Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  “I’ve learned two things in life,” he often says. “Put your absolute trust only in God and not in any man. And no man can curse what God has blessed.” When he talks about the church and his relationship with God, he frequently quotes the Bible and speaks with at least the same intensity that people hear so often when he is miked during a football game.

  Once Lewis began playing football, the only issue was his size. He had great speed, an uncanny ability to find the ball and the ballcarrier, and a will that couldn’t be measured. As a high school sophomore, he was five-nine and 160 pounds. By his senior year he had grown to six feet and 190 pounds—bigger, but still small for a college linebacker. “I wanted to go to Florida State in the worst way,” he said. “I was a lifelong Seminole fan and I had a cousin who was there playing wide receiver. I went up for my visit and I met with Chuck Amato [now the head coach at N.C. State], who I think was the defensive coordinator at the time. He says to me, ‘Ray, we love you, we want you here at Florida State.’ I’m thrilled, I’m just jumping up and down inside, thinking I’m going to Florida State. Then he says, ‘We’ll redshirt you for a year, give you a chance to get in the weight room, get bigger and stronger. Then you’ll back up Derrick Brooks for a year and when you’re a sophomore, you’ll be ready to start. I stood up and said, ‘Coach, what makes you think I’m not better than Derrick Brooks right now?’” Lewis had no intention of watching other people play football for two years.

  He knew he was ready to play big-time college football right now. But he had visited only two other schools: Auburn (his first trip on an air-

  plane) and Florida A&M. In the state playoffs that fall (1992) his team—Kathleen High School—played Fort Myers. Miami coach Dennis Erickson came to the game to scout one of Fort Myers’s wide receivers. He came away wanting to know how to get in touch with Ray Lewis. “I think I rushed for a hundred and eighty-seven yards and I made twenty-five tackles,” he said. “Two days before the national deadline, Miami offered me their last scholarship. I had never seen the school, but it was Miami. I said, ‘Let’s go.’”

  The coaches whispered something about redshirting, but Lewis was hearing none of it. “Once they saw me on the practice field, that was over,” he said. “I started the season behind a senior, Robert Bass, but then he got hurt in the opener against Virginia Tech. I came in and made eighteen tackles. The next week we played at Colorado and I had fifteen tackles, a sack, a pick, and started a fight. I still remember Warren Sapp and some of the older guys grabbing me, saying, ‘No, Ray, no, Ray, stop, we can’t afford to lose you!’”

  By his sophomore season, Lewis was co-Big East defensive player of the year along with Sapp, who left school that year to become the first draft pick of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was picked as a preseason All-American prior to his junior year and flew to Las Vegas to be part of a photo shoot for the All-American team. It was there that he met a huge tackle from UCLA named Jonathan Ogden. Each still remembers the other: “All I thought was, ‘Little linebacker, big mouth,’” Ogden said. “I mean he never shut up.”

  “He kept giving me these looks like I was the class clown,” Lewis said. “Which I was. Everyone was so tight. I just wanted to have fun.”

  He had a good deal of fun that season, making every All-America team and being voted the Big East’s defensive player of the year. “That’s when I knew it was time to go,” he said. “I was pretty sure before my junior year, certain afterwards. College football had become too easy for me by that point. I was ready for the NFL and I knew it.”

  The NFL wasn’t quite as sure. Ozzie Newsome still believes some teams were scared off by Lewis’s bluntness, his tattoos, and his outspokenness. Lewis is convinced it was all about size. “Same as high school,” he said. “People didn’t think I was big enough. I’ll never forget going to the combine. They stand you up there in front of everyone and measure you. I was six feet zero, zero seven inches—just a tad over six feet even. I can still hear Bill Cowher’s voice saying, ‘Is he really that small?’ I can remember thinking, ‘Small? You think I’m small? Have you ever seen me run to the football?’”

