Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  The Ravens would do that. With the team down, 10-3, Ed Reed intercepted a McNabb pass and lateraled to Will Demps, who took the ball into the end zone. The defense gathered around Demps to celebrate. That’s an NFL no-no. Excessive celebration. The flag flew and Billick’s headset flew off about a millisecond later. “Dammit, Ray,” he said, directing his anger at the leader of the defense. “You guys simply cannot do that. You can’t get us penalized like that. What did I tell you guys about not giving them the chance to throw a flag?”

  Billick might not have stayed angry for long if Wade Richey’s kickoff, pushed back to the 15-yard line by the penalty, hadn’t been fielded by Eagles rookie J. R. Reid at the 20 and run back for a touchdown. “I told you we’d pay!” Billick roared. “When are you guys gonna learn you can’t make mistakes like that!”

  The final score was 26-17, Eagles, the second half dominated by rookies and free agents trying to make an impression while the game dragged on toward midnight. By the time it mercifully ended, even the eager Eagles fans were on their way home, if only to get out of the stifling heat.

  The good news was there had been no major injuries.

  Except perhaps to the team’s psyche. Owens didn’t catch another ball the rest of the night. He didn’t have to.

  10

  Getting Serious

  WHEN THE TEAM RETURNED TO WESTMINSTER following the Eagles game, the mood was different. Two preseason games were in the books. Training camp was almost over. Billick had planned to break camp after practice on Tuesday morning, August 24, but decided to send everyone home after the annual rookie show on Monday night. Almost always when the choice is between slightly overworking or slightly underworking, Billick leans toward the latter, especially in preseason. The one and only exhibition game in which the starters would play extensively was the following Saturday. The first cuts would take place the following Monday. Most of those decisions had already been made, and a number of players were keenly aware that they were in the final days in which they were guaranteed to be paid for playing football.

  The best thing about camp had been the lack of injuries to starters and key players. B. J. Sams was close to returning from his hand injury. No one had expected Peter Boulware or Anthony Wright, both still mending from surgery, to be involved in camp at all. Defensive tackle Marques Douglas had injured an elbow, and at first it had been feared he might be out six weeks. Now it appeared likely he would be back for the final exhibition game. Anthony Weaver had an ankle injury that did not appear to be serious. Todd Heap had been out for a couple of weeks with a broken nose and rotator cuff problem in his shoulder, but neither injury threatened to keep him from being ready to start the season. The three players currently slated for injured reserve had never played a down in an NFL regular-season game: Trent Smith, Derek Abney, and Matt Zielinski.

  The one serious problem that had cropped up was the health of Orlando Brown’s mother. She had been hospitalized just prior to the first exhibition game, and Brown had been excused from camp and from the games to spend time with her. She was a diabetic with blood pressure problems, and her condition was extremely serious.

  Everyone associated with the Ravens knew how close Brown was to his mother and how emotional he was in normal situations, much less one as dire as this. Brown was one of the more remarkable and unlikely stories in NFL history. Brown’s nickname was Zeus, which made sense since he was just about the biggest man anyone had ever met. Even among the behemoths of the offensive line, Brown stood out. He was six foot seven, 360 pounds, and, if it were possible, looked bigger than that. The irony was that his mother gave him his nickname when she was pregnant with him, and when “Zeus,” was born—several weeks premature—he weighed three pounds and five ounces.

  “My mother never thought she would be able to get pregnant,” he said. “When she did, she was forty-two years old. She decided that the baby was some kind of a gift from the gods and told her students [she was a junior high school teacher and taught a class in mythology] that she had already nicknamed the baby Zeus.” It didn’t take long for the preemie to grow into his nickname. By the time Brown was a teenager, growing up in Northeast Washington, D.C., he weighed more than 300 pounds and was playing on both the offensive and defensive lines at H. D. Woodson High School. To make extra money, he worked as a bouncer at a strip club not far from the school. “They never guessed that I wasn’t eighteen,” he said. “I looked a lot older.”

