Ray Lewis peered out at the roomful of Ravens waiting to hear from their embattled team leader. A pep talk, it would not be.
In February, 2000, Lewis was charged with murder in the stabbing deaths of two men in Atlanta. Now, five months later, the All-Pro linebacker stood before teammates at training camp in Westminster, knowing that what he said could pull the Ravens together — or push them apart..
Lewis hadn't planned to address the Ravens that day. A friend, Hall of Famer Jim Brown, was in town and had agreed to speak to the players. But when he rose to do so, Brown surprised them all.
"There are many things I can say to you guys today, but I don't think you need to hear from me," Brown told them. "You need to hear from your leader."
Brown sat down. Lewis, then 25, stood up — and held nothing back.
"He put everything out in the open," quarterback Trent Dilfer said. "Instead of sweeping (the incident) under the rug, and having it be the pink elephant in the room, Ray said, 'Here's what's going on, and how I'm dealing with it.' "
Lewis' animated talk lasted 10 minutes, players said.
"He wasn't subdued," safety Kim Herring recalled. "At the end, we all said, 'All right, cool — now let's move forward.'"
Thus began the season that would culminate in a Ravens Super Bowl title and catapult Lewis into the upper echelon of NFL players, where he has stayed for 10 years. To that point he'd been a prodigious talent. That day he transformed into a leader, and he remains one of the most revered motivators in all of sports.
Lewis had reached a plea bargain a month prior. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and was given a year's probation. He also testified against two of the men he was with that night — Reginald Oakley and Joseph Sweeting — but without directly implicating them. They were eventually acquitted. Though he has maintained that he acted as a peacekeeper during the street brawl in Atlanta and was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, Lewis later settled — for a total of about $2 million — with the families of the victims to avoid a civil suit.
Lewis had acted irresponsibly on the night of the tragedy, advising those he was with to not speak to police. The white suit he was wearing has never been found. The NFL fined him $250,000 for violating its personal conduct policy, and in some ways his tarnish spread to the rest of the Ravens. Most of his teammates, though, were able to take an uncomplicated view of the situation; the judicial system had spoken, and now Lewis was an innocent man trudging through unwarranted character assassination. By speaking so frankly on the first day they were gathered as a team, Lewis made clear how he planned to act that year. As with any championship run, a thousand things — from finding the right quarterback to having a few fumbles bounce the right way — had to happen, but if there was a force that gave the team an identity, it was Lewis.
"What he said that day cast a vision for us," kicker Matt Stover said. "Basically, he said 'Follow me,' and we did. It gave us a spark, a trust, a bond that turned something so horribly terrifying and life-changing into such a positive for the team."
Lewis was preaching to the choir, teammates said.
"We all knew what Ray was accused of was false," defensive end Rob Burnett said. "(Mahatma) Gandhi could have talked to the team that day, and it wouldn't have changed our minds about the character of Ray Lewis."
Publicly, however, the issue festered. Whenever the club hit the road, fans targeted Lewis, called him a killer and picketed the places where the team stayed.
"Signs, you can ignore," Burnett said. "But when people have the luxury of seats close to our bench, it gives them a soap box from which to spit venom. The things that came out of their mouths made me want to jump up in the stands and do things that my parents didn't raise me to do."
Now, Lewis admits the threats on his life were so real that he checked into out-of-town hotels under an assumed name. Yet in spite of the danger – or, perhaps, because of it – he played that season with an unprecedented focus and ferocity, teammates said, leading Baltimore to 11 straight victories and a world championship.
With all of the hubbub swirling around Lewis off the field, football became his sanctuary, teammates said.
"He found his peace between the goal lines," guard Edwin Mulitalo said.
At the same time, however, "Ray went out and exerted his anger toward opponents on the field," linebacker Cornell Brown said. "He found he could release that pain outside of him — the things you can't say out loud, but you can say in a hit."
Lewis agreed.
"Yeah, yeah, that's it," he said of his stepped-up intensity in 2000. "If I wouldn't have went through all that (in Atlanta), maybe I wouldn't have had the year that I had."
And, teammates said, maybe the Ravens would have come up short of a title.
Had the tragedy not occurred, "I don't think that we'd have gone to the Super Bowl," Mulitalo said. "Ray was great before that, but that incident gave him extra focus and pushed us over the top."
In turn, Lewis raised the bar for the team, which rallied around him, Mulitalo said.
"Ray was our cornerstone, and we fed off of him," he said. "Not only did we circle the wagons (around Lewis), we were bumper to bumper."
Dilfer said: "It was a concerted effort each week to rally around our brother. There were times, in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Tennessee when, getting off the team bus, a bunch of us wanted to get into fights" with fans maligning Lewis. "You had to control your emotions a lot. It was a test, all year long."
Ravens' coach Brian Billick milked the us-versus-them situation for all it was worth, Dilfer said.
"Ray's case fueled the bunker mentality that we rallied behind every week," Dilfer said. "Billick made sure we had a chip on our shoulder all year."
In a recent interview with Sun columnist Peter Schmuck, Billick recalled the way the story followed the team. Media covering opposing teams would cover the story each week.
"So you dredge it all up again," he said. "And you walk out in the stadium behind Ray and you hear some of the things people – idiots – can say, and it does galvanize you. That 'us against them' was very, very real."
