Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (16 page)

Meanwhile, they started talking to me about whether I would
stay as the defensive coordinator if they hired somebody else. I told them Harbaugh was the only guy I would stay for, but I also expected them to help me get a head coach job somewhere else. I wasn’t going to be satisfied doing the coordinator job the rest of my career. Our general manager, Ozzie Newsome, was great about that. He said he would help, and he did. I think they announced Harbaugh’s hiring about 20 minutes later.

I admit it: I was bummed out by that whole situation. I was probably in dreamland about staying in Baltimore the rest of my career, but I just had a feel for it. I loved that situation and I gave everything to it.

I talked a lot to my family after that, and eventually I got my attitude right again. It’s like my mom said: What’s the best plan to get what you really want? Are you going to let this get you down or are you going to throw your all at it? To me, that’s not even a question. John was great to me after that, too, so it got to be easier. He really sought out my opinion and brought me in on a lot of decisions. He started hiring a lot of guys that I kept saying I would have hired, too, like Cam Cameron to be the offensive coordinator. I really liked what John was putting together, and there wasn’t any politics to it. We were really working together as a whole group.

Plus, running our defense in Baltimore was nothing but excitement. When I took over in 2005, three seasons earlier, we had Ray Lewis still at the top of his game, and we had Ed Reed. Again, you’re talking about two guys who are maybe the best ever to play their positions and two guys who put football above everything else. You’re talking about two players who are willing to put in the time and energy that coaches put in.

Moreover, Ray Lewis is the Baltimore Ravens. He is the face of that team and the heart of that team. I hear some outside people talk about Ray and some of the stuff he went through early in his career, and they have no clue what this guy is about. I’ll tell you one other thing: I didn’t even dream of taking Ray out of Baltimore when I left to go to the Jets. Yeah, there was a lot of talk about how we were going to make some monster offer to get Ray and Bart Scott. I wasn’t
going to discourage that because I didn’t want to show our hand, but in my heart, I wasn’t going to do that.

Ray Lewis can play for only one team. That was my opinion. When it came down to it, I went to Bart Scott’s house at midnight of the start of free agency in 2009 and not to Ray’s, because that’s how I felt. It would have tarnished Ray’s image. You’re talking about a guy who represents fierce loyalty and passion. He carried that franchise to its championship in 2000. He carried it for all those years. Ray Lewis in the locker room is an amazing thing that people don’t see. He runs that locker room and sets a tone for how everybody is supposed to work. Trust me, it was tempting to want to bring a guy like that with me, but I don’t think it would have been the same. I think Ray would have been a leader, but it’s just not the same thing. It wouldn’t have been so natural for him. I think it would have been forced. It was like when I heard that Deion Sanders was telling Dallas owner Jerry Jones to get Lewis in free agency. It made sense, but I just don’t think it would have been easy for Ray to feel the same way about the Cowboys as he did about the Ravens.

He’s the most intense, passionate guy I have ever seen—just a warrior. If you’re storming the beach, he’s the first one on the beach and he’s going to make sure his guys are with him. It’s like the stories they tell about my dad in Korea. Ray motivated me as a coach. That’s how good a player he was. That’s how intense a competitor he was. He got there before I did, but they told me he took the team over right when he was a rookie. When I got there and then when I took over the defense, all he wanted to know was whether I was genuine and if I could help him. That was it. If you could do those two things, that resonated with him. If you’re a phony, Ray Lewis can see right through you in about two seconds. I saw it happen. He’d see coaches or players who weren’t with the program and he’d know it right away. When there was something missing with a coach, Ray just wouldn’t respond to that guy.

