Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Newsome won the debate. Marchibroda would be allowed to finish the season if only so that potential coaches wouldn’t see the Ravens as an organization in chaos. Modell asked Newsome and his son to head the search committee for a new coach and to begin their work immediately. Newsome liked that idea. “I never understood why, when you were making the decision that was probably going to make or break your team for the next few years—picking a coach—owners would do it by picking up a phone and asking a buddy, ‘Who do you like?’ or taking a recommendation from a friend. It was almost casual and it was so important. There’s no one more important in the organization than your coach, and you hire him just because your buddy said he’s a good guy?

  “My idea was to mirror the approach we take in the draft. Put together a list with everyone on it and then winnow it down from there. David and I would meet almost every night at his house and all of us put in long hours, going down lists of names. We would usually have a bowl of macaroni and cheese that Art’s chef would make for dinner and then get Popeyes chicken when it got late. We started with every NFL coordinator and every major college coach on our list.

  “We checked to make sure people weren’t interested. Shack [James Harris, whose nickname as a kid was “Sugarshack”] called Joe Gibbs to see if he was interested. No. We checked Steve Spurrier to see if he was interested. No. Eventually, we narrowed the list to people who were gettable and, we thought, good.”

  The best-known name on the short list was Mike Holmgren, who was as hot as any coach in the NFL because he had just been to back-to-back Super Bowls in Green Bay. Holmgren was looking to leave Green Bay because he wanted to go someplace where he had total control. Newsome and Modell decided if Holmgren could be had, they should do whatever had to be done to get him. “We did our due diligence,” he said. “His wife was a Christian Scientist, so we found the one Christian Scientist church in the area for her. I had told the Modells that if Mike Holmgren needs absolute power to come, give it to him, I’ll relinquish mine if that’s what is best for the team and, to tell the truth, I thought it might very well be. We were looking at George Seifert, too, but then Jerry Richardson [Carolina’s owner] snapped him up.

  “Turned out we never got the chance to interview Holmgren. We had a plane waiting in Seattle to bring him here after he talked to Paul Allen, but he never got on it because Allen offered him total control and so much money that he couldn’t turn it down.”

  They ended up with four coordinators as finalists: Brian Billick, Chris Palmer, Jim Haslett, and Emmitt Thomas. The hot name was Billick because the Vikings had just set a handful of offensive records. Palmer was also an offensive coordinator and the other two were defensive coordinators, not a bad thing in Newsome’s mind since the Ravens were building a very strong defense. He was a little concerned that Palmer kept talking about how his old boss, Bill Parcells, would do things. “I always remember Coach Bryant telling all of us that if we got into coaching, not to try to emulate him because you have to be your own guy. You can learn from Coach Bryant or Parcells, but you can’t be them.

  “Brian was impressive for several reasons. First, I talked to a lot of people about him and so did David. Cris Carter [the Vikings wide receiver] told me they had hated each other at first, but that had changed and they got along well. I asked him if he would come and play for him if he had the chance and he said absolutely. Warren Moon said the same thing. Bill Walsh [Billick’s first mentor] said we couldn’t go wrong if we hired him.

  “But what sold me was when we talked to him. There just wasn’t any of the same old rhetoric you hear from guys when they’re trying to get a job. He was above the curve. I could tell he was a risk taker. At one point I asked him how we would resolve differences we might have on the draft and the roster, did he think we would be able to compromise? And he just said, ‘No, Ozzie, I don’t believe in compromise. Because if we compromise, then neither of us is responsible for the final decision.’ I liked that. Then he said that either I would convince him or he would convince me. I liked that, too. I also liked the fact that he was up front about feeling that way.”

  By the Friday before the NFC Championship Game between Atlanta and Minnesota, the Ravens had decided that Billick was their choice. They couldn’t formally offer him the job while his team was still in the playoffs, but they made it known to him that the job was his if he wanted it. The word that came back was: I’ll get back to you. The reason: the new Cleveland Browns were also making a big play for Billick.