  Brown did just enough work in school to graduate but never worried about the SATs. He had decided to be a football player, and school wasn’t a priority. He landed at Central State, an NAIA school in Ohio that had no SAT requirement for admission or, more important, to play football. After a year at Central State he transferred to South Carolina State (still without having taken an SAT) and was eventually shifted from defense to offense as a senior. His size drew the attention of some pro scouts but he really had never been taught the nuances of playing the offensive line, so there was almost no chance he would be drafted.

  The Cleveland Browns had sent Scott Pioli to South Carolina State to work out one of Brown’s teammates. Pioli couldn’t help but notice Brown, who had lingered near the practice field when he heard an NFL scout was in town, and asked him if he wanted to work out for him. Brown did. Pioli was impressed, especially when Brown decided to show him how aggressive he could be by charging at him while he was trying to get video of him to take back to Coach Bill Belichick.

  “I said, ‘You want aggressive?’” Brown remembered. “I’ll show you aggressive.”

  The Browns decided to offer Brown a free-agent contract. When he got into minicamp it was apparent he had great potential but very little idea of how to play. There were no practice squads in those days, so the only way to keep a player under contract who wasn’t going to be on the active roster was to hide him on injured reserve. It was common for teams to create injuries for players they thought had potential in order to get them onto IR. When the Cleveland coaches told Brown they wanted him to get “injured” in the team’s final preseason game, Brown objected. “I’m not faking an injury,” he said. Even though the coaches tried to convince him that the injury was for his own good and that it was not unusual, Brown was still skeptical.

  “Then the game starts and I get knocked down on one of the first plays, I don’t even know by who,” Brown said, laughing. “Next thing I know, before I can even start to get up, all the trainers are out there, saying, ‘Stay down, Zeus, we’ll take care of you.’”

  He was placed on injured reserve the next day with a shoulder injury. Brown has nothing but good things to say about Belichick, who attended his wedding. But his memories of his early days in Cleveland are of Belichick screaming at him almost nonstop. “I think he thought my first name was ‘Stupid,’” Brown said. “Every time I did something it was ‘You stupid ——, I told you not to do that.’ He never let up on me. He taught me how to be a football player. When I started to make money, first thing I did was buy my mother a car. If Belichick didn’t have plenty of money, I’d have bought him a car, too.”

  Midway through the 1994 season, Brown became a starter at right tackle. He remained there for the Browns and then for the Ravens through the 1998 season. When the expansion Browns came into existence in 1999, one of their first free-agent signees was Brown. He was twenty-eight years old, back in the city where he had started, making big money. He could not have been happier. He had started sixty-nine straight games for the Browns/Ravens before missing the last three games of the ’98 season with an ankle injury. With the new Browns he was a starter and a key player on the team for the first fourteen weeks of the season. Then, in week fifteen, in a game against Jacksonville, one of the all-time fluke injuries in the history of football changed the course of his career and his life.

  It was midway through the second quarter and the Browns were driving. Referee Jeff Triplette called a false start on Browns center Jim Bundren and tossed a penalty flag in his direction. Back th
en, referees were instructed to throw penalty flags in the direction of the offender. Penalty flags are weighted at one end by a tiny beanbag so they don’t float in the wind but rather stay put once they land on the field. Somehow, Triplette threw the flag right at Brown. Instead of landing near Bundren, it went through Brown’s face mask and smacked him in the right eye. Brown screamed in pain because the weighted part of the flag had scratched his cornea. Enraged, he charged at Triplette and knocked him over before he was pulled away. He was ejected from the game, which was a moot point since he couldn’t see out of his right eye anyway. To add insult to injury, the league suspended him for the final game of the season, meaning he lost a week’s pay while wondering if he would be able to play again.

  The injury proved to be serious. Brown had to have surgery on the eye and was out of football for the next three seasons. During that time he sued the NFL for loss of income and was awarded a settlement reported to be about $10 million, even though both sides agreed as part of the deal not to talk about how much money the league paid Brown. At the end of the 2002 season, Brown was cleared by doctors to play football again. The Ravens, who needed a tackle to bookend with Jonathan Ogden, decided to take a chance that Brown could still play and that he could stay healthy. He had done both in 2003, and the team was counting on him to anchor the right side of the line again in 2004.

