I Feel Like Going On

by Ray Lewis

  So I sat there through that first round, all these people coming through the suite, hearing all these names called out ahead of me.

  Keyshawn Johnson, wide receiver out of USC, to the New York Jets.

  Kevin Hardy, linebacker out of Illinois, to Jacksonville.

  Simeon Rice, lineman out of Illinois, to Arizona.

  Jonathan Ogden, offensive tackle out of UCLA, to Baltimore.

  That was a big draft for wide receivers, the way it played out. But I wasn’t counting wide receivers. No, I was counting linemen and linebackers, and there were six of them taken off the board by the time we got to the twentieth pick, which belonged to the Miami Dolphins—six guys who went ahead of me because of size. (And just so you know, not one of them lasted in the league longer than seven years.) Each name was like a dagger, but something told me I was destined to fall to this twentieth spot. I mean, I was sitting right there in their stadium. I’d played my college ball right under their noses. The Miami fans, they loved the way I played. I was a Florida boy, through and through. So I told myself it was all good, all those defenders going ahead of me, because it set me up.

  But then, the Dolphins drafted Daryl Gardener, a defensive tackle out of Baylor. Let me tell you, the boos that came on the back of that call were like sweet music to my ears. These Miami fans, they had no interest in Daryl Gardener. Jimmy Johnson, he was the Dolphins’ new coach, and he had that whole Miami connection going on. It made no sense, and a lot of folks thought that pick should have been me. They were counting on it, and at just that moment, if I was being completely honest, I was counting on it, too.

  But that’s just how it goes on draft day. There’s no time to sit and fuss, because those picks just keep coming. Every couple minutes, there’s some twist and turn, and all around me people were speculating, wondering where I’d end up. The first round was about to run out on us, but I wasn’t worried. I knew if I fell to the Packers, I’d be going to Green Bay—they’d already told me I was their man, so that was as far as I would fall.

  After that Miami pick it went:

  Pete Kendall, offensive tackle out of Boston College, to Seattle.

  Marcus Jones, defensive end out of UNC, to Tampa Bay.

  Jeff Hartings, guard out of Penn State, to Detroit.

  Eric Moulds, wide receiver out of Mississippi State, to Buffalo.

  Philadelphia had the twenty-fifth pick, and for a beat or two we all thought they would call my name, but they went to the other side of the ball and grabbed Jermane Mayberry, an offensive lineman out of Texas A&M–Kingsville. So at this point we all thought Baltimore would pass me up and I’d wind up playing for the Packers.

  Matter of fact, we had the television on in the suite, and we were listening to Mel Kiper do his analysis, and he was talking about all these holes they needed to fill up in Baltimore. They’d already taken Jonathan Ogden with the fourth pick, so the feeling was they’d go with a skills position–type player, someone to maybe get the fans in Baltimore excited about their new team. Remember, this was the year the Modell family moved the Cleveland Browns franchise to Baltimore, and the city had been hungry for a team since the Baltimore Colts left town for Indianapolis in 1983.

  Just then, the phone rang in our suite. It was Ozzie Newsome, director of football operations for the Baltimore Ravens. He said, “Is this Ray Lewis?”

  I said, “Yes, sir. What’s going on, Mr. Newsome?”

  He said, “Son, your name is about to be called.”

  I said, “By who?”

  He said, “Baltimore.”

  I said, “Okay, I know, Baltimore. But Baltimore who?”

  A lot of folks forget, but when Mr. Modell announced he’d be moving the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, the plan was for the team to be known as the Baltimore Browns. That’s what was in all the papers, all over ESPN. But then there was all this legal nonsense I didn’t really pay attention to—it ended up the team name, the team colors, all the team records would stay in Cleveland and a new ownership group would come in. I wasn’t really paying attention, because the fight had nothing to do with me. And now that it did, I honestly didn’t know what this team was called.

