Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  “Amen to that,” Billick said.

  Fassel made the call to Collins. Much to his surprise, Collins expressed interest in coming to Baltimore. Two days later he signed with the Raiders for more money than the Ravens had been told was on the table. “I think, at the very least, we made Kerry some money,” Fassel said.

  On the second day of minicamp, Kordell Stewart was signed to back up Boller. Leigh Steinberg, his agent, kept telling Newsome that there were several other teams interested in Stewart and that Newsome needed to up the money ($760,000 for a ten-year veteran) if he expected to sign Stewart. Newsome always knows when an agent is bluffing, because he works the general manager’s grapevine as well as anybody. He told Steinberg to call him back when Stewart was ready to sign for the minimum. On June 7 Steinberg called. The next day Stewart was on the field in uniform.

  7

  Ray and Jamal

  BEFORE THE RAVENS TOOK THE FIELD for their first day of minicamp, Jamal Lewis had to face the music. Or, more accurately, he had to face the cameras and notebooks and tape recorders.

  Which meant that Kevin Byrne had to put together a list of bullet points. Byrne had been with the Cleveland/Baltimore organization for twenty-four years, and everyone—from Art Modell to Steve Bisciotti to Ozzie Newsome and Brian Billick—always looked to him for guidance with any kind of public relations, whether it was the announcement of a new Ravens charity, the hiring of an assistant coach, the cutting of a veteran player, or a star player dealing with felony charges.

  The Ravens had first dealt with the issue of a star player being charged with a serious crime in 2000, when Ray Lewis had been accused of the Atlanta Super Bowl murders. When Lewis made his first appearance in Baltimore for minicamp that year, five days after the charges against him had been dropped and he had pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, he was immediately made available to the media with the caveat that he would talk once—and once only—about the events of Atlanta and their aftermath.

  Jamal Lewis’s situation was different because the case was ongoing. Ray Lewis had been able to talk about his case in the past tense and his lawyer, Ed Garland, had been able to begin the press conference by quoting the prosecutor who had dropped the murder charges, saying, “I have concluded Ray Lewis is innocent of these charges and I am going to dismiss these charges.”

  Jamal Lewis couldn’t make that claim. He could say that he was innocent and that he believed he would be exonerated. But he also had to be careful not to say anything that might anger the prosecution, because there was no way of knowing at that point what direction the case was going to go. No trial date had been set. There was speculation that the trial might come during the season, or it might not come until the season was over.

  The specter of another star Raven facing felony charges was disturbing to the entire organization. Dick Cass had talked to Lewis’s lawyers at length about the charges and their circumstances and had come to the conclusion that Lewis had essentially been suckered by the FBI’s female plant and that the crime he was accused of was a technical one: by using a cell phone to set up a meeting that eventually led to the sale of drugs, he had broken federal law. What was concerning to Cass the lawyer was that while the government might have a case only on that one technical point, conviction on that point meant a ten-year jail sentence, minimum. A conviction would end Lewis’s NFL career.

  The other concern was a more general one about the image of the team. Dating back to the Atlanta incident and the swagger of the team that had won the Super Bowl a year later, the Ravens had been labeled thugs and criminals by many in the media. Billick was still viewed by many as arrogant and overbearing, in large part because of that first press conference in Tampa.

  For the past two years, the team had been slowly shedding that image. Many of the veteran players responsible for that swagger were gone, most of them leaving in the salary-cap purge of 2002. Ray Lewis had done a remarkable job of resurrecting his public image. He was an absolute icon in Baltimore, beloved because he was a truly great player, respected as the absolute leader of the Ravens, and revered because he did a great deal of charity work in the area. Even nationally he had been redeemed in many, if not most, eyes. He was both a corporate and an NFL spokesman, someone looked up to by most connected with the sport.

