by Ray Lewis
I quit. Right then and there. Wasn’t a temper tantrum kind of quit—no, it was more of an I don’t have time for this kind of quit. And as soon as I walked out of that gym, I ran into a man who would go on to have a huge influence on me. His name was Steven Poole, and he was the wrestling coach. He saw me storm through those gymnasium doors, saw that I was a little riled up, and took the time to find out what was troubling me. He was one of those coaches who really took the time to connect with us kids—an educator, more than anything else. He heard me out, let me vent and moan about how basketball players were soft, whatever it was that had gotten me going.
When I was through, he said, “Got something I want to show you.”
He took me to see the wrestling team, which used to practice in the cafeteria. They didn’t even have gym space for these guys—that’s how far down the ladder they were in terms of being a popular sport in our junior high school. They’d moved all the tables to the side, set down this giant mat on the floor. It was the strangest thing, because this was where we took our lunch, every day, and here the place was completely different. First thing I noticed was the smell—it smelled like a locker room, all sweaty and grimy. All that time eating lunch in that same big room—a lot of times, the only decent meal I’d have all day—I’d never had a whiff of what went on in there during wrestling season. And it was super hot, like someone had cranked the heat all the way up, and there on this mat were all these sweaty kids, just going at each other, working on drills, grips, moves—all of it.
I didn’t want any part of it then, but it must have made an impression, because I came back to wrestling a year later, when I was up at the high school. What happened was I met a man who used to coach my father, who’d been a big-time high school wrestler. This man was now a referee, and he sought me out one day in the gym and handed me a small booklet, almost like a magazine. How he came to find me, I never knew. I had no idea who this guy was, or what he was handing me, so he went to explain. He said, “Boy, you open that book, you might see something.”
So I did. Turned out this man had given me the Kathleen High School wrestling yearbook from 1975. The year I was born. The year my father set a whole bunch of records. There it was, on the very first page. Elbert Jackson, Elbert Jackson, Elbert Jackson . . . and as I tore through that yearbook I saw the man didn’t just set a bunch of records—he’d set them all. There was his picture—a face that could have been mine. And there was his legacy—a legacy I could not let stand.
His name was all over that book. Most wins. Most pins. Fastest pin. Everything you could possibly win or accomplish, he’d done it. And as I kept looking at his name, over and over, up and down the page, it set me off. Got me thinking his name didn’t deserve to live on like that, not with the way he’d stepped out on me and my mother, me and my sisters.
I took that book home and showed it to my mother.
She said, “Where’d you get that?”
I said, “This man gave it to me. A referee. Said he used to be Daddy’s wrestling coach.”
My mother looked at the book for another few moments, looked at my father’s picture, then handed it back to me—said, “Well, what do you know?” There was nothing else to say.
I took that book to my room in the garage and studied it. Then I hung it over my bed, opened to the page with my father’s records. Every night, I’d look at that book and get mad. That fury I’d started to feel? It grew in ways I couldn’t even recognize. Seeing my father’s name like that, seeing him celebrated. It set me off. I’d drop to the floor and start flipping through my deck of cards, doing my push-ups, doing my sit-ups. Just then, those push-ups and sit-ups came from a place of pure anger. And as I worked, as I raged, I said to myself, “His name will never be remembered.”
I actually spoke these words out loud, to the empty room.
I said, “I will erase that man’s name.”
I said, “It will be like he was never here.”
• • •
So I wrestled.
Sophomore year, I moved up to Kathleen High School. A lot of athletes at the school played multiple sports, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to be doing football in the fall and wrestling over the winter.
Coach Poole was still over at the junior high school my tenth-grade year. For now, the wrestling coach was a science teacher who didn’t know the first thing about wrestling. I won’t give his name here, because there’s no need to embarrass this man, but he would just kind of stand around in these big dorky glasses with his clipboard, his arms folded, and tell us to keep practicing, hard. That was all he could say to us—“Keep practicing hard, boys.”
