Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  “I was always a reader,” Newsome said. “I would read anything I could get my hands on, especially if it was about sports. I had read in the local newspapers about how the white school had better facilities, better equipment, better classrooms, all of that. I told my mom I wanted to go to school there and see how I did.”

  Predictably, the first year wasn’t easy. Newsome and the handful of black students entering the school understood that their presence was resented by some. Plus there were all the normal headaches of being a new kid. “First day on the schoolyard we chose up sides for baseball,” he said. “I was the last guy picked because no one knew me. First time I came up I was going to show them, I was going to hit the ball farther than anyone had ever hit a ball. I struck out.”

  Things soon got better. Newsome was a good athlete and a good student. In eighth grade he played organized football for the first time and became a wide receiver on the first day of practice because he arrived late, and as he was running to get onto the field, the first group of players he came to were the receivers. His ascension was rapid. By his junior year, he was being recruited by all the major football powers. By then, he had grown to six foot two and 175 pounds, with soft hands and excellent speed. And he was one of the better students at Colbert County High School.

  “For a long time my mom wanted me to go to Vanderbilt,” he said. “Academics. Bill Parcells was on the staff at the time and he was recruiting me hard. But I’d played basketball with Leon Douglas. He was a year ahead of me and he went to Alabama. He kept talking to me about how it was important for an Alabama boy to stay in Alabama. In the end, it came down to Auburn and Alabama, and both my mom and I were pretty much convinced I should go to Auburn. I had teammates there, including my quarterback, and it just seemed right. So, the day before the signing date, I committed to Auburn.”

  A day later he signed with Alabama. The reason, according to Newsome, was John Mitchell, who had been the first African American to play at Alabama under Bear Bryant. “He came up the day before the signing date and I told him I’d decided to go to Auburn. He asked if he could take me to dinner. In those days [1974] there were no rules about what alumni could and could not do. I said okay. During dinner, he convinced me. He just said Alabama was the place and that Coach Bryant was completely color-blind. He won me over. So I went home and told my mom I’d decided to go to Alabama.

  “She was furious. She started screaming at John that her son was going to Auburn, that the decision had been made. I said to her, ‘Mama, the Lord told me I should go to Alabama.’ Then she really got mad. She said, ‘Don’t you start putting the Lord into this!’ She ordered John to get out of her house. John pulled me aside and said, ‘Ozzie, I’ve got to stay here tonight because Coach Bryant told me not to come back without you.’ Somehow I got my mother to let him stay the night, and the next day I went and hid out from all the other recruiters and signed with Alabama.”

  Newsome thrived at Alabama from the start. Perhaps because he had been in predominantly white schools since the sixth grade, the lack of black faces didn’t bother him. He couldn’t help but notice that each recruiting class had an even number of blacks in it —“Roommates,” he said. “They weren’t quite ready to mix blacks and whites in the same room yet.” But as a football player, he never felt any serious prejudice. “At Alabama, if you played football, you were on a pedestal, regardless of color,” he said. “And Coach Bryant, he really didn’t care about color. He just cared about making everyone better, whatever it took.”

  Newsome became a starter by the end of his freshman season and began his senior year as a highly touted pro prospect. By then, he was a Big Man on Campus and, apparently, acting like it. “Coach Bryant called me into his office before the season started and said, ‘Ozzie, I’m getting that senior strut vibe from you as if you think you’re bigger than the program. I don’t like the way you’re acting. I think I’m gonna call your mama and tell her how you’re acting.’

  “Now, by then, my mom was the biggest Alabama fan on earth. She had learned that if your son played football at Alabama, everyone knew about it and it was a really big deal. She adored Coach Bryant. If he told her I was misbehaving, I’d be in big trouble. So I said, ‘Please, Coach, don’t call my mom, I’ll be okay.’”

  He graduated —“I did enough to get by and that was about it”— with a degree in recreation administration the following spring and was drafted by the Browns with the twenty-third pick. To this day, Newsome tries as hard as he can to be straight with potential draft picks about what his team’s interest or non-interest is, because he remembers his own draft day so vividly.

