Ravens' Lewis not going anywhere anytime soon
BALTIMORE – In those moments before a football game, when a strange calm fills the Baltimore Ravens locker room, Ray Lewis(notes) sits quiet. He does not stomp or scream or wave his arms the way he does for those three hours that the game is played. Rather his teammates notice, it is as if he is building a storm inside, a fury that grows hotter and hotter until he reaches the edge of the field …
"And it all just explodes," as receiver Derrick Mason(notes) says.
It blows up in a frenzy of jumps and kicks, with head thrown back, hands spread wide and flames from the team's pyrotechnic display shooting all around him.
Ray Lewis is ready to play football.
So it has been for 15 years in Baltimore.
So it will continue to be.
Last week an odd controversy arose around the Ravens. Since Ray Lewis at 35 years old has shown no sign of being anything but Ray Lewis, someone asked Ravens coach John Harbaugh if perhaps he could even fathom a day when Lewis was no longer the team's soul, its most relentless player – a human pile-driver pounding opposing offenses without a hint of breaking. Harbaugh chuckled and said that some time ago he asked Lewis if there was a time when the linebacker might want to be on the field for fewer plays.
Lewis apparently didn't think much of the suggestion, if it could even be called that. He politely said something about letting the coach know if he ever felt that way but later told reporters that such a moment would probably be his last in football.
On Sunday the very thought of cutting back plays made him laugh as he walked out of the Ravens locker room following yet another game in which he led the team in tackles – this time with seven, assisting on five others during a 17-10 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Give up a moment of football? His voice boomed off the cinder block walls.
"You've got to think it is like your first game in the league," he said as he headed toward an M&T Bank Stadium exit.
He stopped. He was wearing a suit, carrying a bag, his fingers were taped. He is every bit a football mercenary trapped in a game he loves too much to cheat of whatever energy he possesses. His eyes grew wide. There are so many new, young players, he said. They need to understand.
Understand what?
"These moments will never be again," he said. He was shaking his hands now, pleading. Don't you see?
Football moments?
"No!" he shouted. "Moments in life! The time clock stops for no one. Every moment of our life keeps ticking down. If you don't approach this opportunity we have right now you'll never have it back again."
This, he said, is why he plays the way he does.
And this is what every new Ravens player encounters upon his arrival.
Safety Ken Hamlin(notes), known himself for a certain ferocity in a near decade as a player, was asked on Sunday if he could even compare the intensity of Lewis to that of anyone he encountered in the league. He paused before suggesting John Randle, a Hall of Fame defensive end who worked himself into such a pregame rage he dabbed huge globs of eye-black across his face. And yet even Randle, Hamilin said, was nothing like Lewis.
No one, he said, was like Lewis.
"We newcomers inherit that boldness," said defensive end Cory Redding(notes) who arrived this year after several seasons in Detroit and Seattle.
This team has come to be Lewis' now. As the older players who rode with him to the Super Bowl have drifted away, he has remained; bellowing in the faces of new teammates, screaming about clocks ticking and moments that can not be squandered.
"I will credit the organization for keeping me here so long," he said as he stood in the hallway outside the locker room. "Every coach that has come in has told me 'you control it, we put in the game plan but you control it.' "
It's an order he has never hesitated to carry out. One that lived again on Sunday as he danced his pregame dance, then raced across the field bellowing at men who can never match his frenzy and yet feel compelled to nonetheless try. He chased Tampa Bay's quarterback Josh Freeman(notes), a man 5 inches taller and 13 years younger, leaping with arms outraised every time Freeman threw, just in case a finger happened to touch a pass. Several times the Buccaneers ran their bruising, young running back LeGarrette Blount(notes), all 247 pounds of him, at Lewis. The runs went nowhere. Blount went to the turf. Lewis twirled in the late day chill.
It was a happy dance. And even without the pregame flames bursting all around him, it was all the fire the Ravens needed.
Sit out a few plays?
Never Ray Lewis. Never at all.