He had one or two assistants who knew the sport well enough to teach us a couple moves, teach us some strategy, but for the most part we were on our own. We wrestled by instinct, by watching our teammates, our opponents.
First thing we had to figure out was my weight. Me and a couple dudes were in the same weight class—165 pounds. But we didn’t have anybody to wrestle at 189. I must’ve weighed about 167, maybe 170, so I raised my hand, said I’d take on the bigger guys—said, “It don’t matter.” And, really, it didn’t. I was cock-strong, country strong. Anybody under 200 pounds, I could kind of deal with them, even with my lack of experience. I could give away ten pounds, twenty, thirty. I figured out straightaway that wrestling wasn’t all that different than football. It was one-on-one. That’s all. Even with my lack of experience, my lack of coaching. Long as I could outthink you, outhustle you, outdrive you, I could deal with you.
I had my way, my style. My thing was to bait my opponent, keep after him, make him go after me. I was aggressive, but I had this switch in me, needed to be flipped. I needed to be confronted. If it was just strategy, just tactics, you could maybe outwrestle me, but if you got me riled—well, then it was on. My go-to move was to get my opponent in a big old bear hug, turn it into a hip toss, pin him to the ground. Ninety percent of my matches, that’s how it would go. Once I got my hands on you, that was it. Nobody was picking me up off that floor, throwing me down. Kids weren’t into lifting the way some of them are today. And you can bet I was the only high school wrestler with my crazy regimen of push-ups and sit-ups, so nobody could match my strength. Even if you were two hundred pounds, you couldn’t match my strength.
I made it all the way to states that first year. Nobody from my school had ever won a state title—not even my father, with all his wrestling records. But here my lack of experience finally caught up to me. I sailed through the first couple rounds. Outflanked this one dude—boom! Pinned this other dude—boom! Next thing you know, I came up against this kid from Miami in the semifinals. He was wearing an orange singlet. I never knew his name. I didn’t want to know. Names, they make it personal, get in the way. Even on the football field. I had your number. That’s all.
But this dude from Miami, I can still see his face. I can still see that stupid orange singlet. He was well coached, I’ll say that. He had a plan. Me, I had no such thing. He knew my strength. He was prepared for it. I could only try to dominate—and I did, first two periods. I was up in the match, in control, but then I made a fool move. We were grappling, each of us looking for an opening, and finally I underhooked him, clamped my hands around his chest. Usually, when I clamped my hands, it was all over. If I got up under you, that was a bad day for you, because there’s no easy way for you to come back from that hold. But this guy was cock-strong, same as me. He was country strong, too—probably one of the strongest guys I ever touched. The fool move came as I was getting ready to twist him, toss him. He hit me at the exact same time. He’d seen what was coming from me and he reacted to it, like he must’ve been coached. It was a smart move—the only move he could have made, really.
See, when someone’s fixing to twist you like that, the response move is to hook your opponent’s arm and roll with him, so that’s what this orange kid from Miami did to me, and he was so swift, so sharp, so strong I didn’t notice what he was doing until it was
too late. I caught myself as I went to the ground—thinking, No, don’t let your left shoulder go down. But sure enough, he drove that left shoulder down and pinned me, and the moment the referee whistled the match it’s like all the air was let out of me.
I was devastated—although, truth was, I had no business being devastated. I just didn’t know how to wrestle, was all. I could battle the heck out of people, I could deal with them, grapple with them, drive them to the ground, but I was just throwing my strength around. I didn’t have a plan, didn’t have a clue.
So this was where Steve Poole checked back into the picture. Our principal from Kathleen Middle School came up to take the job at the high school, and he brought a bunch of faculty with him, including Coach Poole, so when I went out for the wrestling team the next year he was waiting for me. He knew about my run to states the year before, of course. He actually sought me out in the hallway one day during football season, before wrestling even started. He said, “I finally got you to wrestle, huh?”