  But, of course, there were always going to be pockets of people who still called him a murderer, others who would talk about his plea bargain, even though there hadn’t actually been one. The charges against Jamal Lewis brought all the old Ray Lewis stories bubbling to the surface. Additionally, Ray Lewis’s close friend defensive back Corey Fuller had been charged with felony gambling during the off-season for running an illegal card game out of his home in Tallahassee. Shortly before that, Fuller had been involved in a bizarre shooting incident outside his house in which he had been shot at—and returned fire—by two men he believed were trying to rob him. Throw in a year-old assault charge against linebacker Terrell Suggs for his role in a fight outside a bar in Phoenix and a lot of people were having a lot of fun depicting the Ravens as the NFL’s answer to the team Burt Reynolds had quarterbacked in The Longest Yard.

  Publicly, the Ravens dealt with each situation matter-of-factly, saying in each case that when the facts came out, people would understand that Jamal Lewis, Fuller, and Suggs were good men who had not committed any serious crimes. There was, however, a good deal of concern about Lewis, Fuller, and Suggs—or, more specifically, about the team’s image—inside the Ravens facility. Cass had talked to the lawyers in each of the three cases and reported back that he believed none of the three players had done anything seriously wrong and might, especially in the cases of Fuller and Suggs, be completely innocent. Even so, everyone agreed that those facts weren’t going to make the issue go away. The concern was how much of a distraction all the questions about the cases and the team’s image were going to be as the season approached.

  That concern was crystallized on the first day of minicamp when an ESPN crew showed up, ostensibly to talk to players about the upcoming season and their hopes that they could build on their successes of 2003. Byrne, who was friends with the director assigned to the shoot, made it clear that the team felt it had dealt with all the Jamal Lewis questions earlier in the day at Lewis’s prepractice press conference and that all the players had been told the subject was off-limits except perhaps to express empathy and support for their teammate. Billick never told his players what to say to the media, he just informed them what the team’s public position was and let them go from there.

  Normally when ESPN shows up, NFL teams roll out the red carpet. ESPN is one of four networks—along with CBS, Fox, and ESPN’s corporate sister, ABC—that pays the league hundreds of millions of dollars for broadcast rights. What’s more, ESPN televises the draft and devotes hours and hours of coverage to the NFL, which amounts to invaluable free advertising for the league. If ESPN wants something from an NFL team, it almost always gets it. In this case, the director wanted Byrne to bring players in one at a time to the trailer the Ravens used as a media workroom so he could set up cameras and talk to them in a private environment, away from the locker room. Byrne was happy to cooperate.

  Not surprisingly, the first player he sent in was Jonathan Ogden. There were several reasons for this, one of them being that Ogden was just as much a lock Hall of Famer as Ray Lewis. He was also very smart, very articulate, and more than able to deal with any question that might be thrown at him. When Ogden came out of the trailer, he went straight to Byrne. “I don’t think you should send anyone else in there,” he said. “They aren’t here to talk about football.”

  ESPN had pulled the old bait-and-switch: start out with football questions, then shift into questions about “distractions,” specifically distractions such as Jamal’s impending trial. Ogden knew right away what was going on. He danced around the questions and then went straight to Byrne. At that point Byrne told the ESPN director that the locker room was open to ESPN, as it was to anyo
ne else in the media, but the Ravens wouldn’t be providing any more players that day.

  When Billick heard what had happened, he decided it was time for him to sit down and talk the whole situation through with the key people in the organization—starting with the new owner and working from there to the players. Billick had never believed in any kind of formal player council, as some teams have, in part because he didn’t feel it was needed but also because he knew he ran the risk of offending certain players who might think they belonged on it and weren’t asked. Now, though, he called two meetings for the next day: one with Bisciotti, Cass, Newsome, and Byrne, to be held in Billick’s office in the afternoon; the second to be held at night at Billick’s house, the invitees being Ray Lewis, Jamal Lewis, Jonathan Ogden, Todd Heap, Ed Reed, and Matt Stover. The first five had been Pro Bowlers the year before. Stover had been the team’s placekicker since 1991 and was a respected elder even in a sport where placekickers are usually sneered at by “real” players. Billick thought about asking Boller to the meeting for the simple reason that he was the team’s starting quarterback and had to be one of the team’s leaders in order for it to succeed. He decided against it for the same reason he generally didn’t call these meetings in the first place: there were other, more established players on the team who might resent Boller’s presence after a total of nine NFL starts.

