by Ray Lewis
There was this one Clewiston dude, I hit him so hard, I knocked him to the team bench, got him all tangled up on the sidelines under the fence. I can still feel the impact of that one hit—a clean play, but it was nasty, sent a signal to anyone paying attention that I’d come to play. Put it out there that William Campbell could take his time healing, because he wasn’t about to get his spot back.
I was the big dog now.
The rest of the guys on that team, they came to play, too, but we couldn’t get it done. We ended up losing that first game to Clewiston, and almost every game after that. It was the story of our season. The games were close, but we couldn’t close them out—got to where we started to think our team was cursed. We were 1–9 on the season, and this was coming off a big year, with a lot of returning players. We kept beating ourselves, was what it was. A lot of our seniors, they were checked out. They were superstars already, in their own minds, some of them headed off to college, on to do bigger things on a bigger field. Me, I was only thinking about the game in front of me, the player lined up in front of me. It was back to that one-on-one battle. By the fifth game of the season, all those losses were starting to weigh on us as a team, but I made my own peace with it—told myself, Hey, we might not win another game, but I guarantee, nobody will beat me in tackles. Nobody will beat me to the ball.
And I saw to it. I gave it my all. Wound up leading the team in tackles . . . from the safety position. And somewhere in there I caught myself thinking this was what I’d been dreaming about all along. This was me, climbing the ladder, playing with the big boys—same dudes I used to watch and model myself after when I was coming up.
The style of play, it was a little different than I was used to in our local pickup games. When it was just us, just a bunch of kids running around in the dirt, the game felt a lot like jazz. We improvised, a lot. We figured it out. There were busted plays every which way, and nobody really stuck to their assignments, because the thrill of the game was getting your hands on the ball, getting in on the tackle. Here at the high school level, though, you were playing in a system, so things were a little more regimented. Wasn’t exactly rigid, what we had in place under Coach Maddox, but we all had our roles. We had to run our lanes, follow the set plays.
The refs mostly left us alone. They were old school, too—the game was still a man’s game. There was no bailing out. If you got hit in the mouth, you took it. Didn’t matter if the other guy got there early or you were hit late, you just had to deal with it. It was not a fixed fight, the way it is today—at the professional level, all the way down to Pee Wee. More and more these days, we’ve got these rules in place so that nobody can hit, and that’s not how the game is meant to be played. Don’t know that I would have stayed in the game, the hands-off way it’s played today, but Coach Maddox let us play. The refs let us play. And even though we didn’t win but one game, we started to find our way.
• • •
Unfortunately for Coach Maddox, he wasn’t along for the rest of the ride. Wasn’t his fault we’d put together such a miserable record, but I guess he took the fall for it, because when my junior year rolled around we had a new coach. His name was Ernest Joe, and he’d graduated from Kathleen High School the year I was born. Coach Joe brought a whole different vibe with him to the field. He knew Lakeland, knew all these distractions lining up away from the football field, looking to do us dirt. He was a new-school coach with an old-school mentality. He still had us playing hard and working our tails off, but he found a way to mix in a shot of pure joy. He had us dancing, man. He used to do this thing at our pep rallies before games. He’d write these crazy-funny raps, work in the names of all his players. He made football fun, and it carried over to the way we played. He changed the spirit of the whole school. He really did.
Winning was a part of that, but the change was in the air before our first game. And we had a lot of those good players from the year before still around so we came out strong. We started out 5–0 that year. We were a dominant team defensively. I played alongside a dude named Torrian Gray, who went on to play at Virginia Tech. The two of us together—man, we were problems—like, real problems. Torrian was smooth, fierce. I just loved playing with him—but our season took a turn before it even got started. Trouble was, we weren’t ready as a team. We had a rough time on the other side of the ball, lost three out of our next five games, ended up missing the playoffs, but it was a step forward for us. It was a good season, a fun season, an important season.