I said, “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Poole. I could have used your help last year.”
He laughed, shook my hand—said, “It’s a new year, Mr. Lewis.”
Coach Poole knew wrestling. He was known around our little town as “The Magician on the Mat.” Folks actually called him that, if you can believe it—but the name fit. Coach Poole had it down. He was short, didn’t look like much of an athlete, but he knew wrestling. He was powerful, knew how to harness that power. As much as anyone else in my life to that point, he prepared me for battle. All that mixed martial arts stuff you see today, he had me working on those types of moves back then. I had moves, countermoves, moves to counter your countermoves.
He asked me, “How good you want to be?”
I said, “The best ever.”
He said, “How much time you willing to put into it?”
I said, “How much time you got?”
I was always one of the last to leave football practice, and I brought that same mind to wrestling. I’d be there until Coach Poole shut the lights off, and then he would drop me off at home in his blue pickup truck. His big thing was to keep moving out there on the mat, so my hands were always moving. He had me bouncing on the balls of my feet, ducking, juking, weaving. He had me doing a ten-play move, a twenty-play move. He had me firing like a machine—wasn’t anybody in the state of Florida could keep up with me. I made quick work of my opponents. It was just too easy. Ten or twelve seconds, my matches were over. My whole junior year, working my way back to states, I don’t think I had a match last longer than twelve seconds. I would come at you—hard, quick—and touch you and slam you into the ground and it was over.
Nobody could deal with me on that mat. Nobody. States? It’s like it was a foregone conclusion, you could write it down. But then I messed up in the finals. I let myself be beat, gave away a point late in the match, didn’t think all those steps ahead like Coach had trained me to do, and I was devastated all over again.
Coach Poole was just as disappointed as me—hard to believe, but it was so. He felt for me, man. He knew how hard I worked—how hard we both worked. He knew what it meant.
I said, “I’m coming back to finish this.”
So we went back to work, but there was a whole other football season I had to get through before I could wrestle senior year. And do you know what? I took wrestling with me out onto that football field—because, back then, wrestling mattered most. Football was just a way to lift my wrestling—a way to fill the time until wrestling. Slipping blocks, getting up under people, staying low, engaging—this became my off-season workout. I’d always approached football as a one-on-one game, hand-to-hand combat. That’s how I broke it down. But now that I knew what I was doing, now that I had all these moves, it’s like I was cut a whole other way. This was my first football season as a wrestler—a real wrestler, working with all the benefit of Coach Poole’s training. And I was a different cat out there. I was. I’d learned from all that time in the gym, all that time on the mat, that I could make you react or lean a certain way. Running backs used to always wonder how I could find the same hole as them, the same time as them, and it was because of wrestling. I was working through all these ten-play moves, twenty-play moves, got to where I was outthinking everybody on that field before the ball was even snapped. And that was all wrestling, man. That was all Coach Poole, teaching me to work with my hands, to bounce on my feet, to think ten steps ahead.
By the time wrestling came back around, senior year, I was good and ready. I was confident. I’d already snapped every one of my father’s records. Most Wins. Most Technicals. Most Pins. Some of those, I snapped off sophomore year. The rest fell in my junior year. Each time, I’d come home, take that book off the wall, make a little x through my father’s name in the record book, say a little prayer, hang it back up. I did that about a dozen times. The last record to fall was his Fastest Pin record—seven seconds. Snapped that one my junior year.
After that, there was just one record left—only, it wasn’t a record; it was the state title. He’d never won one of those. Nobody from Lakeland had ever won one of those, so this was my goal. Even with football heating up, lots of attention coming my way from college coaches, this was my one and only goal.
One thing I want to make clear: my father didn’t just wrestle. No, he was the cornerback of the football team, too—and a stud cornerback at that. From what I could tell, he was probably the roughest athlete to ever come out of Lakeland, but I didn’t care about what he did on the football field. I didn’t have that record book tacked to the wall over my bed.
