Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Deion.

  “I knew he was in shape, because he played basketball all the time,” Fuller said. “I knew he didn’t have the game completely out of his system. And I knew—I mean, knew—that he could come back and be a nickel corner. I mean, come on, we’re not talking about your average player here, we’re talking about Deion Sanders.”

  Deion Sanders—Prime Time to anyone who had ever paid attention to football—was not by any stretch of the imagination your average player. During his twelve seasons in the NFL, he had redefined the cornerback position, playing it so well and so aggressively that offensive coordinators drew up game plans that, for all intents and purposes, removed Sanders’s half of the field from consideration. Throwing in his direction wasn’t just pointless, it was foolish.

  Sanders had made himself into one of the best-known personalities in sports not just by being perhaps the best cornerback ever but by becoming a solid Major League baseball player and a luminous, if at times controversial, personality. He had been dubbed “Prime Time” coming out of Florida State because of his penchant for making spectacular plays at key moments—or in prime time—and had ridden his talent and that persona to millions on and off the field. He had retired from football just prior to the start of the 2001 season after deciding he didn’t want to play for newly hired Washington Redskins coach Marty Schottenheimer. He had worked out a deal with Redskins owner Dan Snyder and then played one more year of baseball before retiring in 2002.

  He had been hired to do CBS’s pregame show and had been very good on the air. He was smart, he was funny, he had presence, he knew the game, and, perhaps most important, he knew the players. “I could call just about anyone in the game,” he said. “If someone speculated on how the Ravens’ defense might attack the Steelers’ offense, I could say, ‘I talked to Ray Lewis last night, and here’s exactly what they’re planning to do.’”

  Sanders had decided not to return to CBS in 2004 after the network had turned down his request to double his salary from $1 million to $2 million. Most people saw that decision as another example of an athlete (or ex-athlete) trying to bleed every dollar he could out of an employer. It wasn’t quite that simple. Sanders had never been comfortable working with Boomer Esiason, the ex-quarterback on the CBS pregame set. The two men argued frequently on the air. Most people thought the arguments were schtick. Sanders said they weren’t.

  “Boomer and I just disagreed on a lot of things,” he said. “It wasn’t an act and it wasn’t fun. To me, retirement is supposed to be something you enjoy. I wasn’t really enjoying myself that much. I felt like if I was going to go back and do that again, I wanted to be paid the way the top guys in those jobs are being paid. CBS made a business decision not to pay that much. Their show is number two [behind Fox] and they didn’t think it was worth that much money when the show was number two. I understood. Business is business. I’m still cool with those guys, I like almost all of them. But I decided to take a break, go home for a while, and spend time with my family.”

  Sanders was home on his 112-acre ranch in Prosper, Texas (a Dallas suburb), when his cell phone rang. It was Fuller, who had pulled out his cell phone and called Sanders almost as soon as the idea crossed his mind. Fuller had chosen to attend Florida State because Sanders had played there. The two had become close friends, and Sanders referred to Fuller and Ray Lewis—whom he had met years earlier because they had the same agent—as his “little brothers.” Now Sanders answered the phone and heard one of his little brothers jabbering on about him coming back to play football because the Ravens needed a cornerback and he could still play cornerback.

  “You’re crazy,” Sanders told Fuller. “I’m done. I’m coaching my son and spending time with my kids. I’m not playing football.”

  He hung up the phone. His wife, Pilar, asked him what that had been about. “It was Corey with some wild idea about me going back to play,” he said.

  “You tell Corey to leave you alone,” Pilar Sanders said. “You’re staying right here.”

  “I know,” Sanders answered. “I know.”

  A few hours later the phone rang again. This time it was both Fuller and Lewis. Fuller had talked to Lewis during dinner, and once the evening meetings were over, they called back to double-team him.

  “You know you can do it,” Lewis said. “You’ll be with us. We can have a great team. We can go to the Super Bowl. Come on, man, we need you.”