  “It was torture,” he said. “In those days there was no combine [the annual NFL meat market held in Indianapolis that most draft hopefuls attend], and teams only came to work you out if they were really interested. The Packers came down and they worked me out for two hours. I was exhausted. Then the Browns came down and I said, no way am I going through that again. They were there to see [close friend, running back] Johnny Davis, too, and they had him call me and ask me to come over just for ten minutes. The guy who came was Rich Kotite [who later coached the Eagles and Jets] and he just tossed a few balls to me and that was it. I found out later he really just wanted to look me over, specifically, he wanted to get a look at my butt to see if I had the potential to get bigger than two-twenty.”

  On draft day—the draft wasn’t on TV in those days—Newsome sat by the phone. Word came that the Packers had taken wide receiver James Lofton with the sixth pick. Then, at number twelve, the Browns took Clay Matthews. “I’m not happy, but I’m not panicked because Cleveland had another pick. But then they traded the pick to Minnesota. Now I’m really getting bummed. Who’s going to take me? Anyone? A little while later the phone rings and a voice says, ‘Ozzie, this is Art Modell, are you ready to become a Cleveland Brown?’ They had traded with someone to get the twenty-third pick. I went from frustrated and worried to overjoyed in about a minute.”

  Newsome got a $75,000 signing bonus from the Browns and a three-year contract that paid him $50,000, $57,500, and $65,000. He also got a shock when Coach Sam Rutigliano told him at the end of the first mini-camp that he was being moved to tight end. “I’d never played anything but wide receiver my entire life,” he said. “But Sam said not to worry, I’d still catch plenty of balls.”

  The first time he touched the ball in a real NFL game, Newsome ran 40 yards for a touchdown on an end-around play against the San Francisco 49ers. He was so excited, scoring right in front of Cleveland’s infamous “Dog Pound” that he spiked the ball. Then he thought about what Bryant always told his players: “When you get in the end zone, act as if you’ve been there before.” Or when a player really hotdogged he might say, “If you want to be in the circus, there’s one you can join down the street. We’re here to play football.”

  Concerned that Bryant would see a replay of the spike, he called several friends back home and told them if Bryant did happen to see it, to tell him it was an accident, a heat-of-the-moment thing. He never heard from Bryant all season. “Then when I went home at the end of the year, I went to see him,” he said. “First thing he said was ‘I saw you spike that ball.’ I told him that I forgot myself because I was so excited. He just nodded and said, ‘You didn’t do it again, did you?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘You ever going to do it again?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’ He just nodded and smiled and moved to another topic.”

  The only blemish in an otherwise sterling career was the Browns’ inability to get to the Super Bowl. The Browns were good during most of Newsome’s thirteen-year career—they made the playoffs seven times—but always found a way to come up just short of the ultimate game. In 1980, playing at home against the Oakland Raiders, the Browns trailed, 14-12, when they drove to the Raiders 13-yard line in the final minute. A field goal would win the game, but with the wind swirling inside the Mistake by the Lake and Don Cockroft having already missed two field goals at that end of the
stadium, Sam Rutigliano decided to try for the end zone once more, giving quarterback Brian Sipe orders to “throw it in Lake Erie” if someone wasn’t wide-open. Newsome was wide-open—or so Sipe thought. At the last possible second, cornerback Mike Davis jumped in front of Newsome and intercepted the ball. The Raiders went on to win the Super Bowl.

  In 1985 the Browns led the Miami Dolphins, 21-3, in the third quarter in the opening round of the playoffs—and lost. If they had won, they would have hosted the AFC Championship Game the next week. A year later they did host the AFC Championship Game, against the Denver Broncos. That game produced the famous (or, in Cleveland, infamous) John Elway-led 98-yard march to tie the score with 37 seconds left that became known simply as “the Drive.” A year later it was “the Fumble,” Earnest Byner fumbling on the goal line in Denver when he was about to tie the game late in the fourth quarter. Again, the Broncos went to the Super Bowl. They went again in 1989, this time beating the Browns soundly in their third championship game matchup in four years.