  His mother’s illness concerned everyone in camp. The entire team was aware of how close Brown was to his mother and everyone knew he had been through a difficult off-season because of a nasty custody battle with his ex-wife over their three children. Brown had always been high-strung, even putting aside his understandable (though not excusable) bull rush on Triplette. Players on other teams often tried to bait him into committing penalties, either through trash talking or unseen grabbing and pushing in the pile. His temper had cost the team in the Tennessee playoff game when Jevon Kearse had taunted him into committing a personal foul just prior to the Ravens’ final punt of the game. That 15 yards had allowed the Titans to get just close enough for Gary Anderson to sneak his game-winning 46-yard field goal over the crossbar. The referee who had called the personal foul on Brown? Jeff Triplette.

  Brown was one of those people who was a delight to be around 99 percent of the time. He was outgoing and friendly, probably as well liked as anyone on the team. If you asked staff members which player they enjoyed the most, many would say Brown. But when he lost his temper, it could get scary in a hurry. At halftime of a game the previous season, Brown had become so frustrated with offensive line coach Jim Colletto that he had started screaming at him to leave him alone and just let him play the game. Billick had stepped in and calmed things down before they got worse.

  There was no doubting that Catherine Brown’s illness was devastating to her son. He had called Billick before the Eagles game to say he felt guilty about being away from the team but was afraid if he left his mother’s side, she might die while he was away. “You stay there as long as you need to and do what you have to do,” Billick told him. “That’s your first priority.”

  The final day of camp—Monday, August 23—got off to a good start when Orlando Brown walked into the locker room and pronounced himself back with the team. Everyone was glad to see him. The rookie show was scheduled for that night, the final rite of passage for the rookies. The days of serious rookie hazing are long past in the NFL, in part because training camp isn’t nearly as intense as it once was. Rookies are still expected to round up food for the veterans on the road and still have to sing at dinner. The only true hazing in the Ravens’ camp came after one morning practice when the top two draft picks—Dwan Edwards and Devard Darling—were tied to a goalpost while a group led by Ray Lewis, Gary Baxter, and Adalius Thomas showered them with shaving cream, Gatorade, and ice-cold water. When the bucket of water was empty, it was placed on Darling’s head. The two of them stood quietly while they were serenaded, for reasons no one could explain, with an off-key version of “Down by the Riverside.” They were freed after a few moments. Lewis checked to make sure they were okay, adhering to Billick’s rule that no one get hurt during hazing.

  The way rookies react to being hazed can give coaches some insight into their character. Edwards and Darling simply accepted their fate without complaining or arguing or even asking for mercy. They understood that it was part of the drill. Jim Fassel remembered three years earlier, when tight end Jeremy Shockey, his first-round draft pick, had arrived at camp without any sleep because of a screwup in his travel plans. He had practiced, gone to dinner, and had immediately found himself being ordered to sing by veteran linebacker Brandon Short.

  “He said, ‘Just let me finish eating first,’” Fassel remembered. “That wasn’t good enough. Short walked over and said, ‘We tell you to sing, you sing now.’ Well, next thing I know, he and Shockey are going at it. I jumped in and screamed at ’em both but I remember thinking, ‘I got my guy. This is a real player.’ Shockey went on to have a monster rookie year and helped the Giants reach the playoffs before the fame and fortune of New York caused him to implode on and off the field. Edwards and Darling weren’t likely to become luminous stars, but they weren’t likely to self-destruct, either.

  The good mood of the morning was broken by two incidents: one minor, one not-so-minor. The first was a fight between Ron Johnson and Gerome Sapp, two players struggling to retain their spots on the team. Sapp was a defensive back and special teams player who had made the team a year earlier as a sixth-round pick out of Notre Dame. He was one of the most highly regarded people in the organization, one of the players asked to come in and talk to the rookies during orientation sessions about dealing with the pressures of being in the NFL. Everyone knew that the first cut day was a week away, and tensions were high. Billick doesn’t like fights in practice, and his teams don’t have them very often. He threatened everyone with gassers—repeated wind sprints—if it happened again, but he understood why the players were on edge.