  There was at least one person who was completely convinced that Lewis wasn’t too small to play in the NFL—Ravens’ linebackers coach Maxie Baughn. He visited Lewis to work him out and talked to him on several occasions. Every time he saw Lewis, he came back to Newsome and told him, “Everything I give him to do, he asks for more. No matter what you give him, he goes and gets it and then asks for more.”

  Knowing about the doubts scouts had about his size, Lewis went into draft day simply hoping to get taken in the first round. Even so, as he watched one linebacker after another being taken before him, Lewis was dismayed. Kevin Hardy went to Jacksonville with the second pick; John Mobley went to Denver with the fifteenth; Reggie Brown went to Detroit with the seventeenth. “I knew I was better than they were,” he said. He heard ESPN’s draft expert Mel Kiper Jr. saying that he had great speed and talent but was simply too small to be a star in the NFL. Finally, late in the first round, the phone rang. It was the Packers. They had the twenty-seventh pick and, as soon as Baltimore got through making its pick at twenty-six, they were planning to take him. Lewis was fine with that. He wondered if Maxie Baughn would be disappointed that the Ravens had decided not to take him. Another phone rang. It was Newsome. He would not, as it turned out, be going to Green Bay.

  The first day he showed up at the Ravens’ training facility, he went into the weight room and asked what the team record for pull-ups was. “Forty-six,” he was told. He promptly took off his shirt, did forty-seven, and put his shirt back on. It didn’t take long for the Ravens to figure out they had found a special player. Lewis was so fast and had such a nose for the football and a drive to make every tackle that he quickly became a star. By his second year he was chosen as the AFC’s best linebacker. He became a perennial Pro Bowler. By the end of the 1999 season, he was clearly one of the elite players in the game.

  All of which led him to Atlanta.

  The Super Bowl has become an annual sports convention. People flock to the city where the game is being played to party, to see and be seen, to hawk products, to get their picture in the paper and their faces on TV. Lewis went to have a good time with some friends and then was planning to fly to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl. “My mother begged me not to go,” he said. “She knew something. She pleaded with me to skip it. Three times she said to me, ‘Junior, don’t go there.’ I told her I had made commitments—to my friends, to make appearances. I thought I had the whole thing under control. My kids were there; my girl was there. We were going to Hawaii the day after the game. But that last night my friends all wanted to go out. I made a mistake. I went outside the structure I had set up for myself while I was there.”

  He was out with those friends after the game on Sunday night, hanging out at a club in the chic Buckhead district. Outside the bar, there was a fight. It escalated, and before it was over, two men were lying in the street with fatal knife wounds. Lewis later testified that as the fight escalated he got into the limousine he had rented for the weekend and began urging his friends to get into the limo. In the early hours of the morning, when police came to question Lewis, he was, by his own admission, less than forthcoming. Before the day was over he was in jail, charged with a double murder.

  He was there for fifteen long days. “It was awful,” he said. “It was awful because jail is awful. But it was also awful because it had nothing to do with me. This was not a place where I belonged. It was painful.”

  Lewis can still remember the lowest moment of his time in jail, about five days after he had been there. Before he went to bed each night, he did sit-ups and push-ups to get himself to a point of exhaustion where he could sleep. That night, though, it didn’t work. “I lay there on the bed and I cried,” he said. “I just cried and cried. I sat up and I looked at the tears in my hands and I said, ‘Okay, Lord, now I understand. You’re up to something. You’ve got a plan. I’m not
going to worry anymore, I’m not going to cry anymore. I’m going to wait and see what your plan for me is going to be.’ From that moment on, I was okay. I really was okay.”

  When he got out of jail, Lewis had to deal with the fact that he had now become the symbol of the thug football player—actually, beyond thug because now there were people who were saying he was a murderer. “People who never met me were saying and writing this was part of a pattern,” he said. “I said, really, what pattern? When have I ever been in trouble? Never. Not once. But they knew. They knew Ray Lewis. Of course, there were others [most of them in Baltimore] who loved me and knew I was innocent. They didn’t know me, either, but they did have faith in me. That’s the part of it I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget the way Art Modell and Ozzie Newsome and Brian Billick and my teammates stood behind me then.”