  To be honest, my head was a mess to begin with, with everything else that had gone down. Burying my best friend. Talking to his family, to the police, to our teammates. In some ways, it was like the draft was beside the point. But then I’d catch myself thinking about what this moment would be like with Red at my side, told myself he was at my side, still. Told myself Red would have wanted me to celebrate this moment, maybe even find a way to laugh about it—me going to the league to play for this brand-new team that didn’t even have a logo, a uniform.

  The Ravens name wasn’t announced until a couple weeks before the draft—and it would be another couple weeks before the team had its colors and a uniform design. So this was just another example of me not knowing what normal looked like. Normally, on draft day, you get selected, you put on your team’s hat, maybe a jersey, and you pose for a bunch of pictures, but that’s not how it happened.

  Normally, on draft day, you don’t run from burying your best friend up the road to a quiet little draft party in a stadium suite, just to hear your name called by a team that doesn’t even have a jersey, a logo, a name that anyone outside their own front office can remember. And it’s not like I really cared, with everything else going on—felt to me like this was maybe appropriate. This was maybe Red’s way of telling me to hold on just a minute, make sure this moment didn’t get lost.

  But it was something to notice—something to laugh about. Ozzie and me, we laugh about it to this day, because this was how that phone call went down—me saying, “Baltimore who?”

  As moments go, this one was bittersweet—but it was a new day.

  EIGHT

  Ride That Train

  The Ravens front office finally got the team colors and logo all set, but my uniform didn’t look right. Something didn’t fit. I was used to wearing 52, ever since Randy Shannon pinned it on me at Miami, but here they gave me 53. Pepper Johnson was wearing my number—he’d been wearing it all the way back to his days at Ohio State. He was also slotted in as the starting middle linebacker. I could see that, I guess. Pepper had won a couple Super Bowls with the Giants, played in a couple Pro Bowls. He’d been a veteran presence on the Cleveland Browns, so of course he came to Baltimore and was expected to fill that same spot.

  I was just a rookie, didn’t think it was my place to say anything, so I kept quiet. For a time. First couple practices, I ran with the second unit, made my presence known with my game instead of my mouth. And I must’ve made some noise, because, middle of training camp, our defensive coordinator, Marvin Lewis, came up to talk to me. He said, “Ray, we like how you get to the ball. We’re thinking of starting you at weak-side linebacker. I know you’re used to playing in the middle, but we’ve got Pepper.”

  He said it like he was expecting me to be excited he was putting me on the starting unit, but I heard it another way. I heard it like I was back in high school, sitting in Chuck Amato’s office on my recruiting visit to Florida State, him telling me I’d have to play behind Derrick Brooks for two years.

  I said, “I can’t play no weak-side linebacker.”

  We talked about it some. I wasn’t trying to be difficult, but I wanted Marvin to get my thinking. A lot of guys, to go from middle linebacker to weak-side linebacker, it might have been an easy transition. You go from seeing the whole field, covering every which way, to just focusing on one side, with a lot less ground to cover. For some players it might be no big thing, but it went against my strength, against my nature. The weak-side linebacker really had just one job—to get to the ball, but a great middle linebacker can cut an offense in half, just by dominating the line of scrimmage, just by seeing the play before it takes shape. In the middle, you have to react off the guys in front of you, the guys to either side. You have to quarterback the defense, which worked for me because I was like a dictator on the fi
eld. It fit with my personality.

  He said, “You can play middle, you can play weak side. All you need to do is dial it down.”

  I said, “No disrespect, Mr. Lewis, but I’m not cut that way. You put me out there, weak side, I’ll just run over everybody. I’m not the less involved guy. I can’t dial it down. That’s just not me.”

  He heard me out, but I wasn’t done—figured I’d take the opportunity to press him on my number, long as we were talking. I mean, your number is your identity, man. It’s how you’re known. And here I’d taken Randy Shannon’s good advice and found this meaningful number and made it my own. Wasn’t about to let it go without a fight. So I said, “One more thing, fifty-two is my number. The shirt you gave me, it says fifty-three. The dude wearing that, I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize him.”

