by Ray Lewis
The national television piece, it wasn’t a distraction so much as it was a motivation—that’s how I looked at it. Our motto was simple: big-time players make big-time plays in big-time games. Out of that came another motto: this is how we feed our kids. And this was just one of those games, how we made ourselves known.
Folks told me later that Keith Jackson took a shine to me up in the booth. He was calling the game for ABC, kept saying my name. I was in on so many tackles, there was no avoiding me—“Ray Lewis, a young kid out of Lakeland, Florida.” In that folksy, singsong voice of his.
This was my first official game that I’d started, so I paid attention to my stats—but then, I always paid attention to my stats, counted my tackles. This was how I took my measure, same way a basketball player might keep track of his points. Ten tackles—that was always the magic number. You get to twenty points on a basketball court, ten tackles on defense, you were having a good game, so my whole focus was on getting to double digits, and here in this Colorado game I got to ten tackles by the end of the first half.
You get to ten tackles, everything else is gravy, right?
Randy Shannon was into it, too. He was keeping score right alongside me. He came over, end of the second quarter, told me I’d hit my number. I didn’t need him to tell me, but I liked that he did; I liked that he knew what was driving me out there.
He said, “Already at ten, Ray. Already at ten.”
And I said, “Ain’t no stopping me, Coach.”
And, really, there wasn’t. Second half, Keith Jackson ended up calling my name a whole lot more. The young kid out of Lakeland, Florida, ended up with close to twenty tackles, a sack, four pass breakups. It was just a crazy game. A statement game. And you have to realize, we had an outstanding defense that year. We had Rohan, Warren Sapp, Patrick Riley—these dudes came to play, so it’s not like I was running around out there all alone. No, there was help all around, and we held on to win 35–29, made ourselves a factor in the national conversation.
• • •
A lot of folks in college football watched that Colorado game, and the takeaway for them was that we were a handful. And, just being honest, that I was a handful. I’d come out of nowhere, far as a lot of people were concerned. I wasn’t a top recruit, not by any stretch. Wasn’t even in the media guide. And here I was, on a rampage, messing with Kordell Stewart’s head, getting into his game plan. It set me up, that game—got me into a little hot water, even. After the game, a reporter came by to talk to me. He wanted to talk about the game, but he also wanted to talk about my game, and here I’d never been shy. Yeah, this was my first college start, but I’d just put up some big numbers, on a big stage. I’d just made a statement. So I said what I was feeling. I said, “By the time I’m through, I’ll be the greatest player to ever play for the Miami Hurricanes.”
And just like that, I was in the spotlight. Got a big response, a line like that. It was all over the sports talk shows. Columnists wrote their little pieces, left and right. Wasn’t exactly a foot-in-the-mouth type moment, because I meant what I said—but if I’d known the firestorm it would set off, I might have kept quiet. At least until my second game.
Right away, I started getting calls from all these former Miami players—a lot of them giving me a hard time for pumping myself up like that. They’d say things like, “That’s a tall order, son.” Or, “Why don’t you get a few more games under your belt before you start running your mouth?” It was mostly a good-natured hard time, don’t think anyone was too upset, but it got people talking, I’ll say that.
Best call I got was from Michael Irvin—who was still tearing up the league for the Dallas Cowboys, on his way to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He said, “I like it, Ray. That’s Hurricane football.”
I had to pinch myself, that Michael Irvin was taking the time out of his day to call me—but it wasn’t what he said so much as that he called. His message, I already knew, didn’t need to hear it from him. Damn straight it was Hurricane football! Damn straight I would be the best player to come out of the U! I didn’t need to hear from anyone else on that. An outcome like that, it was up to me and no one else. But just hearing from Michael Irvin at all, just hearing from all these other great players was something special.
Wasn’t just my team that was now part of the conversation.
I talked for a while with Michael Irvin. Everybody called him “The Playmaker.” It was a name he encouraged, so he knew as well as anybody what it meant to strut, to play with confidence. And I think he appreciated that same quality in me—that’s why he called. And when it came time to end the call he said, “Now go out and do it.”
• • •
Hurricane football—that’s a phrase you hear a lot when you play for Miami. There’s a certain style of football we play at the U. We’re dead serious about our game, and I always appreciated it when someone picked up on that, and here we were three games into my freshman season, undefeated, on a nice little roll.
Fifth week of the season, we were still undefeated, headed up to Tallahassee to play Florida State, the number-one team in the nation. Another big game—for me, especially. Just a couple months earlier, I sat with Chuck Amato, the Seminoles’ defensive coordinator, who told me I’d be stuck behind Derrick Brooks for two years, so a part of me had something to prove. Of course, it was only part of me with something to prove, because the validation wasn’t for me. I didn’t need Chuck Amato or Bobby Bowden or anyone else on that Florida State coaching staff to know they made a mistake, letting me slip away from their program. I already knew this myself, and that’s all that counted. No, the real motivation here was that I wanted to make these people pay—told myself I would put a hurt on them they’d never seen coming, make them regret writing me off the way they did.
So, yeah . . . there was that.