  “Art was furious,” Newsome said. “Especially since it was Cleveland. He said, ‘If he doesn’t want it, forget it, let’s go hire Chris Palmer.’ We convinced him, let’s wait and see. I think David and I both thought he was really the guy. When the Vikings lost that Sunday, Dwight Clark [Cleveland’s general manager] was up there with a plane and orders to bring Brian to Cleveland to make a deal and sign him. But David got the deal done by phone. He and Brian talked numbers, we talked about those numbers, and then made a deal. We flew him in and introduced him the next day. Then we got on a plane together to go to the Senior Bowl [in Mobile, Alabama], and Brian showed me on his computer some of his plans for the off-season. I was amazed. He had done, in a few hours, things we used to spend days charting and planning. I can remember thinking, ‘We’ve got the right guy now. Let’s go to work.’”

  4

  The T.O. Caper . . . and Other Adventures

  THEIR WORK PRODUCED REMARKABLE RESULTS remarkably quickly. In 1999 the Ravens were 8-8, winning five of their last seven games. A year later they stumbled to a 5-4 start, going five straight games without scoring a touchdown. Brian Billick made the decision at that point to bench quarterback Tony Banks and go with veteran Trent Dilfer. The offense’s marching orders under Dilfer were simple: don’t lose the game. The defense was evolving into one of the most dominating in the history of the NFL, led by two huge defensive tackles—Tony Siragusa and Sam Adams—a superb defensive backfield, and a young linebacker who seemed to be in on every play: Ray Lewis.

  The Ravens ripped off seven straight victories to end the regular season and made the playoffs for the first time in their four-year history, as a wild-card team. They beat Denver at home and Tennessee and Oakland on the road to reach the Super Bowl against the New York Giants. Reaching the Super Bowl for the first time is always a defining moment for a team, for a coach, and for a team’s star players. Never was that more true than for the Ravens team that went to Tampa in January of 2001.

  Ray Lewis had emerged that season as the heart and soul of the defense, which was also the heart and soul of the team. The Ravens had given up 165 points during the regular season, an NFL record for fewest points allowed since the expansion to a sixteen-game schedule in 1978. Lewis had played, however, with an undeniable cloud hanging over him: the incident in Atlanta a year earlier on the night of the Super Bowl, which had left two men dead and a plethora of questions that simply would not go away.

  When police had questioned Lewis after the two murders, he had been, according to them, uncooperative and unwilling to tell them what he knew—or what they thought he knew. Lewis was arrested and spent fifteen days in jail, charged, along with two of his friends, Joseph Sweeting and Reginald Oakley, with the two murders. He was released on bail—a changed man, he would say later—and went to trial two months later. Midway through the trial, according to Lewis’s attorney, Ed Garland, the prosecutor came to his house on a Sunday morning to tell him he was planning to drop the charges against Lewis because he did not believe there was any way to get a guilty verdict. In return, he told Garland he wanted Lewis to testify as to what he had seen that night. Garland agreed because he knew that Lewis wanted to tell his version of the story. The prosecutor had one condition under which he would agree to call Lewis: he would have to admit under oath that he had lied to the police on the night of the incident. That would lead to a misdemeanor conviction for obstruction of justice. There would be no jail time. Lewis, through Garland, agreed. Even with Lew
is’s testimony, Sweeting and Oakley were acquitted. No one was ever convicted of committing the murders.

  Lewis was sentenced to one year of probation for his obstruction conviction and fined $250,000 by the NFL.

  From the beginning, the Ravens, while saying they knew the judicial system had to run its course, defended Lewis. The public stance adopted by the franchise was simple: we know Ray Lewis, we believe in Ray Lewis, and we do not believe Ray Lewis did what he has been accused of doing. When Lewis returned to the team for preseason minicamp, he was greeted with open arms by everyone in the organization. He agreed to answer questions about what had happened—not at the scene that night in Atlanta, but in the aftermath—and then the team made it clear that, as far as they and Ray were concerned, the issue was closed. Lewis had answered the questions once, and now he was entitled to move on with his life.