  “There was the Drive, the Fumble, and the Rout,” Newsome said, remembering all three games. “The one that hurt the most was the Drive. Usually, when the defense was on the field, I didn’t watch. I’d sit on the bench and rest. But in that game, we’re less than two minutes from the Super Bowl, I’m watching. They have a third-and-seventeen. They make it. Then they score. Even in the overtime, we got the ball first and didn’t do anything with it. I can still remember at the start of the Drive, thinking, ‘I’m finally going to a Super Bowl,’ because I’d always said I wasn’t going until I played in one.”

  Following the Rout in 1989, Newsome flew home with the team, walked into his house, and could tell by the look on his wife Gloria’s face that something was wrong that had nothing to do with the game. “Your dad died a couple of hours after the game,” she told him. It wasn’t a shock—Ozzie Newsome Sr. had liver and kidney problems and was extremely overweight, but it was still a shock because it was his dad. “Last time we talked had been Friday,” he said. “Dad said to me, ‘Ozzie, you’ve got to do something about that Elway.’ I told him not to worry, that we had a plan for him this time. He was skeptical. I think the last thing he ever said to me was ‘Watch out for Elway.’”

  Newsome thought he was ready to quit at that point. He’d played twelve years and his body had taken a pounding and he sensed that the team’s time as a Super Bowl contender had come and gone. But Modell persuaded him to come back. “If we sign [cornerback] Raymond Clayborne and you come back, I think we can make another run at it,” he said.

  Newsome came back. The last game was in Cincinnati. By then, Coach Bud Carson had pretty much told Newsome he could put himself in the game or take himself out as he saw fit. In the second half, even with teammates encouraging him to go back in to catch a few more balls, he stayed on the sideline. “I knew it was time,” he said. “I called my mother and said, ‘The fire’s out. I’m done.’”

  Newsome and Modell had always had an unspoken understanding that he would stay with the team when he retired. They had become close through the years to the point where, during the 1987 strike, Modell had called Newsome personally when the strike was about to end, and pleaded with him to come in and play in the final scab game against Cincinnati because he believed the game was critical to the Browns’ playoff chances. Newsome—and many other stars—came back that weekend. The Browns won and made the playoffs, but the locker room was split because some players had crossed the picket line, others had not.

  The plan was for Newsome to learn scouting. But Bill Belichick, the newly hired head coach, wanted him to work on the field, too. Newsome eventually became a hybrid—part coach, part scout—working on the field during the season, scouting during the off-season. “At one point I think I had the longest title in the history of the NFL,” he said. “I was the ‘head coach offense/pro personnel director,’” he said. “By then, I think I knew I wanted to be on the personnel side, but Bill kept pushing me to keep coaching.”

  Newsome was learning as he went. He still remembers vividly the Sunday night in 1993 when Belichick decided to cut quarterback Bernie Kosar, who had been just about as popular in Cleveland as Newsome. “I came in Monday morning and it was done,” he said. “It was a mistake. It happened because people were angry and frustrated. The lesson I learned from that was never make a decision, a big decision, right after a game. Look at the tape, calm down, and then if you think it is time to make a move, make it. But never while you’re still emotionally wound up from the battle.”

  Newsome was among a small handful of people to whom Modell revealed his moving plans early in the 1995 season. He was stunned. Cleveland had become his home; he knew everyone in town and they knew him. Modell wanted to be sure Ozzie would go with him to Baltimore, and Newsome agreed to go. Soon after the move, Belichick was fired and Marchibroda was hired in his place. Mike Lombardi, the vice president in charge of football personnel, was also let go. It was Jim Bailey, the team’s executive vice president on the business side, who recommended to Modell that he put Newsome in charge of personnel. In one of his first conversations with Marchibroda, the two of them agreed that if they ever had a disagreement they couldn’t resolve, they would go to Modell to discuss it together. It is a policy Newsome has continued to this day in his relationship with Billick and Bisciotti. “The best thing about my relationship with Brian,” Newsome said, “is that it never comes to that. We always figure something out between ourselves.”