Making Lewis the poster boy for the 2000 Ravens was a gutsy move on the coach's part, players said.
"What if Ray had done something else wrong (off the field)?" Brown said. "It would have looked bad for Billick, standing up for this guy. It definitely could have backfired on the coach."
Fans tried to rile the Ravens' middle linebacker. Rod Woodson recalled a preseason game at Washington in which signs were brought into the ballpark, including one that read, "Ray Lewis, killer of sons."
"I was livid," said Woodson, the Hall of Fame defensive back. "Ray had to hold me back. But, you know, in a weird way, it kind of made us all closer. We all started going bowling on Thursday nights to get away from everything. It made us more like family than a football team."
Nationally, it wasn't a feel-good title run. Lewis' transgressions led the media to vilify the team in newspapers from the Bergen (N.J.) Record ("The Ravens are a polluted parade of bad acts") to the Miami Herald ("Satan's favorite team won the Super Bowl.")
The day he learned he'd won NFL Defensive Player of the Year, Lewis was assailed on the air by Don Imus, the radio talk show host, who said he would root against Baltimore in the playoffs because it harbored "a murderer."
The Ravens won anyway, and Lewis was named Most Valuable Player of Baltimore's 34-7 victory over the New York Giants.
Never mind that, in the aftermath, he was spurned as the "I'm going to Disney World" pitchman. Or that Wheaties snubbed Lewis and put the faces of five other Ravens on its Super Bowl commemorative cereal box.
The year that began so horrifically ended with accolades.
"That (championship) was the diamond that came out of the coal," Mulitalo said.
"But it would have been nice if it had happened some other way."
A rare look into the past
In the 10 years since that Super Bowl, Lewis has cemented his place as one of the league's all-time top linebackers. Though the incident in Atlanta will always be a footnote to his life, it is seldom mentioned anymore.
Lewis, who has gone on to become a commercial pitchman and Baltimore icon, has rarely discussed what happened in Atlanta, or how those events changed him. But in a recent interview with The Sun, he shared his thoughts on that turbulent year and how it shaped his life.
"I'm telling you, no day leaves this earth without me asking God to ease the pain of anybody who was affected by that whole ordeal, because it was handled so wrong," he said of the slayings. "He's a God who tests people — not that he put me in that situation, because he didn't make me go nowhere. I put myself in that situation.
"But if I had to go through all of that over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing. Couldn't. The end result is who I am now."
At the same time, Lewis said, the snubs by Disney and General Mills vexed him more than he let on.
"I ain't going to no Disney World," he scoffed to reporters after the Super Bowl.
A decade later, Lewis says those corporate slights still bother him.
"(You think) you're going to Disney, because you've reached the highest award you can reach in life," he said. "Then somebody says, 'Oh, because of your image, because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, we can't salute you.' And as a man, that hurts. That's what makes me view every day as that day."
Lewis said that he tried to tune out the fans' vitriolic taunts.
"I've never stopped carrying that on my shoulders," he said. "During that year, I said, 'You know what? Whatever people are gonna say, they're gonna say.'
"The sad part is, you hear the ignorance of the way people speak about something they have no clue about. So when you do hear those things, you start to pray for people like that. (Even now) when I'm in opposing stadiums, I just recite our Father's prayer to calm my mind down."
Lewis coped, knowing the Ravens had his back, both on the field and off.
"From all the crazy things going on in those stadiums, from the signs to the words people were saying, they (his teammates) were right there," he said. "It defines what brotherhood means, and why we're put here, so that one day, if you find yourself (in a jam), you've got somebody worthy enough to talk to."
All season, Lewis played with "the passion of a warrior," Stover said, especially on the road. He had 13 tackles (12 unassisted) and received a game ball in a 15-10 victory at Jacksonville. In a one-point win at Tennessee, Lewis leveled Eddie George, the Titans' star running back, with a crushing hit in the first half that caved George for the rest of the game. And, in the playoffs, Lewis intercepted a Tennessee pass and raced 50 yards for a touchdown to seal the Ravens' 24-10 division championship.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Atlanta, players sensed a maturity not seen before in Lewis.
"He totally became a man that year," Brown said. "The time he spent in jail, alone, gave Ray a lot of time to check himself."
That Lewis played that year at a fervid pitch didn't surprise tackle Harry Swayne. He said Lewis treated his incarceration "like an injury, where you get hurt and it flashes in your mind that 'This is my last play.' You thought your future was so bright; now, all that can change."
Lional Dalton, a defensive tackle, said Lewis "went from being childish off the field to more of a leader. He hung out with more positive people, and he kept his circle tight.
"It probably saved his life."
Woodson agreed.
"That (incident) slapped Ray into reality," he said. "I don't know if he'd be the player he is today if he hadn't gone through that. It made him appreciate what he had on the field. He'd always been a tackling machine, but that year he became a playmaker, a leader."
Said Woodson, "It was unfortunate that it had to happen that way, but we all have a different journey."
But it was a fitting theme for the team that year, Mulitalo said.
"Every Super Bowl team has its story, and this just happens to be ours. In a weird, ironic way, how else would it be for the Ravens?"
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