I’ll never forgot one of our toughest losses that season, against the Lakeland Dreadnaughts, our big crosstown rivals. That’s the game that put us out of the playoffs—and for a guy who hated to lose, that was like losing twice. We played the game at Bryant Stadium, and we held the Dreadnaughts close most of the way. We ended up losing by a couple touchdowns, and the guy who killed us was this one dude, Steve Franklin. He wore number 32, and he kept making big plays. After the game he came over to me and did the most remarkable thing. I was sitting on our bench, my head hung low, waiting for my disappointment to pass, when Steve crossed to our side of the field to shake hands.
Now, I’m a sore loser. I am. I hate to lose. Been that way my entire life, so I knew back then to keep to myself when a game didn’t go our way. But there was Steve, holding out his hand—saying, “Pick your head up, Ray.”
I didn’t want to talk to him just then, not at all. We were rivals. I respected him as an athlete. We lived in the same town, went to rival high schools, so we were always hearing about each other’s accomplishments on the field. It was decent of him to come over like that, but I didn’t want any part of it. I just wanted to be by myself.
Still, he kept his hand out, told me again to pick my head up—said, “Next year, it’s gonna be different.”
It took me back, a line like that. Next year, it’s gonna be different. I couldn’t think what he was getting at, so I looked up, finally, and Steve could see he had my attention.
I said, “What you mean by that?”
He said, “I’m coming to play with you next year. Me and Jason Mitchell. We’re coming to Kathleen.”
Jason Mitchell was another demon on that Dreadnaughts team—six foot five, could throw the football eighty yards. From his knees.
I said, “Steve, I don’t got time for this. Quit messing around.”
He said, “No lie. Go ask Coach Joe. He knows all about it.”
Sure enough, Steve was telling the truth. Those two families switched districts, and he and Jason came to play with us, and we were loaded with talent my senior year. At every position, both sides of the ball. It ended up Steve became one of my closest friends. I used to call him Black—and me and Black, side by side, we did a lot of damage. All the way back in preseason, we had our eyes on the state championship. That’s how loaded we were, man—and Coach Joe, he had us playing with such joy, such exuberance. It felt to us like there wasn’t anybody who could touch us.
It was our world and all these other teams, they were just lucky to be on the same field as us for a while. That was our attitude, going into the season, but unlike wrestling it didn’t exactly play out this way.
Our first jamboree game, senior year, our star linebacker, Jason Bamberger, went down with an injury against the Lake Gibson Braves. A jamboree is like a preseason scrimmage, only you don’t really keep score and you only play for two quarters. You weren’t supposed to get hurt in a jamboree game, but Jason was out, and Coach Joe came over to me on the sideline—said, “Ray, would you do me a favor?”
I said, “What’s that, Coach?” I’d only played for Coach Joe a short while, but already I trusted this man like a father. Already I knew I would run through a wall for him.
He said, “Would you fill in for Jason, play a little linebacker for me?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. I said, “No problem, just tell me what you want me to do. I never played linebacker before.”
He said, “Just go to the ball, Ray. All you g
otta do.”
So I went to the ball. And I went to the ball. And I went to the ball. I know we weren’t supposed to keep score in a silly little jamboree game, but I did, in my own way. I kept score the way I always kept score—I counted my tackles. Every change of possession, I’d run over to the sideline with a big old smile on my face and say to Coach Joe, “This is too easy.” It was like a revelation. From the linebacker spot, I could get to the ball a lot quicker than I could from the safety spot. I was making tackle after tackle—seventeen in all. In just two quarters!
So out of that one injury, my whole career took a turn. When my name was called, I was ready.
High school wasn’t just about sports. No way. It was also about girls—and, got to say, the one kind of fed into the other. Somewhere in there, I started dating the captain of the cheerleading team—a beautiful girl named Stephanie Davis. And she wasn’t just beautiful—she was super smart, with a 4.2 grade point average, could talk to you about anything. She ended up going to Florida State, but not before she broke my heart.