  Near the end of practice, the first significant injury of the preseason took place. During a pileup, someone rolled onto center Mike Flynn’s shoulder when he was twisted in such a way that he heard something crack. “I knew right away it wasn’t good,” he said. “The sound was all I needed.”

  He was right. He had fractured his right clavicle. Leigh Ann Curl, the team’s surgeon, made the drive from Baltimore to examine him and by lunchtime word had come back that Flynn would be gone for eight weeks. Flynn had missed one game in four years and had just signed his first big contract during the off-season, a four-year extension that was worth almost $4 million. That contract had marked a moment of arrival that Flynn had doubted would ever come in his football career. He hadn’t been offered any Division 1-A scholarships coming out of high school in Springfield, Massachusetts, and had ended up at Maine, a Division 1-AA school. “Almost everyone who played football at Maine was like me,” he said. “We were the 1-A rejects, guys who weren’t quite good enough to get a 1-A scholarship. A lot of us had a chip on our shoulder because of that. We all had stories about the 1-A program that said it wanted us but didn’t offer [a scholarship] in the end. In some ways, I think it made us better players because we all felt as if we had something to prove.”

  Flynn never thought seriously about the NFL until very late in his college career. He had torn up his knee midway through his sophomore season and thought perhaps he might not play again. But he came back and was first team all-Yankee Conference as a senior, playing at tackle. Even so, at six-three and 270 pounds, he was undersize for an NFL lineman. He signed with the Ravens as a free agent, thought he was doing well in training camp, and then was cut after the third preseason game. “Awful feeling,” he said. “I remember driving home, thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’” He didn’t want to give up football; he had felt competitive enough in camp to think he might have a chance to play in the NFL. He had a burst of hope when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers signed him to their developmental squad, but learned how cruel the NFL ca
n be when he was released six days after signing because the Bucs had found another player they believed had more potential. He went home—again—stayed in shape, and hoped the phone would ring. It did—in November—when the Jacksonville Jaguars called to offer him a spot on their developmental squad.

  Flynn accepted and walked into a locker room where he knew no one and no one knew him. “It was a lot different than going to a team in the spring where there are a bunch of you who are rookies and in the same boat,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone. I think I had dinner just about every night I was there by myself. The people at the Cracker Barrel near my apartment all knew me by name. They were probably my best friends down there.”

  Flynn lived the lonely practice squad existence in Jacksonville for a month, until he got a call from the Ravens. He had, in fact, made an impression on the coaches in training camp, and when the team found itself low on offensive linemen because of injuries, Flynn was offered the chance to sign on to the active roster for the last three weeks of the season. He never made it into a game but felt as if he had his foot in the door. He sweated out training camp the next summer, wondering if he was going to get cut again.

  “On one of the cutdown days George Kokinis came and knocked on the door,” Flynn said. “When I saw him, my heart sank. I remember thinking, ‘Not again.’ Turned out he was looking for my roommate. I remember turning around and saying to the guy, ‘Hey, guess what, George is here looking for you.’ Then I felt bad.” He smiled. “But not that bad.”

  He was inactive most weeks that season but played the last three weeks—his first action in the NFL after almost two years of waiting to play. The following year he played regularly on special teams. He became the starting center a year later and was now one of the key players on the offensive line. It is the center who makes all the calls for the linemen, which makes him the quarterback of the group. Flynn’s injury would hurt the team psychologically as much as anything else. His replacement, Casey Rabach, was the team’s best backup offensive lineman, a good enough player that there had been talk of moving him to right guard to compete with starter Bennie Anderson. Now there was no choice but for him to play center. Rabach was a good player, but without Flynn, the character of the line changed. Flynn was New England fiery; Rabach Midwest (Wisconsin) laid-back. What’s more, with Rabach starting, there was very little depth on the line.