  “Looking back, I probably erred on the side of caution,” Billick said. “In all probability, everyone would have understood why I asked Kyle to be there.”

  Both meetings were essentially the same. Billick wanted to sit down with Bisciotti and Cass to make sure that everyone was on the same page. Billick was still feeling edgy about his relationship with the new owner. Some tension still simmered from their January meetings. Was Bisciotti bothered, he wondered, by all the negative publicity floating around the team? Did he think he had bought a team populated by thugs? Billick was pretty sure he knew the answers, but he wanted to hear them from Bisciotti and wanted to be sure that he was conscious of the fact that the team was fighting an image problem in a league that is nothing if not image-conscious.

  “If I thought it was a question of character, I’d be concerned,” Bisciotti said. “If I thought we had bad guys, I’d be concerned. But I don’t. I tell my kids all the time that I know they’re going to make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes and I still make mistakes. But if you make mistakes, serious mistakes, repeatedly, then it becomes a question of character. Right now I don’t think it’s a question of character. I think we’ve got some guys who have made mistakes or in some cases been unlucky. But that’s where I think it ends.”

  They talked about the need to keep the pending court cases—especially Lewis’s—from becoming a distraction once training camp began at the end of July. The Ravens would go into the season as a team given a shot to get to the Super Bowl. The favorites would be the defending champion New England Patriots in the AFC and the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC; but the Indianapolis Colts, Kansas City Chiefs, and the Ravens would be mentioned in the AFC, and the Green Bay Packers, Seattle Seahawks, and Carolina Panthers would be seen as contenders in the NFC. That meant there would be a fair number of national media members in training camp. The same questions put to Jonathan Ogden by ESPN would no doubt be put to players then.

  “I think we have to be clear, just like we were with Ray, that this is a non-issue for us as a team right now,” Billick said. “We respect the system; we will let the case play out, however it plays out. But right now our focus is on football, and the chances are good that our guys aren’t going to want to answer questions about Jamal except if they are about his abilities as a running back. And Jamal has addressed it in his press conference. If you weren’t here, the transcript is available. That’s where it ends.”

  Billick’s message was similar that night, but he wanted to be sure the players were comfortable with handling it that way. Reed and Heap hadn’t been around during the post-Ray Lewis arrest period, so Billick wanted to get a sense from them about how those on the team who hadn’t lived through that felt. He also wanted to see if there were any other issues on his players’ minds. At one point he turned to Ogden and asked him how he felt about Lewis being such an iconic figure in Baltimore. “You’ve been in the Pro Bowl for seven years,” he said. “You know how much you mean to this team. Yet, when people talk about us, it’s always ‘Ray, Ray, Ray.’ Does that ever bother you?”

  Ogden, who would be just as happy never to be recognized by anyone—difficult when you are six-nine and 345 pounds—laughed. “Doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. “I know what Ray means to the team and how important his leadership is. That’s who he is. Who I am is different, and I’m very comfortable with that.”

  Billick is a big believer in attacking issues directly. He had become even more of a believer in that approach when he had attended the Black Coaches Association convention earlier in the spring. He had been asked there as a speaker but had remained after he finished to hear the speaker who followed him, a female psychologist. “She talked about something she called ‘stacking,’” Billick said. “Stacking is something we all do. Something is bothering me at work, so I get really upset because some SOB cuts me off in traffic. Then I get home and one of my kids is doing something mildly annoying and I go off on them because I’m already upset about work and about the guy who cut me off. Then I go back into work the next day in a bad mood to begin with because I’m stacking one thing on top of the other.

  “It can get to be a cycle. I wanted to make sure, right at the start, that we didn’t start doing any stacking. I thought with everything that was floating around, everything the guys were no doubt hearing, with a new owner, getting ready to move into a new facility—which I knew would be great ultimately but would also involve a lot of work—we could get into stacking very easily. I wanted to try and cut that off before it got started.”