You see, this was around the time when this one song was getting a lot of play—“Let’s Chill,” by this R&B group called Guy.
Let’s chill . . .
Let’s settle down . . .
Every time I heard that song, it put me in mind of my girl, and one day they announced on the radio that it was coming up, so I sprinted the two miles or so to Stephanie’s house, because I wanted to play it for her. Well, I pulled up in front of her house, and there behind the bushes I saw Stephanie kissing this other dude, and I was devastated, man. I was struck down. So I turned on my heels and sprinted over to my best friend Kwame King’s house. And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I got to his place, that’s when the song came on the radio, and I just lost it. I started cryin’ like a great big baby.
Kwame sat me down and said, “Let me help you understand women, right now.” And he walked me through how it was—how he saw it, anyway, all of fifteen, sixteen years old. Like he knew.
• • •
We’d been on Coach Joe to start letting us play on both sides of the ball. A lot of programs in the area, you’d see a lot of two-way players, and I was itching to carry the ball. Coach kept saying, “I’ll think about it, Ray. I’ll think about it.” But other than a couple carries in practice, a couple kick returns, I never really got to do my thing.
That all changed when our star tailback, Carlos McCaplain, went down in a game against Lake Wales. We’d started the season on fire, 3–0. Nobody could deal with us. We had the two best linebackers in the county, in me and Black. We had Carlos and a big, fast sophomore named Ken Bridges in the backfield. We had Jason Mitchell at quarterback. We were a handful—we were too much. But then Carlos snapped his knee something awful. I could hear it from the sidelines. And Carlos, he screamed—a chilling sound. First time I ever heard somebody in that kind of pain. I felt for the dude, I really did, but before they could help him off the field my mind was already racing to the rest of our season. Carlos was a big part of our offense. Without him, we’d have to rely more and more on Kenny, and he was young, untested. Also, that boy played soft. I don’t like to knock on one of my guys, but that’s how it was. The dude could run. The dude was ripped. He had a body like Tarzan, but he took a hit like Jane—just sayin’. So we couldn’t rely on him the rest of the way. He was a good option, but he couldn’t carry us the way Carlos could have carried us.
That sense of joy we’d been playing with? It snapped, right along with Carlos’s knee—it seemed to take all the air out of our team, just that one play.
Coach Joe responded by having our quarterback run the ball on our rushing plays—QB Sweep Left and QB Sweep Right. We tried this, first couple possessions, but Lake Wales had us figured out. It took away one of our weapons, lining Jason up in the backfield like that. It signaled the play. Instead of having all that firepower, we were down to just a little bit of juice.
So I went to Coach Joe and pushed him again on letting me run the ball. I said, “Don’t put Jason back there, Coach. Run me instead. I know the plays.”
Remember, I’d been on Coach Joe all season to let me run with the ball, so he must have thought this through a time or two, but it wasn’t until I made this one last push that he gave in. He said, “Okay, get in there at tailback.”
I ran out onto that field with a song in my heart, man. It about killed me to see Carlos go down like that, to look ahead to the rest of our season without him, but at the same time I was excited. I’d been looking forward to this kind of spot, long as I could remember.
Coach called my number straightaway.
Twenty-Eight, Toss. Twenty-Nine, Toss.
And I was off.
Oh man, I was flying—kept us in the game. I ran left. I ran right. I found a bunch of holes—and, once or twice, no hole to be found, I plowed my way through for a couple yards anyway. We ended up losing, but it felt to me like we’d found ourselves a running back. Felt that way to Coach Joe, too. He came up to me after the game and said, “Boy, you can really touch the ball.”
I said, “Yes, sir. Just let me touch it any chance we get.”