  “You have to remember that none of us had ever dealt with anything like this before,” Billick said. “It wasn’t as if I could call some other coach and say, ‘Hey, when this happened to you, what did you do?’ We were sort of flying blind. But the one thing we kept coming back to was that we all believed, truly believed, that Ray just wasn’t capable of doing something like that. Was he in the wrong place at the wrong time? Absolutely. Did he handle the situation badly with the police that first night? You bet. But that’s a long way from being a murderer or any of the other things he has been accused of being.”

  Opening Lewis up to the media at minicamp and then saying he was through dealing with the issue wasn’t about to prevent the story from coming up wherever the Ravens went on the road that season. It didn’t prevent fans from screaming, “Murderer!” at Lewis whenever he walked out of a tunnel away from home. “We all knew that was the way it was going to be,” Billick said. “Ray knew it, too. In a way, it became a rallying point for all of us. Here was our leader, dealing with this, and we were all going to be there to stand behind him because we believed in him.”

  Now the Ravens were walking into the hottest media crucible in sports. No event draws more media attention than the Super Bowl. It is one solid week of more than 3,500 media members (that’s about a 35:1 ratio of media to players) looking for something to write about because there is no real story—the game—until Sunday and they all have to justify being in the city where the game is being held by writing something. One story stood out in Ravens vs. Giants for anyone who had ever picked up a notebook or a microphone: Ray Lewis. One year after he had landed in jail on a murder charge in the immediate aftermath of the Super Bowl, he was likely to star in the Super Bowl. No self-respecting reporter could be expected to ignore that story.

  Billick, who had started his post-football-playing career as a public relations assistant for the San Francisco 49ers, understood that. So did Kevin Byrne, who had been the Browns/Ravens public relations honcho for twenty-two years after starting out on the other side of the fence as a college journalist. Both men knew that the minute the Ravens’ plane landed in Tampa, Ray Lewis’s name was going to be on everyone’s lips. They needed a plan.

  “Basically we decided that the best thing to do was make me the target,” Billick said. “I knew I could handle it and, to be honest, it was more important that Ray not be distracted or bothered than it was that I not be distracted or bothered, because I knew I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”

  On the plane ride down on the Monday before the game, Billick and Byrne went over a number of bullet points that Byrne had put together. This is standard procedure every week between the two men. Byrne will suggest subjects Billick wants to cover in his Monday press conference, and while Billick may not hit them all, he will certainly use them as a guide. Byrne’s points on Lewis were clear: Ray has already addressed this. You have the right to ask what you want, but he may not answer any questions on this subject while he is preparing for the biggest game of his life. . . . The facts speak for themselves. . . . Ray pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, the murder charges were dropped. . . . He has already been penalized by the NFL. . . . He has had to live with the incident all year when the team has played on the road and no doubt will continue to have to live with it. . . . This has been discussed within the team, and no one on the team is likely to respond to questions on the subject, either.

  Byrne thought that if Billick laid that out briefly during his opening statement, it would undoubtedly anger some writers, especially those who didn’t cover football regularly and saw the Lewis story as fresh. That’s one thing that makes the Super Bowl unique: many who cover it don’t really cover football. What Byrne didn’t count on was Billick’s temper. The night before, ESPN (which does cover football regularly) had aired a lengthy piece during which reporter Jeremy Schaap had interviewed relatives of Richard Lollar and Jacinth Baker, the two victims. One of them said on camera that he believed Ray Lewis was a murderer. Others talked about how much they missed the two men and how shocking it was to have them go out for a night on the town and never come home.

  To Billick, this was piling on. It was especially surprising since ESPN has such a cozy relationship with NFL teams 99 percent of the time. This was far from cozy. If ESPN was beginning the week with this sort of piece, Billick could imagine what was going to come next. “I thought the piece was unfair,” he said. “The prosecutor dropped the charges against Ray because there was no evidence he committed the murders. Then they let this poor kid, whose grief I completely understand, call Ray a murderer. That’s just wrong.”

