school team played. Our little field was the same little field they used for some of their practices, so when I wasn’t running around with my own friends I was studying these older kids, watching how they lined up, how they moved, how they made things happen.
I was a quick study, shot through with a confidence I’d yet to justify. Got to where I thought I knew a couple things. And I guess I did, because here was this coach, Biscuit, seeing something to like in my game.
He came over to me—said, “Son, why you ain’t playing football?”
I said, “Football? Thought that’s what we were playing.” I pointed to the football that had come to rest at our feet, just to show him I wasn’t being smart. (Okay, so maybe I was being smart—maybe it was some of that confidence shining through.)
He said, “No, I mean Little League. On a team. Uniforms and everything.”
Little League football, that’s what we called it. Other parts of the country—other parts of Florida, even—it was Pop Warner football, Pee Wee football, youth league football, but this was the first I was hearing of it, and Biscuit called it Little League. Anyway, it sounded good to me, and I said as much, but I also
said I didn’t think my mother would allow it. I was wide-eyed, excited to play organized football, but I was also realistic.
He said, “Let me talk to her.”
I tried not to laugh, didn’t want to be disrespectful—said, “You? Talk to my mama? That’s the last thing you want to do is talk to my mama ’bout me playing football.”
He couldn’t know this, of course, but I would have had an easier time getting my mother to sign me up for astronaut school. But Biscuit was determined, so I brought him round to see what we could see. In a million years, I didn’t think my mother would go for something like this—for one thing, we didn’t have the fifteen dollars it cost to register—but what did I care if this dude wanted to talk to her about it? If anything, it would be fun to watch him dance.
Sure enough, my mother wasn’t having any of it. She put her hand up before Biscuit could get through his pitch—said, “I don’t want to hear it. You tellin’ me this boy should take the time to play a game? He’s got too much to do around the house. There’s nobody else to watch these kids.”
Oh man, she shut him down. Then she ran through a whole list of reasons why I couldn’t play, said she couldn’t get me to games or practices, couldn’t pick me up from games or practices, couldn’t pay my registration fee, and on and on.
When she finished her list, Biscuit put up his own hand—said, “I’ll take care of all that.”
Now, there’s one thing you need to know about my sweet, proud mama—she wasn’t about to be told what for or shhhed by this strange, biscuit-shaped man who’d come into her kitchen to talk football. She had a lot of questions, concerns, and she would run through all of them, in her own time. Probably, she wanted to know Biscuit’s background, what he did for a living, whether he had children of his own, but this part of the conversation wasn’t meant for my ears. That was the beauty of back then. Back then, grown-up business was grown-up business. Kid business was kid business. Nowadays, everybody’s business is everybody’s business, but I remember my mother flashing me a look, telling me I should disappear into another room for this part of the conversation.
She was on it, my mother. No, she didn’t always make the best choices when it came to the men in her life, but she figured it out, best she could. Through it all, she had us kids covered. She had our backs. End of the day, every day, she was my hero, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t looking for ways to let her know how I felt about her. The best way was to tell it to her straight, with a little help from Tupac. To this day, every Mother’s Day, I call her up and sing her a couple lines from “Dear Mama.”
Now ain’t nobody tell us it was fair
No love from my daddy, ’cause the coward wasn’t there . . .
I put my heart all the way into it—same way my mother put her heart all the way into me, into each of us kids. And here she was, spread crazy thin by work and life, stressed, with hardly enough time to even breathe, and still she made time to think about something that might have been important to me that seemed foolish to her. Bottom line: she fought for us, even if it wasn’t always clear to her what she was fighting for, and here she had no way to know how important this was to me—how important it could be, anyway.
Don’t remember how long they talked, Biscuit and Mama, but it seemed like forever. It felt to me in my little-kid head like my future hung in the balance. For the first time in my life, I wanted something that had nothing to do with the care and feeding of my family. Something for me—just me. I hadn’t even realized I wanted it so bad, until Biscuit came through the door and started making his pitch. Still, my mother wasn’t ready to sign me up. She had to think about it, and think about it. Every day, I begged her to let me play. But she put me off until the last day of sign-ups, when she finally gave in. That’s why I got the last jersey in the pile, the number practically falling off. It was such a sorry-looking thing, but I didn’t care. To me, it was like an official NFL jersey. To me, it was like a rite of passage just to be able to put on a uniform—any uniform.
Anyway, it was 1985, and my number was 85, and I thought that was some kind of sign, the numbers matching up like that. My mom keeps a picture of me in that jersey, and every time I see it I get this big old smile on my face. It takes me back—my first taste of the game, dressed out in a shabby, worn uniform with the jersey number tore off and half gone.