  Marvin Lewis looked at me and tried not to smile—don’t think he’d ever heard a rookie talk in such a brash way. But I didn’t know any other way to be. I was all about what was mine, based on what I knew I could do. And I wasn’t shy about putting it out there, so he flashed me this look that said, Okay, well I guess we’ll see about all this, youngster. We’ll see.

  Next day—the very next day!—I got to training camp and there was a 52 jersey hanging in my locker with my name on it.

  Whatever I was expecting to come out of the talk with Marvin Lewis, I wasn’t expecting that. Not right away.

  There was no one around to ask about it, so I just put on that jersey, thought maybe Marvin Lewis had gone to Pepper Johnson and asked if he’d give up his number for this brash kid out of Miami. Didn’t know what else to think. So I went out to the field for our walk-through—on that team, we always did a walk-through before we started running drills. But the whole team was lined up, first-string defense, and there was no middle linebacker. I looked this way and that, couldn’t see Pepper Johnson.

  Didn’t occur to me that I had anything to do with Pepper not being here—the jersey, yeah, but not his absence. Never in a million years would I have thought the one followed from the other. Then, after a couple beats, Marvin Lewis came striding over to me—said, “This is your team now.”

  Turned out, Marvin went to talk to our head coach, Ted Marchibroda, told him he liked what he was seeing out of me in practice, hearing out of me on the sidelines. Turned out, too, that the coaching staff was looking to make some changes, maybe move the team away from how things were in Cleveland, the culture of losing they had on that team, so they went and gave Pepper Johnson his release. Wasn’t a knock on Pepper. The dude could still play—he’d led the team in tackles the year before, would go on to play another couple years in the league. But that Cleveland Browns team that packed up and moved here to Baltimore was Bill Belichick’s team, and this brand-new Ravens team was Ted Marchibroda’s team, and this was one way to shake things up.

  Still, I couldn’t believe it, wasn’t really following—said, “Pepper’s gone? For real?”

  Marvin Lewis said, “For real. So tell me, how good do you want to be?”

  I said, “The best to ever play the game, sir.”

  He said, “Are you willing to work for that?”

  I said, “All I know is how to work.”

  He said, “Well then, get to work. Already told you, this is your team now.”

  Can you imagine that? I hadn’t played a down for this man, and already he’d seen something in me to treat me in this way. It was the most remarkable thing—about the last thing I was expecting—and it wasn’t just Marvin Lewis. No, it was Coach Marchibroda and his whole coaching staff. It was Maxie Baughan, the linebacker coach, who’d seen something when the team was working me out before the draft. Maxie was an All-Pro linebacker in the 1960s, for the Eagles and Rams, so he could play—and he knew what it meant to roam the middle of that field on defense. He knew what it was to hit. He came up to me one day in training camp and said, “Ray, I’ve been around a long time. I’ve seen a lot of put-together athletes. Ain’t seen too many put together like you.”

  I took it as a compliment—but it wasn’t really. What Maxie meant, when I pressed him on it, was that I might have been ripped and in tremendous shape—and I was—but that it wasn’t enough. He said, “You won’t last three years in this league.”

  Just like that, he went from a compliment to a knock.

  I said, “What are you talking about?”

  He said, “You need to put some meat on your bones if you want to survive in this game, the type of pounding you’re about to take.”

  There was a lot I had to learn—and the very first lesson was that I had a lot to learn. That’s how it goes when you’re young—you think you’re invincible. You think the game will keep coming to you. But no, you reach a certain level, you have to take a different approach. This was the NFL. I was going from playing with teenagers to playing with grown men who knew their game. I was going from figuring out these other players, learning their tendencies, to studying coordinators, to playing against these big-time coaches. I was going from a game to a career, from a college campus to living on my own in a strange new city. Only time I’d ever been out of Florida was for road games back in school, so it was a big adjustment, me living on my own, learning my way around.