Charlie Ward was the Florida State quarterback—a magician with a football in his hands. Charlie ended up winning the Heisman Trophy that year, and leading the Seminoles to their first national championship, and he was just lighting it up. It was a big rivalry, man. This was the first I knew what it meant, Florida State going up against Miami, and that stadium was thumping. We had our rivalries back in high school. Those games against the Lakeland Dreadnaughts were knock-down, drag-outs, so I knew what it was to hate on an opponent, and here there was some bad blood. All that week, leading up to the Florida State game, there were stories about how Charlie would hold up against the “Eye of the Storm.” Already, that’s what they were calling me—the middle linebacker on a strong Miami Hurricanes team.
The Eye of the Storm.
A young kid out of Lakeland, Florida.
Four games in—two and a half games, really—and I already had a nickname, already had a reputation, and I played to it. But that Florida State team, they were just too polished. They were stacked at every position, efficient, poised—just a solid, balanced team. And as much as I hated to admit it, they were well coached, too. We were dominant on defense, but we couldn’t move the ball against the Seminoles, so we played to a kind of standoff, most of the way. The game was close, but then, Florida State got two picks late and turned the game around, and we wound up on the short end of a 28–10 score.
It was a disappointing loss for us as a team, but for me personally it was huge. In a good way. Don’t mean to make it sound like I was a selfish player, because winning was everything. Forget those double-digit tackles, the nicknames, the calls from Michael Irvin. None of that mattered if it didn’t come wrapped inside a win. But just to be on that field, in the middle of that rivalry, playing in front of all those fans, a lot of folks who knew me from my high school career—that was an important milestone. It told me I was playing with the big boys now. It told me that Hurricane football was serious.
• • •
A lot of my teammates, they didn’t like how this Florida State game was called—the veterans, mostly. Truth was, the Seminoles outplayed us, deserved to win, but some of our guys
wanted to hang it on the officiating. Some of them wanted to hang it on the coaching, even. They didn’t like some of the personnel moves we made late in the game, and I don’t want to call anyone out here, but the feeling was we might have had a better shot at moving the ball with a different package, a different look.
I was just a rookie, so it wasn’t up to me to agree or disagree on this. I kept my mouth shut, but the veteran players were talking up a storm, got it in their heads that the thing to do was boycott our Monday practice. Far as I was concerned, it was just a bunch of noise, but I could only go along with it. When you’re a freshman, you do as you’re told. And besides, our Monday practices weren’t much. We looked at film, went for a light run. So instead, the upperclassmen put on a barbecue at Thirty-Six—the dormitory-type suites where a lot of the guys lived.
Wasn’t much of a protest—it was more of a party, really. There was a lot of talking, a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of nonsense, but do you know what? Out of that little piece of rebellion, we came together as a team, got a good dialogue going. The coaches, they didn’t like how we’d broken ranks, but they let us speak our minds, and underneath all of that we began to feel like we were all in this thing together. It was Hurricane football, in a whole new way. Wasn’t the way I would have handled it—because, hey, the Seminoles beat us fair and square. But there was some good that came out of this.
Out of that, we went on a little tear and won the next four games by big, big scores. Syracuse, 49–0. Temple, 42–7. Pittsburgh, 35–7. Rutgers, 31–17. Those Big East teams, they couldn’t touch us, man, and on the back of those big wins we climbed to number four in the national rankings. It set us up for a Big East showdown at West Virginia—the Mountaineers ranked ninth in the country.
This was a game we should have won and, got to say, the main reason we lost was me. Not because I got beat. Not because I didn’t play well. But because I didn’t play much at all. See, this was the game where Robert Bass came back from his knee injury—and, nothing against Robert, but he wasn’t ready. He got his job back, but he wasn’t up to it just yet. Forget that the dude couldn’t match me on that field, that nobody could match me on that field—physically, he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t all the way healed. But he’d been cleared to play, so he played. He had seniority, so he played. That kind of thing, in the college game, it’s just understood. I didn’t agree with it, but I didn’t question it.
Now, let me just be clear: I don’t believe we were a championship team that year, but there’s no denying we were in the conversation. Here we were, Week Ten, the number-four team in the country, going up against another top-ten team—so, yeah, definitely, we were in the conversation. But then I barely even saw the field, and we ended up losing a close game, 17–14. Would it have made a difference, me being out there instead of Robert? Well, it’s not for me to say—but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway. Hell yeah it would have made a difference. The dude was not a hundred percent, and West Virginia took advantage of that. They hurt us up the middle. On the six or seven plays I did get into the game, I made damn near every tackle, so it would have changed things up. Plus, we’d been on a nice momentum run, had a good flow going, a good energy.
Robert Bass could play—my goodness, he went on to play in the league, so of course he could play. But he was much bigger than I was, much stockier. He played a different type of game, gave us a whole different look. Me, I was quick, played with a ton of energy, tore through that line like a rifleshot. That afternoon in West Virginia, we let the air out of whatever mojo we had going on that midseason run, whatever version of Hurricane football we’d been playing.