  The move to Baltimore was chaotic. On April 1—four weeks before the draft—a skeleton crew of Cleveland refugees moved into the Colts’ old facility. The building had almost no furniture; there was dust everywhere and there was no place to file anything. “All of our scouting reports and tapes were lined up in the hallway outside our offices,” Phil Savage, who had come with Newsome as the newly minted director of college personnel, remembered. “It was hard to believe you were working in the NFL.”

  The team had to purge some salaries to get under the cap in order to have a chance to sign the two first-round draft picks they were entitled to. Key veterans, such as linebacker Pepper Johnson, wide receiver Andre Rison, and cornerback Donnie Griffin, had to be cut. “We had fifty-one players under contract and no practice squad,” Newsome said. “It was all we could afford.”

  And yet the Ravens came up with that historic draft, taking Ogden and Lewis in the first round, working from that shell of a building. Certainly there was some luck involved. The Ravens were convinced that Arizona was going to take Ogden with the third pick, but the Cardinals ended up taking Simeon Rice. “They actually tried to bluff us,” Newsome said. “They thought we wanted Phillips, so Mr. [Cardinals owner Bill] Bidwill had his people write a card in New York that our guys could see that said, ‘Lawrence Phillips,’ on it to try to get us into trading up with them. Oldest trick in the book. Plus, I didn’t want Phillips anyway.”

  Modell did. He kept pointing out that the team needed a running back. Everyone in the room said the same thing. Newsome was determined to “stay true to the board,” meaning that he was going to take the highest-ranked player on the Ravens draft board when it came his turn to pick—regardless of position. Even though he had two experienced tackles, he believed Ogden could play guard for a year and then become a great tackle. So he took Ogden, and Phillips ended up going to the St. Louis Rams, where he became a complete bust.

  The Ravens also needed a linebacker. A lot of teams were wary of Ray Lewis. He had refused to go through workouts at the combine—as did many players—and had interviewed there with only a few teams. The Ravens had been one of them. Even the Ravens had a Z, by his name on the board because he was “height deficient,” being just a shade over six feet tall. “What we saw was a little linebacker who was immature and, some people thought, pretty arrogant. But [assistant coach and former Pro Bowl linebacker] Maxie Baughn had gone down and worked him out and he came back and said, ‘The guy’s a competitor, a real competitor. And he can really s
hoot his gun.’”

  In English that meant Lewis made plays—lots of plays. The Ravens took him. Even so, the rebuilding process was a slow one. By the third season, with the team in the new stadium and two more drafts in place, the team appeared ready to make a playoff run. Then came the opening-day debacle against Pittsburgh. That loss, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end for Marchibroda.

  “I remember David [Modell] was ballistic after that game,” Newsome said, laughing. “I mean, he was mad at me, he was mad at Ted, he was mad at everybody. We had everything exactly right except for the way we played. After that, the pressure just kept building until it popped. It was almost inevitable.”

  The final pop came on November 1, following a 45-19 home loss to Jacksonville, the team’s fourth straight loss. That dropped their record to 2-6. Those few fans who remained in the fourth quarter filled the stadium with chants of “Ted Must Go.”

  One of the chanters may have been Art Modell. As soon as the game was over, Newsome got a call from Sam Miller, Modell’s assistant. Modell wanted a meeting—now. “I knew exactly what we were going to talk about,” Newsome said.

  The meeting was in Modell’s box and included Art and David Modell, Jim Bailey, James Harris (Newsome’s head of pro scouting and confidant), and Newsome. The Modells wanted to fire Marchibroda on the spot. Newsome, remembering his vow not to make important decisions in the aftermath of a bad loss, counseled caution. “I said, ‘Who are you going to make coach if you fire Ted?’” he remembered. “‘If you name one of the assistants as an interim, what good does that do? Is there anyone on the staff or out there you want to commit to right now, give a long-term contract to, because if you want to hire someone permanently, you have to give them that contract and make that commitment.’”