Ray Lewis knew it was coming. The familiar buzz of his cell phone the instant the Tennessee Titans had done the unthinkable: go on the road to topple the Patriots in Saturday’s stunning 20-13 AFC wild-card win.
“Here we go,” read the text, still the last message Lewis has gotten from ex-Titans great Eddie George since the fog-fueled, Derrick Henry show punched the Titans ticket to this weekend’s showdown in Baltimore.
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“Here we go, again.”
It had been Lewis who called George, a friendship close enough that both instead use the word brothers, several days earlier with an urgent message.
“Eddie, I need you to get in contact with someone with the Titans,” Lewis had said. “They need to get this message: take away (No.) 28, the running back (James White). That’s the key to Tom Brady’s success.”
Lewis was adamant. You had to play chess against Brady. The Patriots quarterback and surefire Hall of Famer was going to design the right screen play, the right dump to the running back at just the right time to break your back. That’s what made Lewis, a 13-time Pro Bowler with the Baltimore Ravens, voraciously study every video, every angle for hours when Brady’s Patriots loomed.
The 44-year-old Lewis still dissects footage like he’s playing, a mind sharp enough to take the gridiron years after his body cannot. He had picked the underdog Titans to win. He watched Tennessee march into Foxboro unafraid, almost daring the Patriots in the second half to score anything at all. But mostly, like millions of us, Lewis watched Henry — who turned 26 on Saturday — completely change the game.
The comparisons to George, a power back who ran for 10,009 yards from 1996-2003, started the moment Henry was drafted out of Alabama. A mentorship morphed when George came down hard on the young star last season. The way Henry — responsible for 204 of the Titans’ 272 offensive yards — controlled the game, the way he forced the Patriots to alter theirs, was a thing of beauty.
As the Titans’ star running back was putting the finishing touches on the win, one of the organization’s best players ever was texting Lewis. For the first time since 2008, the Ravens and Titans — once bitter rivals — will square off in the playoffs on Saturday at M&T Bank Stadium.
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And the two men most responsible for that hatred, a back-and-forth on-field brutality set against the backdrop of nearly 25 years of love and loss, were already making plans.
Here we go, again, indeed.
It’s time for one of the game’s best rivalries to be renewed.
“I challenge you to find the video.”
George has heard about it, over and over, and is adamant this footage, this play, does not exist. That the media willed the very notion — that he was knocked out cold by Lewis in 1997 — into existence and the prehistoric days before YouTube and Twitter and GIFs has made it such that proof doesn’t need to exist. Just the story, which adds another element to a rivalry already chockfull of memorable incidents. Before the NFL realigned its divisions for the ’02 season, the Ravens resided in the AFC Central with the Titans. By the turn of the century, Baltimore-Tennessee was must-see TV, complete with on-field punches, scoreboard taunts and epic trash-talking through the media and in both locker rooms.
At the epicenter of it were Lewis and George, two supremely gifted players who were constantly trying to crush each other’s bodies and souls. They were the game within the game, and they were brutal. Perhaps the concussion story has been embellished over time — “I was never knocked out once in those games,” George insists — but the bludgeoning between him and Lewis, whose ascent in Baltimore mirrored that of the organization, was not.
“He made me a better football player and a better, God-fearing man,” said George, who officially retired in 2006. “In order to beat someone and compete against someone physically you have to match them, not just physically, but spiritually. It’s a battle of wills. You got to be at a certain level spiritually and take that on without any fear or intimidation. It’s a lot deeper than just the battles on the field. (Lewis) challenged me.”
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It’s no wonder George sought out Psalm 27 before one pivotal matchup against Baltimore, a powerful Biblical verse helping condition him for the gladiator-style football game to come.
“The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked advance against me to devour me, it is my enemies and my foes who will stumble and fall.
Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear;
though war break out against me, even then I will be confident.”
Lewis, a Hall-of-Famer whose terrifying presence became the face for a hard-nosed Ravens defense, never had to say much in those days to get his team primed for the Titans. George, a leader inside Tennessee’s locker room, watched Baltimore morph from a talented team that lacked discipline to a group of bounty hunters without a weak link. There was a lot of respect between organizations, but even more hatred.
“If you go back to 1997 and ’98 I’m telling you, you never saw more physical football games than those football games,” said Lewis, who likens his matchups with George to iconic heavyweight boxers Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier. “If anyone ever knew what we had to put into life just to deal with each other.
“I tell him all the time, ‘We gotta tell this story.’ There’s never been a battle like that between a running back and linebacker.”
Their story starts in 1995, years before Lewis’ iconic interception, the one that clanked off George’s hands and paved the way for the Ravens’ first-ever Super Bowl victory in 2000. Before Lewis became Baltimore’s hero and George cemented his legacy in the ’03 playoffs — jawing and stiff-arming Lewis while rushing for 88 yards with a dislocated shoulder — the pair was among a bunch of hopeful college players assembled in Los Angeles.
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The same agent was trying to recruit both Lewis and George before their NFL careers took off. The conversation soon shifted to Miami — Lewis’ school — versus George’s Ohio State.
George looked Lewis up and down and smirked. “You never want to see me in the league,” he told Lewis. “You’re too small. You’re playing that East Coast football.”
Lewis was amused. “What are you talking about?” he countered to George. “Just calm down, man, calm down!”
The trash-talking gave way to an immediate, albeit, competitive bond. They were kindred spirits on opposite sides of the ball. Two years after the memorable meeting, Lewis — the Ravens second-ever draft pick — is at his first Pro Bowl with George. The linebacker isn’t all that well known, but George is a former Heisman Trophy winner. He always attracts a crowd.
So Lewis finds a chair and waits for nearly three hours for his friend to finish signing autographs, assuring him later over Mai Tais at the pool, that he had nothing better to do.