  In the background, Lewis and Fuller could hear Pilar Sanders yelling, “Leave my man alone!”

  She was too late. The seed had been planted.

  “Let me think about it,” Sanders said finally.

  The next day Fuller and Lewis approached Billick. They had an idea, they told him. Billick was accustomed to Lewis and Fuller making suggestions, something he accepted because Lewis was the team’s leader and Fuller was someone he had known for many years. They had never had an idea quite like this one before. “What makes you think he’d do it?” he asked. They told him about their conversation with Sanders. Billick was intrigued. “I’ll talk to Ozzie,” he told them.

  Most nights in camp, Newsome would have dinner in the players’ dining room along with his scouts at the one table in the room marked RESERVED. The rest of the tables were used by players, while coaches and staff usually ate in the adjoining room. The setup had a purpose, giving the players some room to breathe away from the coaches at the end of the day. Most nights one or more of the rookies would be required to stand on a chair, announce his name, his college, and how much his signing bonus was for—the range in 2004 went from second-round pick Dwan Edwards at $1 million down to most of the undrafted free agents at zero—and then sing a song. Unlike the old days, when rookies were required to sing their college fight songs, they could sing any song they wanted to, knowing that if their rendition was not done with gusto, they would be booed heartily. If they did well, the veterans were apt to join in, or at least clap rhythmically as the performance reached a crescendo.

  Billick ate in the players’ dining room only if his family was in town or if there were corporate sponsors around whom Dennis Mannion, the team’s senior vice president of business ventures, had asked him to entertain. One had to be a major sponsor to eat a training-camp meal with Billick. Most days Billick’s lunch and dinner routines were identical: at lunch he would make himself a multi-fruit-flavored smoothie and then take it back to the room that served as his office. “This way I feel like I’m watching what I eat,” he said. “Then at dinner, I go crazy.” Normally he took dinner back to his office, too. On this night, though, after the second day of two-a-days, he walked his tray into the players’ eating area and sat down with Newsome.

  “Ray and Corey have come up with an idea,” he said. Newsome smiled, figuring something wild was coming. He wasn’t wrong.

  “They think Deion might be willing to come and play for us.”

  Newsome’s eyebrows went up. Sanders is one of those athletes who can be identified by his first name only. Even when people use his nickname, they frequently call him “Prime” and everyone knows who they are talking about.

  “Are they serious?” he asked. “More important, is he serious?”

  Billick shrugged. “Don’t know. They say he is.”

  The two men decided on a two-pronged strategy: Billick would call Sanders and feel him out. Newsome would call Eugene Parker, Deion’s longtime agent. After that, they would have a better idea of whether this was a Lewis/Fuller fantasy.

  “You couldn’t ignore it because of the man’s talent,” Newsome said later. “We are talking about a lock Hall of Famer. What kind of player he would be three years after he last played was hard to know. But my guess was he wouldn’t put himself out there if he didn’t honestly think he could still do the job. It was definitely worth investigating.”

  That night Lewis and Fuller gave Sanders’s phone number to Billick, who called him. Billick’s notion was that if this was going to happen, it needed to happen fast. He wanted to
get Sanders into camp, give him a physical, sign him to a contract, and find out what he could do. “The sooner you get here, the better,” he told Sanders.

  Sanders didn’t want to go quite that fast. “I wanted to find out what kind of shape I was in before I actually showed at camp,” he said. “I knew the minute I got there it was going to be a media circus and I didn’t want to just walk into that, cold. At that moment, my foot was actually in a boot because I’d rolled my ankle badly playing in my basketball league a few days earlier. There was no point in my coming in at that point or in them making any financial commitment. I told Brian to give me some time.”

  Billick didn’t feel as if he had that much time. The first exhibition game was in twelve days, and opening day in Cleveland was six weeks off. If he was going to count on a thirty-seven-year-old retired cornerback, he wanted to know as soon as possible what the man could do. He reported his conversation to Newsome, who called Parker. Parker told him he thought Sanders wanted to do it but had to find out what kind of shape he was in first. They agreed to talk again after Sanders had a chance to test himself once his ankle was healed.