We finished up our regular season with a big win against Memphis, but I didn’t get to play much, and I only got in for three plays in our Fiesta Bowl game against Arizona—a game we ended up losing 29–0—so in the end it’s tough to look back on my first season as anything but a disappointment. And it was, but a lot of good came back to me underneath that disappointment. For one thing, I’d shown the college football world that I could play. For another, even more important, I’d shown my brothers on D that I could play. I won the coaches over, too. And I’d started to build some good friendships on that team, so that by the time my sophomore year rolled around, we were tight.
We were good.
We were ready.
• • •
Sophomore year, I came into camp ripped, pissed, hungry.
I was a full-fledged, card-carrying Hurricane by this point. I was seasoned, proven. When it started out, folks had their doubts about me, about my size. I joined the program late as a freshman, but I made my mark right away, so by now I was moving around campus with confidence. I even had me a serious girlfriend named Tatyana. We met freshman year and hit it off. From the very beginning, it felt to me like we were meant to be together, would always be together, so that’s how I looked out at the world. Doesn’t mean I was always the world’s best boyfriend—but we were tight, solid.
My freshman year on the field, it left a bad taste—and not because I didn’t play as much as I thought I should play. No, I was good with that. Robert Bass, he earned that starting job, didn’t need no freshman lining up to run him off just because he blew out his knee. No, I got my chances, turned some heads. Really, the bad taste had more to do with how we didn’t get it done as a team—which, in a lot of ways, was not at all where my head was at after we were trounced in the Fiesta Bowl. But that’s how it goes sometimes, heat of the moment. When our season just kind of fizzled like that in Arizona, I wasn’t man enough to hang my head and regroup with my brothers. I put the blame someplace else, told myself those last two losses weren’t on me.
But that’s not how you win as a team, is it? That’s no winning mind-set, and here I came roaring into my sophomore year thinking we would not be denied—as a unit. Already, I knew full well that I could dominate, every which way. But football wasn’t wrestling. Yeah, at bottom, when you break it down, it’s just a one-on-one battle, same way it is on the mat. That’s how I’d seen the game all along, since Pop Warner ball. But there are other elements at play. There are parts of the game you can’t control. So my thing was to control what I could, and to influence everything else. To set an example.
Beginning of the next season I started running with the defensive backs in practice. You want to put me on the clock? You want to race? I wasn’t running with the linebackers. I was running with the DBs, putting it out there that there was no stopping me.
However dominant we’d been on defense the year before, now we were dominant on top of dominant. Most of our guys were back from the year before, and it was clear early on that we would be a force. Other teams, they could barely move the ball against us. I’d line up behind Patrick and Warren, alongside of Rat, and we were like a brick wall. First game of the season, at home against Georgia Southern, we were impenetrable. We won that game going away, 56–0. In all my years in football, I’d never been on either side of such a lopsided score—but I’ll tell you, it felt good to be on the winning side. A game like that, it’s what we called a “stat” game—meaning, it was a chance for all of us to rack up our statistics, to pile on. To look at the scoreboard, you’d think all those stats were on the offensive side of the ball, but that’s not how it shook out. Me personally, I got my tackles. They ran the ball a lot. They had this triple option play they tried all day to get to work, but it never even came close to working.
Let me tell you, it was a bad day to be a Georgia Southern Eagle. Oh, it was. It was. And it was a good day to be a Miami Hurricane. Coming out of that game, we were flying. We told ourselves nobody could touch us. We told ourselves the national championship was within reach. Wasn’t about the score we’d just run up in that opening game—because, frankly, Georgia Southern wasn’t a very good team. No, it was about how we’d run up that score. It was about how rock solid we were on D. It was about how the game was slowing down for us. For me. When you play behind someone like Warren Sapp, you learn to see the ga
me in a whole new way. Warren was such a dictator on the field; the game moved to his will, and me moving in behind him, we had to be in sync. The more we played together, the more we moved together. We had our own language out there—didn’t come from studying film, didn’t come from the coaching staff. It came from studying each other, trusting each other. It got to where Warren knew that if he went front side he had to stay front side. If he tried to be an athlete and go front side and then come back to make a play, we’d be exposed. A dude like Warren, you’ve got to learn how to play off of him very quickly.
That front-seven box we featured on that 1994 team—man, I’ve been a part of a lot of great defenses, but I will take that Hurricane line against anybody. We were as solid as solid could be, and off that first big win we went out to Arizona State and grabbed another big win—47–10—sending us to number five in the national rankings.
After that, the talk just grew. Wasn’t a team in college football could run with us, we kept hearing. Although, of course, this was what we kept hearing because it was us running our mouths. But I’m sorry, we were just too good to think of anything less than a title. So when we came home to face the seventeenth-ranked Washington Huskies the third week of the season, we were flying high. Better believe it, there was excitement all around. We had that home winning streak going full tilt—all the way up to fifty-eight games. Fifty-eight games! That covered almost ten years!
It was the first time our two schools had ever played, but we were rivals. Wasn’t like the rivalry we had with Florida State, but there was history. In 1991, we’d both finished with identical 12–0 records, wound up sharing the national title because the bowl schedule was already set and there was no way to settle things on the field. This game came out of that—so, yeah, we were rivals. The personnel was all different, but the feeling was the same.