  Not surprisingly, the cover of the Ravens’ 2004 media guide featured a photo of Ray Lewis congratulating Jamal Lewis as he came off the field. Equally unsurprising was the photo itself: Ray, helmet off, eyes full of intensity; Jamal, back to the camera, helmet on, the only thing identifying him his number and the name above the number. Ray and Jamal Lewis were by far the biggest stars on the Ravens. As great as Ogden was, the combination of his personality and the fact that he played a position that really got noticed only if he made a mistake made him almost invisible to the fans.

  Not Ray and Jamal—although Jamal would probably have been just as happy living in near anonymity, much the way Jonathan Ogden did.

  Ray Lewis loved the spotlight, even if it had caused him a fair amount of discomfort at times. His attitude toward being a public figure and the anointed leader of a pro football team may have been summed up best two years earlier when he had injured a shoulder in Cleveland, an injury that ended up costing him the last eleven games of that season. When he went to have the shoulder examined, he had to fill out the forms people fill out when they go to a doctor’s office. Under occupation, he had written, “Entertainer.”

  He had been that way for as long as he could remember. The eldest of Sunseria Keith’s five children, Ray Lewis never knew his father. “Knew of him, but never knew him,” he said. He had three younger sisters and a younger brother (who is now a running back at the University of Maryland). By the time he was six, like most kids growing up in Lakeland, Florida, Ray wanted to play football. But his mother, who worked three jobs to support her children, couldn’t spare the $15 it would cost to sign her son up for Pop Warner football. In 1985, the year Ray turned ten, the Chicago Bears were the NFL’s dominant team, going 15-1 and beating the New England Patriots, 46-10, in the Super Bowl. Lewis remembered watching that team with his grandfather, who loved football and loved watching the NFL. “I was transfixed watching,” he said. “I loved Mike Singletary and I loved Walter Payton. I just loved the passion of the whole thing. I knew watching them that I wanted to be that way someday.”

  Lewis we
nt to his mother to plead with her to let him play football. “I said to her, ‘Mama, someday you’re never going to work again. I promise. Just let me play.’” Sunseria Keith was torn. She was afraid her eldest son might get hurt playing football. There was also still the money issue. “I went out to practice one day, just practice,” Ray said. “I was running around out there, and the coach asked me if I was signed up to play. I said, no, that my mother wasn’t sure she wanted to let me or if we could afford it. He went to my mom and offered to pay half the fee. I begged her to do it. I said, ‘Mama, just give me once chance to do it. One chance.’ She said okay. First play of my first game we ran a reverse on the kickoff and I went eighty yards for a touchdown. After that I was completely hooked.”

  Lewis is a believer that drive and desire are something one is born with but that they can be nurtured through experience. He always believed he was his family’s leader, its father figure, since there was no adult father figure around. “I mourned not having a father,” he said. “My mother gave me everything she possibly could. Everything I am today is because of her. But she couldn’t be my father. I wanted to do everything I could to give my siblings a father figure. My mother was out of the house so early in the morning by the time I was in junior high school that I would get my sisters and brothers out of the house and off to school. I would walk them to the bus stop, then go to school myself. I always told my friends if they wanted to play football after school, they had to do it at my house because I had to look out for my family. I liked that kind of responsibility. It made me a man at a young age, I think. I always felt I could deal with whatever came my way.”

  If his mother is the person he looks up to most, the church is the place he cares about the most. For as long as he can remember, Lewis has gone to church every Sunday, often on Saturdays as well, and to Bible study at least once a week. He sang in the choir at Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church and was a junior deacon. Like many raised in the Southern Baptist Church, he frequently makes references to God’s plan for him. When the Ravens hold chapel services on Saturday night, the loudest respondent in the room is always Lewis, who frequently chimes in during the sermon with cries of “Oh my God!” and “Yes, absolutely, so true, so true!”