  When the prosecutor dropped the charges in June and Lewis admitted on the stand that he had lied to police when first approached, he was given a year of probation on the obstruction-of-justice charge. At the press conference in Baltimore a few days later, Ed Garland was adamant when he explained that there was no plea bargain and that the charges had been dropped because the prosecution had reached the conclusion that Lewis was innocent. Garland clearly went too far when he likened the obstruction charge to being “no worse than a speeding ticket.” That comment understandably angered a lot of people, since the police had been seeking answers to questions about a double murder when they spoke to Lewis that morning.

  Almost exactly one year after the Atlanta incident, Lewis stood on a podium in Tampa, holding the Super Bowl MVP trophy. It was then, he says, that he knew God’s plan. “He wanted me to see everything,” he said. “He wanted me to see that hands and feet that were once shackled could carry me to that podium and to that trophy and to sharing the feeling of winning the Super Bowl. I know that’s what it was all about now.”

  Perhaps even more remarkable than coming back to win the Super Bowl MVP was the respect Lewis now engendered from people not just on the field but off. At twenty-nine, he was generally considered the best defensive player in the NFL. He talked proudly about his six children—three he’d had with his longtime college girlfriend, three who had come from later relationships—and had all of them living close to him in Baltimore. His mother was also in Baltimore and he had fulfilled his promise to her in the spring when he graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in business administration. Lewis’s arrival for minicamp was, in many ways, the official signal that the football season was under way. Four and a half years after he had cried in his prison cell, Ray Lewis was an iconic figure in the city of Baltimore and, at the very least, a respected one around the country.

  And what about those people who would always see him as a murderer who had gone free because he was a rich and famous football player? “They can’t hurt me,” he said. “They can only hurt themselves.”

  Jamal Lewis hadn’t spent any time in jail . . . yet. The specter of the trial and how that might affect his and the Ravens’ season was something he knew he was going to have to deal with for a while.

  “What pisses me off is, if I don’t rush for two thousand yards last year, they probably don’t even bother charging me,” he said. “I think the prosecutor saw my name in a file and said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t let this go, this is a famous guy.’”

  Lewis was a very small part of the FBI sting. But once the charges had been filed, his role became far more important than that of anyone else. He understood how that worked. Bumps in the road weren’t anything new to Lewis. Unlike Ray Lewis, who had never been in trouble before Atlanta and never had a serious injury until his seventh year in the NFL, Jamal Lewis had dealt with both injuries and controversy even before he arrived in Baltimore.

  He grew up in Atlanta, where his father worked as a railroad engineer and his mother as a corrections officer. Although they lived in the inner city, the Lewises were a middle-class family. “We lived in a nice house and my parents both made pretty good money,” he said. “That wasn’t true of some of my friends. I was like a lot of kids. I had a choice: trouble or sports. Most of the time I chose sports.”

  He first played football when he was eight and was told to play center. Midway through that season he announced to his mother that he was retiring from the game. “Being a lineman wasn’t for me.”

  He played on and off until high school, when he began to grow into his body. By his sophomore year he was five foot ten and 195 pounds and a battering-ram running back. His father, John Lewis, was retired by then, thanks to a disability settlement resulting from an accident, and he was at every practice and every game Jamal played in. “Between my father being at practice all the time, my mom being in corrections, and my coach [Michael Simms] watching me all the time, I couldn’t have gotten into trouble if I had tried,” he said. “I had to get pretty good grades—or else. The only problem I had was the SAT. I must have taken it six times before I passed.”

  Once he had the minimum score on the SAT that he needed, every football school in the country wanted him. Like so many kids—including Ray Lewis—he thought he wanted to go to Florida State. “Everyone wanted to go to Florida State back then,” he said. “But they wanted me to play fullback because they like those little running backs. I didn’t want to be a blocker. So I started looking other places.”