  While the Ravens moved on with camp, Sanders began working out on his own. Parker found three wide receivers who had been cut early in training camps and sent them down to Prosper to work with him. Sanders was soon convinced he could still cover people. Then, one afternoon in the blazing heat, he did two sprint sets. The first was 10x100 yards with ten seconds’ rest in between. After that he did 10x40, all-out, same rest. He felt great. “That was when I decided, ‘I can do this.’”

  He called Parker and told him to try to make a deal with the Ravens. By that time, word had spread among the players that Deion might be joining the team and, naturally, the story had leaked. Jamison Hensley broke it in the Baltimore Sun on the Sunday before the opening exhibition game. “Whether it happens or not,” he said, “if they’re even talking to Deion Sanders, it’s a story.”

  While the Deion buzz spread, the rituals of camp continued. The first circled date on the calendar was Friday, August 6, the eighth day of camp. That was when the team would hold its annual scrimmage. For the veterans, the scrimmage was something to get through. They would play a series or two, then stand on the sideline and watch the younger players try to kill one another in order to get the attention of the coaches. The attitude of most of the vets was summed up best when offensive line coach Jim Colletto announced during a meeting with his players on the morning of the scrimmage that the starters would play two series that night. “Two series?” Jonathan Ogden said, sounding aghast. “That’s a lot of work, isn’t it?”

  It surprised absolutely no one that Ogden wouldn’t want to be on the field for a single play more than was absolutely necessary. He had long ago figured out exactly how much work he needed to do and he had no desire to do anything more than exactly that. “I understand that there are times when we have to do things I don’t think I need to be doing,” he said. “But the other guys need it. So I don’t say anything about it.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. If not saying anything meant he didn’t argue or debate, that was accurate. But if not saying anything included sighs or the occasional groan or rolling of the eyes, then it could be argued that Ogden always made his position clear. Of course, nobody minded much. That was just J.O. being J.O. “The guy’s a freak of nature,” starting center Mike Flynn said. “He just doesn’t need to do all the things the rest of us need to do in order to be great.”

  Ogden had been charged with giving up one sack in 2003, and he was still upset about it. “Kyle went the wrong way,” he said. “He was supposed to go left and he went right. I blocked the guy right and ran him right into Kyle—who wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  He had forgiven Boller for the mistake. Sort of.

  There was no doubting Ogden’s greatness. He was the prototypical left tackle, the position considered by many in the NFL to be second only to quarterback in terms of importance because it is the left tackle who protects every right-handed quarterback’s blind side. Ogden was six foot nine and weighed 345 pounds. And yet he didn’t look that big. His body was almost sleek. He had speed and quickness belying his size, perfect technique, and a streak of competitiveness that was actually a lot different than the laid-back persona he presented in public.

  “I think the thing that drives me the most is fear of failure,” he said. “I’ve never given much thought to the notion that I might be in the Hall of Fame someday or that people say I’m one of the great left tackles. I just don’t want to get beaten, I don’t want a guy to get by me, and I don’t want to walk away from any game feeling I was outplayed.”

  There had not been many times in Ogden’s life when he had been outplayed at anything. He had grown up in Washington, D.C., the eldest son of Shirrel, an investment banker, and Cassandra Ogden, a lawyer who worked for a group that provided counseling and recruitment services to young men and women from disadvantaged homes who wanted to go to law school. He was always a good athlete and a good student, but he began to focus on football when he arrived at the prestigious St. Albans School (alma mater of, among others, Al Gore) in Northwest Washington. Soon after he started high school, his parents separated. Like many kids watching their parents go through a divorce, Ogden found escape from what was going on at home in athletics.