“It was because of the respect I had for him that kind of started this war,” Lewis said, swapping his previous boxing analogy for basketball. “Magic (Johnson) and (Larry) Bird were hated rivals. Me and Eddie never hated each other. We had so much respect for each other. Eddie made me change my game. He made me into the player I was. We elevated each other.”
Their brotherhood was always more than occasional batterings and Pro Bowl outings. Like that Fourth of July night in 2009, neither man can forget, when quarterback Steve McNair was tragically shot in Nashville. McNair had been George’s longtime teammate with the Titans before the quarterback played his final two seasons in Baltimore. George was crushed. Lewis spoke at McNair’s funeral. Both men sobbed. McNair was only 36.
“Those games are cool and all, but we are all we got,” Lewis told George as the pair embraced after the eulogy. “We didn’t know this was coming, but look at this. We have to deal with this.”
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Lewis remembers grabbing former quarterback Brett Favre, vowing to create a better support system.
“We’ve got to do a better job,” Lewis implored Favre, “of staying in touch with each other.”
Since McNair’s passing, Lewis and George have grown even closer, exchanging regular phone calls and flying in to support each man’s philanthropic endeavors. They’ve talked about pairing up one day, perhaps on a business or charity.
When the Titans announced last year that George’s No. 27 and McNair’s No. 9 would be retired together in a ceremony in September, Lewis — who attended a funeral that day — got a cross-country flight to come in a few days early. He attended George’s “Cigars, Cocktails, and Conversation” event that Thursday, where the pair swapped public “I love yous.”
They know all too well that life is too short not to say how you feel.
“If we go too long without each other we almost feel empty,” Lewis said. “It’s really beautiful. He’s my brother.”
Lewis is nostalgic. Talking about McNair, even a decade later, will always change the tone in his voice to one ripe with emotion.
What a day it would have been, to have a few cigars with George and McNair, whose mother still gets weekly calls from Lewis, after the Titans’ retirement ceremony.
If only Lewis could have made it. If only McNair was still here. Maybe he was.
“It was a No. 9 shaped cloud in the sky that day,” George said, “if you can believe that.”
Three times the Titans and Ravens have clashed in a playoff game, with Baltimore holding a 2-1 edge as well as the last win, a 13-10 victory in the 2008 playoffs. But none had the bad blood — and illustrious place in football lore — the way 2000 did.
The Titans had home-field advantage as the No. 1 seed. It was a close, defensive game and the Titans trailed by a touchdown in the fourth quarter and were trying to do the near-impossible: score late on a Ravens defense that had set an NFL record that year for fewest points allowed in a 16-game season.
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For that, they turned to George. After driving to midfield, McNair attempted a pass for his star running back. But the ball banged off George’s hands and was wrestled away by Lewis mid-air. The linebacker broke George’s leg tackle and ran 50 yards down the sideline for a touchdown. The game ended by the same score, 24-10, and the Ravens went on to beat the Raiders and Giants to win the Super Bowl. That interception is considered one of Lewis’ crowning triumphs, an iconic moment for the Ravens franchise.
Nearly two decades later, George is still haunted by the play. Lewis is more focused on what followed.
Before the magnitude of the moment had really sunk in, before Lewis showered and changed into street clothes, George was there, standing in the visiting locker room. Wearing a white vest fashionable enough that Lewis still gets envious 20 years later — “He looked like the Matrix. I was like, ‘Good God that thing looks good’” — George stared at his friend. He was fresh off one of the most deflating moments of his life, what he would describe later as a part of him dying on the field that day.
Still, he stood and waited to speak to Lewis face-to-face. Man-to-man. Brother-to-brother.
“It had to be me or you,” he said to Lewis. “I love you, brother. Go get it.”
Lewis, who retired after the 2012 season, played 17 years in the NFL. Only one other time did he witness that level of respect from an opponent. In 2013, when Peyton Manning’s Broncos lost 38-35 in overtime, Manning waited 90 minutes to congratulate Lewis. The pair hugged in an empty locker room in Denver, an image that Lewis later had framed for his home.
“I love Eddie for what he made me. I had to go sharpen myself as a man to deal with that man,” Lewis said. ‘We can all chase the Lombardi (Trophy), we can all chase the money but the only way this game moves is because of what he and Peyton gave me.”
Lewis, who was in Hawaii earlier this week, will be in Baltimore on Saturday. George, who was in the process of shuffling around his schedule, is also hoping to be in attendance. After all these years of pummeling each other, the pair might finally get to watch a Ravens-Titans playoff game together.
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There will be no trash-talking or Biblical verses, only cigars and friendly side bets.
The divisions are different now, the names and faces, too. But both teams have great defenses and great running games. The Ravens are led by likely league MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson; the Titans remain powered by Henry.
Baltimore, which lost its last home playoff game to Tennessee, is the top seed and fresh off a first-round bye. The plucky Titans are still trying to get back to the Super Bowl, something they haven’t done since ’99, when they lost to the Rams in the final seconds.
Lewis won’t be trying to get an urgent message to the Titans organization this week. George won’t be sick over the outcome, either way. Both men are in a different, slower phase of their lives now.
“Our relationship has been very unique in that we recognize and appreciate and celebrate who we are as men,” George said, “and what we had to go through to get where we are.”
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be any emotion, a flood of nostalgia or a rush of adrenaline after the last few syllables of the anthem ricochet off M&T Bank’s walls.
“Of course. It’s a natural thing,” Lewis said. “That’s why his last text was, ‘Here we go, here we go again.’” It’s going to be fun. I’m really looking forward to spending some time with him. Let the chips fall where they may.”
And maybe George can rustle up that old white vest.
(Photo: Neil Brake / AFP via Getty Images)
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