Let me give you a good example of the other side of it. When the Ravens hired John Harbaugh in 2008 and I stayed as the defensive
coordinator, our team was looking for a strength and conditioning coach. I was in Hawaii at the Pro Bowl, just there with Ray, Reed, and the other Baltimore defensive guy who made it. When we were there, we met a guy who was working with Green Bay at the time. I knew him a little and figured he’d be a good guy to interview. I don’t know anything about strength and conditioning, but Harbaugh wanted me to talk to him, so I interviewed him. I thought he was a hell of a guy. He sounded good to me, but here’s what I wanted to do just to be sure: I had Lewis and Reed come for the second interview, because I wanted to see if he could stand up to them, if he could handle them. The guy never flinched. He was great, phenomenal. Now, some of his ideas were a little different because he had more of a baseball background, but you could see he was smart. So when it was all said and done, I asked Lewis and Reed what they thought. Ray told me, “You know some of the things were kind of strange and whatever, but I really like him.” I asked Ray why he liked him and he said simply: “He speaks from the heart.” Ray knew it right away. In the end, we didn’t end up hiring the guy because Harbaugh liked somebody else a little better, but it told me a lot about how Ray picked up on people and what he was looking for.

Of course, the best stories about Ray are from the games or practices, and there are a ton of them. Even after I left, there are stories I love about him. In 2009, there was that play during the end of the game in San Diego, when he shot the gap for a big stop at the end of the game. It was a conservative defensive call, but he saw the play and just blitzed on his own. The football intelligence and the physical ability—it’s unbelievable. But even in my first year working with him, I was just wowed every time I saw him in action. The way he hits people is unreal. We were in a “thud drill,” where you’re just supposed to form-fit the tackle, not go all the way through with the full hit. We had a running back named Eric Rhett, a loudmouth guy out of Florida who played in the league for a while, funny guy. I really liked him, because he kept things loose. Anyway, Rhett was running his mouth through the drill, just running it constantly, and
all of a sudden it sounded like a gun went off.
Pow!
I mean, the hit Ray laid on him was unbelievable. Rhett’s feet went over his head and he landed literally on the back of his head. I looked over at Billick and said, “How’s that for a thud period?” It was unbelievable. To this day it may have been the loudest hit I’ve ever heard, and Ray would make those hits all the time.

Another time, we were getting beaten by Cleveland. It was a close game and it was still early on. As I said before, I’ve always believed that one big hit can change the momentum of the game faster than anything—faster than a turnover, faster than anything. Sure enough, Cleveland tight end Kellen Winslow (who’s a great receiver) came across the middle and Ray hit him. I mean, he leveled this guy. The ball went flying up and we ended up getting the interception. After that, the tone was set for the rest of the game. The Browns’ receivers would come across the middle and they’d be pulling off passes. None of them wanted to take a hit like that so, literally, Ray controlled that whole inside. If you came in there, you knew you were running into Ray’s territory and those brakes came on. I’ve seen more dropped passes inside those hash marks because Ray Lewis is standing there. That’s it—he wills himself into making plays.

When you work with people like that, it rubs off on you. If you do your job with joy, you’re going to bring joy to the people you work with. Ray was like that for me, and I wanted to be that way for the people I worked with in Baltimore.

Our last season in Baltimore—2008—was a great one. We were No. 2 in overall defense and went 11-5. Watching Flacco develop into a good quarterback as a rookie was really fascinating to me—especially the way Cameron handled him and nurtured him. It gave me confidence going into New York with Sanchez. The only downer to that 2008 season was losing to Pittsburgh in the playoffs. What a game, though—the hitting, the intensity, the big plays.

Honestly, as I’ve said, I hate to lose. I enjoy winning, but at the end of the day, winning a game in the NFL just means you had a good day at the office. Losing, on the other hand—losing is really
painful. But to this day, there are a few losses that I’ve had in my career that still really haunt me. One that I still haven’t gotten over is that last game at Baltimore, losing in the AFC Championship Game to end our 2008 season—and my tenure in Baltimore. As much as I couldn’t wait to become a head coach, I would have loved to leave Baltimore on top with a championship. But hey, what you don’t get just makes you hungrier.

A
fter the disappointing end to 2008 in Baltimore, I had taken a deep breath and was ready to look to the future. And for me, that meant pursuing a head coaching job for 2009. There were some good opportunities around the league, and I had a pretty good feeling that my dream of becoming a head coach in the NFL was about to come true. But once I sat across the table from New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, I knew exactly where I wanted to be.

Let me explain something about Woody Johnson. The man is completely dedicated to making the Jets great, even if that means doing something that seems to run headlong into another idea.