From there, he started putting me in on kick returns, at running back, wide receiver. Whatever he thought we needed. And I kept flying, man. All on the back of that first series when Coach Joe called my number, we were playing with joy, energy, all of that. We put in this one package, a wishbone package, with me and Black on the wings and a 292-pound fullback named Tommy Lane in the middle. We had a little hand signal for it, called it the “Bone.” And man, let me tell you something, when Coach called for that Bone, when he flashed that signal, folks sat up in their seats. It woke up the stadium, because that was the kind of football Lakeland hadn’t seen in years—not out of a Kathleen High School team.
It was electric.
I can still remember the first time we went to the Bone in a key spot. We were down 13–0 to the Bartow Yellow Jackets, at home. Bartow always had a physical team. They came at you, hard, and here we couldn’t get anything going. At halftime, our principal came to the locker room to speak to us. Mr. Wright—he’d come to us from Bartow, so the game was personal for him. He gave a really rousing talk, moved a lot of the guys to tears—Mr. Wright was crying a little bit himself. And when he was finished, I stood up and said, “Mr. Wright, I promise you, we won’t lose this game.”
That’s when we went to the Bone.
First possession, second half, third down and long on our own forty-five. Tommy Lane went one way and sealed the lineman coming at him. Black went the other way and sealed his guy. And I shot through this little hole, just a sliver of daylight, but then I stumbled, about three yards from the first down. I started to fall—thinking, Oh no. But as I fell I managed to right myself, thrust myself forward another couple yards, and when I finally went down I fell backward, my arm stretched out over my head, the ball in my hand. Put that ball right on the first down marker, kept that drive alive.
Next play, I got the ball again—this time, boom, seven yards more.
We drove in for the score, and then I scored three times more. One of those was a punt return of about sixty yards. We won that game going away, 28–13.
• • •
We didn’t lose a game the rest of the regular season, but we did lose a bunch of players—too many players, really. One injury after another. And the thing of it is, we only had so much depth to go around. Not to make excuses or anything, but we about ran out of bench. By the end of the year, half our guys were playing both ways, and we were tired. But it didn’t matter. We kept playing, kept winning. It’s like we’d caught a piece of magic. Our opponents, they couldn’t run on me and Steve, and no team in the state had the passing game to make up for it.
We were playing with swagger. By the time we went up against Winter Haven, another big rival, my swagger was at an all-time high. One of the ways I would taunt my opponents was to cut their names into the fade of my hair. My uncle was a barber, and a goo
d sport, and he hooked me up, and for the game against Winter Haven I had him cut in the name of Dmitri Denmark—one of their key guys.
Oh man, I was out of control. But I was feeling it. We were all feeling it—and this was a part of that.
That game against Winter Haven, it was a dogfight. Up and down. Back and forth. All game long, I kept my helmet on, picking my spot. Usually, I didn’t take my helmet off unless I scored, and here I hadn’t taken one in just yet, but I started thinking if I didn’t score soon I’d have to take it off anyway. Didn’t want to waste a perfectly good haircut. Second half, we were down two touchdowns, and I went back to receive the punt at about midfield. Broke two tackles, then broke another and high-stepped it into the end zone, and that was when I finally pulled off my helmet. Caused a big old commotion. I heard one of those Winter Haven dudes yell, “Dmitri, he got your name shaved onto his head! He ain’t got no respect!”
And then it was on.
Fourth quarter, Winter Haven was driving. They had this little pop pass they used to run—kind of like a Peyton Manning play. They’d fake a run, roll, toss it to the tight end real quick. They’d just made a big play on us, they were closing in, and I knew they were coming back with that little pop pass, to the right. I just knew. So I was good and ready. Sure enough, they ran that play, and I took a half step toward the ball, made the pick, and ran it down the field another ten, fifteen yards, and it set up one of the most dramatic finishes of the season. Coach Joe wasn’t liking our passing game that day, didn’t want to throw the ball anymore. It was late in the fourth quarter, time was running out, and we needed to score. Mostly, he didn’t want to throw because it was raining, and he didn’t trust the ball to that slick field. Trouble was, we had about sixty yards to go to reach the end zone, and no way to mix things up without throwing the ball a time or two.