  Most coaches begin press conferences with a brief statement before taking questions. Billick frequently goes longer than most because there are certain questions he can anticipate, so he gets them out of the way. Usually they involve an injured player’s status or a move the team has made involving the acquisition or the departure of a player. This was entirely different. Billick talked for ten solid minutes, essentially lecturing the media, not something most people in the profession take well to.

  “We are not going to retry this,” he said, bringing up Lewis and the case almost immediately. “It’s inappropriate and you’re not qualified. . . . Those who wish to embellish it, not to crystallize it, not to shed new information, but to sensationalize it for your purposes—this is my personal observation, it is reprehensible. I don’t like it. It’s unprofessional.

  “I’ve seen some reports that are embellishing on it and embarking on an area that I just see no productivity. I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the families, I don’t think it’s in the best interests of the league, I don’t think it’s in the best interests of Ray Lewis, and, quite frankly, I don’t think it’s in your best interests, because I don’t think you-all, when you do that, come across real well.”

  He had made his point by then, but he didn’t stop: “I’m a little disturbed with the focus that is being brought to it for the reasons it is being brought. I equate it to an ambulance-chasing mode. You decided you wanted to take on a sensational aspect to it. Nothing you hear or find is going to crystallize the situation or unearth anything that hasn’t already been brought forth. So your preoccupation with it is something I’ll address one time only.

  “All charges were dropped against Ray Lewis. There was no plea bargaining. It became very apparent to the district attorney and anybody who witnessed the proceedings that Ray’s involvement did not warrant the accusations or the charges. Ray, after the charges were dropped, offered to testify and admitted readily to not having handled the situation the way he wished he had in not dealing with the police in a forthright manner. You can stir it up, but it’s not going to change the facts.”

  Many of the questions that followed were contentious, including one reporter asking Billick what right he had to tell the assembled media members how to do their jobs. “I have the podium,” Billick replied. “And you-all are here to listen to me.”

  They listened. And then they reacted—angrily. Billick knew while he was still on the podium that he had pushed the envelope a little too hard. As he walked away, he looked
at Byrne and said, “I think I may have gone too far.”

  “No kidding,” Byrne answered.

  Anyone who knew Brian Billick at all would not have been the least bit surprised by his performance that day in Tampa. He had grown up in a family where dinner was often a forum for heated debate. He was the fourth of Don and Mildred Billick’s five children. Mike, his eldest brother, wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and be a pilot. He was in the ROTC program at Cal-Riverside and then in the air force. His vision prevented him from becoming a pilot, meaning he ended up becoming a navigator when he graduated. Don Billick had grown up in Toledo, Ohio, and had gone into the air force as a mechanic. He became a pilot when his superiors noticed that he knew more about the planes than anyone, and suggested he get into the test pilot program. During World War II he met Mildred Bale at a USO party. They fell in love, got married, and moved to Dayton after the war because that’s where the test pilot program was located. Brian was born outside Dayton in February of 1954, following Mike and two sisters. His brother Gary was born sixteen months later. By then, the Billicks were living in Redlands, California, having moved there along with the test pilot program.

  As it turned out, Brian was the family jock. He went from short and round in junior high school to tall and less round in high school. As a freshman at Redlands High School he became a starter at safety and had eight interceptions. “I was like Paul Krause,” he said, referring to the Minnesota Vikings Hall of Fame safety. “I just sat back and played center field, roamed wherever I thought the ball was going.”

  It is not surprising that Billick would use Krause as a reference point, because he was a Vikings fan as a kid. “Not sure why,” he said. “Maybe it was the colors, maybe it was the helmets, maybe it was all those playoff games in freezing cold weather. I liked [Fran] Tarkenton a lot, too, liked to watch him scramble.”