Erasing his wrestling records and making it like he’d never even been here—that’s what drove me.
Coach Poole knew this was my motivation, and he fed into it. It was him, reminding me my daddy had never won a state title. It was him, telling me football was just a way to get ready for wrestling. It was him, egging me on. He was in my head, that whole off-season, after that loss in the state finals. He used to always ask me, “Ray, you’re always so angry when you wrestle. Why you wrestle so mad?”
And I’d say, “Because I’m chasing demons, Coach.”
All through high school—sophomore year, junior year, senior year—I didn’t take a break. Not once. All through college and pro ball, too. I didn’t know what taking a break felt like until all that confetti dropped in New Orleans after we won that last Super Bowl. I didn’t know what break meant. I didn’t know what it was to go to sleep with a sound mind, to rest easy. It wasn’t my way. Even when I was hurt, when I had my surgeries, this burning inside of me would not let me be still. If it’s just pain, then so be it. If it’s just stitches, may or may not pop out, so be it. I never had time to lie down. There was always work to do, and it was in high school that I developed this mind-set. It was working with Coach Poole, trying to grab that state title, and it came from pure anger. It came from wanting to erase my father’s name from that record book.
To lift myself up by beating him down.
• • •
Senior year, I had a plan.
I showed up to wrestle, first day of preseason, and put it to Coach Poole—said, “You ready?”
He looked at me like I was out of my head. The man lived and breathed wrestling. It was the first day of preseason. The newspapers were talking about me as one of the best wrestlers in the state. Of course he was ready. So he said, “Ready? Me? What you talking about, Ray?”
I said, “We’re not wrestling one eighty-nine no more. I’m done with that. We’re wrestling two twenty.”
He wasn’t expecting this. It went against the way the sport was played, to give away all that weight for no good reason. But that was just it—I had a good reason. Already, I’d gone up in weight my sophomore season, because we had too many guys my size and it didn’t much matter, but that’s not what I’d call a good reason. That was just necessity. That was just me taking the hit for my team. Now I was bigger, stronger—wrestling at 189, legit. But to give b
ack twenty or thirty pounds? Just because? It made no sense to Coach Poole.
He said, “Ray, they outweigh you by thirty pounds. What are you thinking?”
I said, “That’s just it, Coach. I beat these guys all season. Ain’t nobody can deal with me at one eighty-nine.”
He took my point—and that’s how we played it.
All season long, there were just two dudes who pushed me—both of them from Auburndale, one of our rival high schools. Even though I never bothered to learn my opponents’ names, I knew these two dudes. We went at each other so often at county tournaments, there was no avoiding each other. One of them, Victor Johnson, I ran into at the Polk County Invitational. Victor was about the same as me on the scales, but he had huge hands—just massive. And I knew him from football, too—he was a running back. But on the wrestling mat, those hands could be trouble. He’d grab me, and it was like he was trying to lift a sack of flour. He had a vise grip, man—like I said, trouble. He was an animal. If you let him ride you, you were done.
Coach Poole had me wrestle Johnson on his feet. “Make him stand up, Ray,” he said. “He can’t beat you on your feet.”
Only thing was, I couldn’t get Victor on his feet too early. The move was to wait him out, pick my spots, find some moment late in the match and make it my own.
It worked out that this one match went into overtime. I was hanging on. Victor Johnson was hanging on. Each of us was kind of waiting for the other one to make his move. Finally, I made mine. There came a point when I realized I could either try to roll him and ride him, or I could let him up—just like Coach Poole had said. So I let him up, got him on his feet—but he got a point out of it, and I could see he was surprised that I’d given him that point. In my head he was about to play my game. I was lining him up. And as the clock was winding down I saw my opening. I shot toward him, anchor-dove at his shins, hard. He started to twist, but by that time I was already on him. He was done.