See, here was the idea I brought to the Jets when I interviewed for the job: I suggested we should go away to training camp. I believe it’s great for team building, great for the players to really focus on football, get away completely from all the comfort and distractions they have at home and really get to know each other. No problem, right? Well, I was pitching that idea to a man who just spent about $75 million to build the Atlantic Health Jet Training Center in New
Jersey and opened it about five months before I sat down with him to interview. This wasn’t like some run-of-the-mill place. Trust me, the Baltimore Ravens have a great training complex in the suburbs of Maryland, but this place dwarfs even that. It’s so nice that Atlantic Health signed a 12-year contract just to put their name on the place. Think about that: They sold a sponsorship for the training facility, not just the stadium.

The place is like some gleaming office structure for some hightech company. Not only is the team there, but so is the entire front office and the business department; everybody who works for the team is in the 130,000-square-foot building. Heck, the weight room alone is around 11,000 square feet. If I ever lose my house, I could probably move my entire family there for a few months and nobody would find us. (Just kidding, honey.) We’ve got beautiful outdoor fields, a field house for indoor practice, an enormous locker room—every bell and whistle. The other thing is that Mr. Johnson did this after decades of the team training full-time (in-season, off-season, and training camp) up on Long Island, way out in Hempstead on the Hofstra University campus. The Jets were an institution out there. Johnson took a big chance to spend money on the team and break tradition.

So along I come, and the first thing I say to him is, “I want to do something different.” That’s basically like saying, “Yeah, boss, those company cars you just got for all the execs—they’re not quite good enough. We’re going to need individual limos.” To my credit, I’d never been there to see what it was like. Plus, I really do believe that getting away is important to team building. Still, that was my first idea, and it was going to cost him even more money.

What did Mr. Johnson do? He said okay. He understood what I was trying to do. He listened to my ideas about team building and how important I think it is for a team to get away. That was my first clue that he was a guy who cared about letting people do their jobs as they saw fit, not insisting on having his own way.

Then came the next idea. Fast-forward to training camp, when we were actually up at State University of New York in Cortland. It’s
way out in the middle of the state, about 35 miles south of Syracuse. Already, everybody was pissed at me for bringing the team there—and I mean everybody: the media, the fans, and even people on the team. Nobody had ever done that in the history of the Jets, so why did I—a first-year head coach—have to, yada, yada, yada. I heard all the complaints, but I had a plan. Of course, the first thing I noticed was something that was going to cost us even more money. We had two practice fields built specifically for our team. Not even the Cortland team was supposed to use them before we got up there; they had their own practice field. Mr. Johnson spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just so those two fields were ready for us, and to most people, they’d be great. But I looked at them and nearly had a heart attack, because the turf was not level. Instead, it was full of little dips and hills. So I said, “We are not putting our team on that field. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want a player to get hurt. We’re all about player safety.” I mentioned it to Mr. Johnson and he was pissed that the fields were screwed up. They went in and tore up the whole thing, and we started anew, getting all the sod in. We had helicopters hovering all night trying to dry the field off before we could finally start using it.

While we were dealing with that, it was also our first week of camp and we were getting ready for our green-and-white scrimmage, the first real kind of action that the guys would have. There wasn’t quite going to be full hitting, but it would get pretty close. It was a time to let the players show something more, and it was going to be competitive. Just as important, we were going to have a ton of fans coming up for the day to see the scrimmage—which would be held in the stadium at SUNY Cortland. My problem was that the stadium had Astroturf or some other synthetic surface, and I was not going to have our guys practice on it, regardless if we were doing full hitting or not. We were not going to risk the injuries, even if we didn’t have a place for the fans to watch. All we had were some little portable bleachers, and the rest of the fans would have to surround the field. I told Mr. Johnson, and he immediately answered, “No problem.
Player safety comes first.” I was telling a guy who has just built a new training facility and was in the process of building a $1.6 billion stadium with the New York Giants that I was not going to make the fans comfortable—and he was okay with it. Maybe he wasn’t happy, I don’t know, but he agreed and he let me do what I thought was most important.