  “Part of it, I’m sure, was just because I was pretty good,” he said. “But the other part was that the football field became a place I could go and not think about the upheaval in my life. My friends on the team became people I could talk to about things that had nothing to do with all that. As I got bigger and better, football became more and more important and I realized it was going to be a part of my future, at least in terms of getting me into college.”

  By the time he was a junior, Ogden was so big and so fast and so good that the St. Albans coaches just lined him up wherever the other team’s best defensive player was, and that pretty much ended that player’s day. Because he had excellent grades and good SATs, Ogden was sought after by every football-playing school in the country. “Actually I only made in the eleven hundreds when I took the SATs,” he said. “My mother freaked out. She said, ‘You have to take them again.’ My dad said, ‘The boy’s a football player. He’s going to get in anyplace he wants with that score.’ Of course, he was right.”

  Ogden visited Notre Dame but found it “too Notre Damish.” He liked Florida and Steve Spurrier and he also liked Virginia, a place where a number of St. Albans players, including Jesse Jackson’s son Yusef, had gone and become successful players. But when he got off the plane in Los Angeles to visit UCLA, he was sold pretty quickly. “They drove me up the Pacific Highway, then they showed me Bel-Air and Beverly Hills and the campus. They played good football, if not great football. They were also good in track. [Ogden was also a shot-putter.] It was a good school. It was gorgeous. I was sold.”

  He became a starter five games into his freshman season. By the end of his junior year he knew he could turn pro and almost certainly be a first-round draft pick. But his future agent counseled him to wait a year (rare advice from an agent) on the grounds that the class of ’95 was filled with stud offensive linemen and he might drop to late in the first round. A year later he would almost certainly be the first lineman drafted. He waited. Sure enough, when people started putting together mock drafts a year later, he was in everybody’s top five.

  He was interviewed by all six teams picking at the top of the first round: the New York Jets, Jacksonville Jaguars, Arizona Cardinals, Baltimore Ravens, Washington Redskins, and St. Louis Rams. The one team he was fairly certain wouldn’t be taking him was Baltimore. “I knew the Jets were taking Keyshawn [Johnson] and I had heard that Kevin Hardy or I would go next, but that if the Jaguars or Cardinals didn’t take me, the Ravens were going to take Lawrence Phillips. Worst case, I’d go five to Washington or maybe six to St. Louis. The one place I thought I didn’t want to go was Baltimore. They had just moved, their facility w
as absolutely brutal, and everything was in upheaval. But I knew I wasn’t going there anyway, especially since they had two experienced tackles, so I didn’t worry about it.”

  On draft day, he sat in the green room in New York and heard the Jets announce they were taking Johnson. Fine. Jacksonville took Hardy. Ogden wasn’t 100 percent sold on the idea of going to Arizona. The organization wasn’t exactly the Packers of the ’60s, but the location was great and Ogden thought he would help the team improve. He sat and waited to hear his name. Paul Tagliabue walked to the microphone and, in his well-practiced monotone, said, “With the third pick in the 1996 NFL draft, the Arizona Cardinals select . . . Simeon Rice from the University of Illinois.”

  Ogden did a double-take. He hadn’t even heard Rice’s name in the early mix. He was surprised. He sat back and waited for Baltimore to take Phillips so he could find out if he was going to Washington or St. Louis. The phone in the green room rang. It was Ozzie Newsome calling him: “Jonathan, are you ready to be the first draft pick in Baltimore Ravens history?”

  Stunned, Ogden said something like “Yeah, sure.”

  A few minutes later he was standing onstage with Tagliabue, putting on a white cap with a black bill and the word RAVENS printed across it. The team still didn’t have a logo yet. Little did he know that Newsome had gone against the wishes of his owner and most of his scouts by taking him over Phillips. Before making the pick, Newsome had asked offensive line coach Kirk Ferentz one question: “Are you absolutely certain he can play guard?” since the Ravens had Orlando Brown and Tony Jones, both quality offensive tackles. “Absolutely,” Ferentz had answered, sealing the deal.