  Georgia might have been a factor, but the school wasn’t that interested in kids from the inner city with borderline SATs. “They came in late after everyone else had recruited me for a while,” Lewis said. “By then it was too late.”

  He thought he wanted to go to Nebraska even though it was ten degrees when he got off the plane for his visit. He was impressed by Tom Osborne, and Lawrence Phillips—the man who made Ozzie Newsome’s career by not becoming a Raven—was his hero and role model as a running back. For a while he thought he would go there. “Coach Osborne was calling me all the time, saying things like ‘I’m just leaving Hawaii, I signed two big offensive linemen to block for you.’ I really liked him. My mom, though, she liked Michigan—great school and all. But then I went to Tennessee. Great program, great stadium. Peyton [Manning] was telling me he was gonna come back and be there as a senior. In the end, it was Tennessee—three hours away—or Nebraska—fourteen hours away. I went with the three hours.”

  His biggest problem as a Tennessee freshman was his first pregame meal. “I’d never seen so much food in my life,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t think I was going to play, so I sat there and ate steak, spaghetti, chicken—everything. Second half, we’re killing them and Coach turns around and says, ‘Jamal, you’re in.’ I’m like, ‘Me? Look how fat I am right now.’ But I got through it. Next week we played UCLA. I didn’t eat very much at the pregame meal that day. Or anytime after that.”

  By the time Tennessee went to Georgia midway through the season, Lewis was the starter. He had a huge day at Georgia, only to come home and find that a story had broken in the Atlanta papers about a shoplifting incident he had been involved in during his senior year in high school. “It wasn’t like I went in and started stashing things in my clothes and walked out,” he said. “I knew the girl at the register and she gave me a bunch of stuff half price. It was dumb. Week after the Georgia game, it becomes a story.”

  Lewis never went to court. He was fined and did some community service. A year later he really broke out as a star the first four weeks of the season as the heart of an offense rebuilt after Manning’s graduation. But in the fifth week of the season, he tore up his knee. Surgery. End of season. He ended up watching on the sidelines while his teammates won the national championship. “That was tough,” he said. “I was happy we won, but not playing hurt. I just said to myself, ‘I’m gonna rehab and come back better than ever.’”

  His junior year was also up and down. He ended up splitting time with Travis Henry, at least in part—he believes—because he publicly criticized the play calling after a loss to Florida. There were injur
ies (a high ankle sprain) and general unhappiness with the coaching staff. He decided to turn pro, even though he didn’t have any scintillating numbers to overwhelm NFL scouts with. Until the scouts came to watch him run. He was now five-eleven, 235 pounds, and he ran a 4.38 40. That meant more to the scouts than 2,000 yards rushing would have. The Ravens took him with the fifth pick of the draft. It was while he was waiting to sign and go to training camp that he met Michelle Smith and made the phone call that would lead him to grief four years later.

  He had an excellent rookie year—complete with a Super Bowl ring—but in keeping with the pattern of his life, that was followed by trouble: first another knee injury in training camp, then a positive drug test (marijuana) that led to a four-game suspension. He came back to play well in 2002 and then had the monster year in 2003 that he was convinced led to the prosecutors’ deciding to charge him in the drug sting.

  “Some coincidence, huh?” he said. “I rush for two thousand yards and all of a sudden something that happened four years ago is a big deal. They say everything’s a learning experience. I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve already learned a lot.”

  8

  The Love Boat

  AS MUCH AS FOOTBALL PLAYERS TALK about dreading training camp and the torture of two-a-days in the hot sun, the modern-day NFL camp is actually a mere shadow of what it once was. Back in those legendary days, training camps were longer and tougher and led to the kind of hijinks that are inevitable when testosterone-driven young men are cooped up in a monastic existence for six weeks. Back then, players often had to lose twenty, thirty, or forty pounds to get into shape for the start of the season. Coaches sometimes withheld water on hot days to toughen up the players.