My mother came to the first organized game. It was the only time she ever made it to one of my games, all the way through high school. Wasn’t that she didn’t support her kids—she couldn’t. There just wasn’t time. In her heart, she supported us, but her heart had to punch the clock at three jobs, be in all these different places at the same time. She was always working, always chasing after my sisters and brother, so she didn’t have time to come out and watch me play football—or, later on, to watch me wrestle. That’s just how things were, and I understood it, but she did make it to that first one. She made a special point of it. She came as much to check me out, to see what I was up to, as she did to cheer me on.
We used to play our games at Bryant Stadium, a run-down place right across the street from the projects where we lived. Wasn’t much of a field, the grass had been run down to a ribbon of dirt reaching from end zone to end zone, but to me it was like playing in the Orange Bowl. So there I was with my ragged Lakeland Lumberjacks jersey, number 85, and my mom was at the field to see me get the first reverse on a kickoff and run the ball back seventy-five yards for a touchdown. As moments go, it was pretty damn great, but I don’t think I’d remember it thirty years later if my mother hadn’t been there to see it. It’s through her eyes that this one play has lived on in my memory. Here’s what she saw, behind the gate in the end zone: me, crossing the goal line and still running, running, running to her. Here’s what I remember: me, crossing the goal line and thinking I wanted to collect my mother in my arms and twirl her around like we’d just won the Super Bowl or something. That’s how happy I was to be able to run toward her like that, in that moment.
I gave her the ball. It wasn’t hers to keep, mind you—don’t think we had but one. It wasn’t mine to give. But I gave it to her like a big grand gesture, like I was thanking her for letting me play, for filling up all those spaces where my father might have been. For being a hero to a boy who needed one.
• • •
Coach Biscuit felt bad about handing me that torn-up jersey, but he was an old-school coach. He was tough, but fair. He was a product of his time, which meant he was willing to do a lot of things a father would have done for a bunch of kids who didn’t have one at home. Just in terms of getting my life organized, finding a way to fit football into what I had to do at home, what I had to do at school—he was all over it. He was good to his word, picked me up to take me to practices, made sure I got home after, covered my registration fee. But it went beyond that, of course. It went all the way to teaching us what it was like to be a part of a team, a part of something bigger than just ourselves. Wasn’t just me taking this in—no, we were a team full of lost, misfit kids. Most of us came from single-parent homes in the projects. Most of us couldn’t afford to be out there every day during football season. We had someplace else we needed to be, chores we had to do at home, whatever. But Coach Biscuit knew we needed to be out there on that field, with him. He knew it ran deeper than just football.
It put me in mind of the words I took in from my mother, trying to explain how things were with my father: I can’t teach you to be a man. No, she couldn’t. But Biscuit, he could teach me some of that. Not all of it, but some.
Survival—that was the big message that came through in practice. We’d go at it, hard. One-on-one. And the boy who survived these battles was the boy who could get it done. Football, the game itself, was almost beside the point. It didn’t much matter. The scoreboard, it didn’t much matter. What mattered was what the game could teach you. What mattered was a sense of discipline, the structure the season could give to our days. Also, the Lumberjacks gave me a sense of co
mmunity, a place to belong. In addition to Biscuit, there were three or four assistant coaches, and they took an interest in us, mentored us, checked in with us to see how we were doing off the field.
For me, the game became my sanctuary. It took me out of my own head and whatever ugliness was around me and just set me loose. And the game itself, the way Biscuit had us playing it, was a revelation. Before I started playing with the Lakeland Lumberjacks, it was every man for himself. Our street version of football was a game we called “Pick ’em Up, Bust ’em,” which was pretty much like what it sounds. Everybody chased after the guy with the ball. No pads. No boundaries. That was the game. When I had the ball, I just had to deal with it, you know? And when I was chasing after the guy with the ball—well, then he would have to deal with me.
Little League football was different—way different. There were rules. There were set plays. Full pads. Refs. But my “Pick ’em Up, Bust ’em” training? It gave me a great foundation. It set the course.
One of Biscuit’s drills was to have us lie on our backs, middle of the field, head-to-head with one of our teammates. Coach would blow the whistle and we’d have to spring up off the ground and do battle. One dude would have the ball, one dude would be the defender—he’d keep switching it up. We’d lie there, ready to spring to our feet at the sound of that whistle, and the kid on D would have to get the other dude back to the ground or force him out of the circle. It was a grudge match, man. It was on. And a couple times through I started to realize that this was the essence of the game—all there was to it. Football, it was just one-on-one. All I had to do was beat this one other person across the ball from me. That’s it. One and done. Soon as I figured that out, I waited for the rest of it. Me, beating another person? That was easy. That was nothing. Had to be more to it than that, right? But there was never any more to it. This was football, at its most basic. This was football, all the way up to my time in the NFL. Beat the guy on the other side of the ball—all the time if you can, more times than not if that’s the best you can do.