  Some of the veteran players, they took a liking to me. I was blessed in this way. Bennie Thompson, a defensive back out of Grambling, came up to me one day in training camp and pretty much asked me the same thing as Marvin Lewis, and I gave him pretty much the same answer. He said, “You want to be great? Meet me in the gym every morning at six to work on the StairMaster.”

  I said, “Every morning?”

  He said, “Every morning.”

  I said, “I’ll be there.” And I was—every morning. Bennie saw that I was serious about my game, about my conditioning, and soon some of the other guys started to notice. Stevon Moore, defensive back out of Mississippi. Anthony Pleasant, defensive lineman out of Tennessee State. Antonio Langham, defensive back out of Alabama. Eric Turner, a free safety out of UCLA—may he rest in peace. One by one, these guys took me in and helped me out and taught me what it was to be a professional athlete. Eric Turner used to stand over me in the weight room saying, “Lordy, Lordy, Lord, you gonna be rough.” (Rough—that was like the highest compliment.) To a man, they took an interest in me, poured so much energy into me, and I tried to do the same thing after I’d been in the league a while, whenever a young player joined the team showing some promise, looking for guidance.

  A lot of times, you’re new to the league, coaches throw you out there on kickoffs, and that’s how we lined up for the first couple practices. It’s like a trial-by-fire situation—they put you on special teams, see what you can do. Bennie Thompson was the L5 and I was the L4, and I would just take off down that field and do my thing. But once they released Pepper, once it was clear to Coach Marchibroda and his staff that I was meant for this other role, they pulled me back. Marchibroda, he was like Dennis Erickson. The man did not want me on special teams. He didn’t want me running up and down the field like that, hurling my body at full speed, scrambling for field position.

  This is your team now.

  For the first time, I didn’t have to wait for the guy in front of me to go down with an injury. I’d earned this spot on my own. It didn’t fall to me, the way it always had—and it felt good, like I’d finally arrived.

  Things were coming together at home, too. For the first time in a long while, we were all living under one roof—my mother, my sisters, my brother, and me. I’d always been the man of the family, in a certain way, but as soon as the Ravens called my name on draft night, I was able to provide for my family, too, so I moved everyone up to Baltimore with me. I found a three-bedroom apartment in a nice part of Reistertown, just outside the city. My older sisters were able to finish high school there, and Kadaja and Keon were set up in school as well, so we were all set as a family. Mama didn’t have to worry about money coming in, and my brother and sisters didn’t have to worry about c
oming home to a tense environment, an uncertain environment, so it felt to me like this great weight had been lifted off my shoulders—a weight I’d been carrying since I was a small boy.

  Caught myself thinking, This is your home now.

  Only thing missing in this family picture was Tatyana and the child we now shared—our son, Junior. Somehow, I went from thinking we’d find a way to be together as a family, always and always, to shuttling everybody back and forth between Baltimore and Florida. See, her family was from the Orlando area, and that’s where she wanted to be, and try as I might I could not convince her to give Baltimore a chance. To give me a chance. It broke my heart, to see our brand-new family broken up by this long distance before we even had a chance to make our way in the world together, but this was how Tatyana wanted to play it for now—and it felt to me like I had no choice but to let her call the shots. We weren’t separated, necessarily, but at the same time we weren’t together, so I tried to put all of that out of my mind and focus on football.

  It worked out that I made some big noise the very first game of the season—so I was blessed in this way, too. We were at home against the Oakland Raiders. In those days, we played our home games at Memorial Stadium, which was where the Baltimore Colts used to play. Oh my goodness—it felt like that rickety old stadium would come tumbling down on us, all those Baltimore fans crammed in there for their first taste of professional football in over ten years. The place was a madhouse—64,000 people. I’d never played in front of that kind of crowd, and it wasn’t just the number of folks that got me all stirred up, but the way they were screaming for this new team of theirs. This new team of ours. We hadn’t done anything but show up to play for them, and they took us in, so it wasn’t like it was just me and Jonathan Ogden and the other rookies making their debut—no, we were all making our debuts, on this grand old stage.