Ray Lewis is Not a Good TV Analyst

By Chad Finn

  | GLOBE STAFF   SEPTEMBER 22, 2014

REPRINT FROM BOSTON GLOBE

Say this for Ray Lewis: He’s relentless, and it’s served him remarkably well.

His nonstop motor as a Baltimore Ravens linebacker for 17 seasons helped him become one of the more prolific tacklers in league history. His tireless pandering to the cameras should have made him a parody. Instead, it made him a coveted personality by NFL rights holders when he retired following the 2012 season.

ESPN landed Lewis with a primo deal that included immediate prominence on “Sunday NFL Countdown” and its “Monday Night Football” on-site pre- and postgame programming. It was fair to wonder, then, whether he was deserving since his history suggested he didn’t always pursue truth and justice with his typical vigorousness.

He carried some curious baggage into his second career. Murder charges against Lewis stemming from a January 2000 fight in Atlanta in which two men were stabbed to death were dismissed when he testified against two men who were in his company that night. He ultimately pled guilty to a misdemeanor obstruction of justice charge.

What has become obvious — never more so than during his shameful performance on yesterday’s morning edition of “Sunday NFL Countdown” — is that no matter what you think of Lewis’s self-aggrandizement and cloudy past, he lacks every rudimentary quality expected of an analyst.

The list of what he has working for him ends at two: He’s a big-name ex-player, and he has an intense charisma. The former is hardly scarce — the NFL pregame show landscape is speckled with semi-charming former stars. And the latter gets old as soon as you realize how phony it is.

Lewis emphasizes and over-enunciates random words. He is addicted to the pregnant pause. He prosthelytizes to obfuscate. He requires these affectations in a desperate attempt to give his words the weight they lack. It works only on the already converted. He’s the same bad actor he ever was.

Bad dancer, too. That’s not a reference to his ridiculous look-at-me pregame routine during his playing days, which resembled an enraged squirrel having a conniption after his acorn supply had been stolen. It’s a reference to how Lewis responds when challenged, how he clumsily tap-dances around his conflicts of interest and contradictory statements.

The Ravens cut Ray Rice on Sept. 8 after the website TMZ released video of him punching out his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Janay Palmer. When Lewis was asked about the incident that night by Suzy Kolber on ESPN, he categorically dismissed any comparison to his own legal situation 14 years earlier, then went about praising Baltimore owner Steve Bisciotti, whom he had talked to earlier that day.

“The reason why Ray Rice will never play for the Ravens again is because when [Steve] saw this video himself, he put his daughter, he put anybody that’s connected to him that’s a female, he put them in that position,’’ Lewis said.

That loyalty to the man who signed his paycheck for so many years left Lewis in a difficult position Sunday. ESPN has delivered some extraordinary journalism in the aftermath of the Rice and Adrian Peterson situations, never more so than after commissioner Roger Goodell’s hapless press conference performance Friday.

Reporters Don Van Natta Jr. and Kevin Van Valkenburg dropped a bombshell on the program “Outside The Lines,” revealing that the Ravens security director knew the full, ugly details of the Rice incident hours after it occurred. Presented with the information four days before any video of the incident surfaced, Ravens coach John Harbaugh pleaded to release Rice but was overruled by Bisciotti and team president Dick Cass.

Lewis is no stranger to a story with holes. But when asked by Chris Berman what he made of Friday’s revelations, he essentially went on a winding four-minute, 361-word speech/filibuster that established only what we already knew: that’s he’s indebted to the Ravens.

I’m not about to waste time and space here parsing every ridiculous word.

I believe these three quotes give you the gist of just what Lewis brought to ESPN Sunday.

On Biscotti and general manager Ozzie Newsome: “If this incident, what we’re dealing with, if they could do this all over again, they would.”

Well, sure. That’s what everyone who gets caught in their own web of deceit says, right?

Lewis again: “Ray Rice put a lot of people in jeopardy because of his actions. A lot of people in jeopardy. Not just himself. He needs to understand that. Because none of this happens if what happened that night in that elevator don’t happen. If I ask anything in this whole thing, I ask, let there be light.”

You’d think that would be the most absurd quote, given that the one person put in the most jeopardy, the one who needs light, was the woman Ray Rice punched into darkness. And yet there’s this context-free doozy:

But at one point he said: “There’s some things you can cover up. And there’s some things you can’t.“

Yes, Ray Lewis actually said that on national television. I’d suggest ESPN should dump him, but he’s famous and entertaining and I know that’s not going to happen.

So I’ll just wait until he says or does something so offensive that ESPN has no choice. Lewis will have to respect that approach. After all, it’s how his Ravens do things, too.

Welcome to the Show, Mickey

This column by master sportswriter Red Smith originally ran in the New York Herald Tribune on April 18, 1951, and depicts Mickey Mantle’s auspicious first day in the big leagues. It is excerpted from the new book American Pastimes, an anthology of Smith’s work from the 1940s through the 1980s.

An hour and a half before the New Year dawned, Mickey Charles Mantle—he was christened Mickey, not Michael, after Mickey Cochrane, whose name is Gordon Stanley—was standing on the top of the Yankees’ dugout looking back into the stands where a kid in a bright windbreaker brandished a homemade sign fashioned from a big pasteboard carton. The sign bore a photograph of Phil Rizzuto, cut out of a program, and crude lettering read: “C’mon, Lil Phil. Let’s go.”

Sitting on the bench, Casey Stengel could see his newest outfielder only from the chest down. The manager grunted with surprise when he noticed that the sole of one baseball shoe had come loose and was flapping like a radio announcer’s jaw. He got up and talked to the kid and came back shaking his head.

“He don’t care much about the big leagues, does he?” Casey said. “He’s gonna play in them shoes.”

“Who is he?” a visitor asked.

“Why, he’s that kid of mine,” said Mr. Stengel, to whom proper names are so repugnant he signs his checks with an X.

“That’s Mantle?”

“Yeh. I asked him didn’t he have any better shoes and he said he had a new pair, but they’re a little too big.”

“He’s waiting for an important occasion to wear new ones,” the visitor said.

Casey is not unaware of the volume of prose that was perpetrated about this nineteen-year-old during his prodigious spring training tour, when he batted .402, hit nine home runs, and knocked in 31 runs.

“How about his first game in a big league park?” a kibitzer said. “Saturday in Brooklyn, when he got only one single. What was wrong?”

“My writers,” Mr. Stengel said, “had an off day.”

Mr. Stengel told about Mantle asking him how to play the right-field wall in Ebbets Field.

“It was the first time the kid ever saw concrete,” he said. “I explained how the ball hits the wall like this and bounces like this and how you take it as it comes off the wall. I told him, ‘I played that wall for six years, you know.’ He said, ‘The hell you did!’ ”

“He probably thinks,” Mr. Stengel said, “that I was born at the age of sixty and started managing right away.”

A couple of newspapermen were talking to Bill Dickey. About Mantle, naturally.

“Gosh, I envy him,” one of them said. “Nineteen years old, and starting out as a Yankee!”

“He’s green,” Bill said. “But he’s got to be great. All that power, a switch hitter, and he runs like a striped ape. If he drags a bunt past the pitcher, he’s on base. I think he’s the fastest man I ever saw with the Yankees. But he’s green in the outfield. He was a shortstop last year.”

“Casey said that out in Phoenix he misjudged a fly and the ball stuck on his head.”

“It hit him right here alongside the eye,” Bill said. “He’s green, and he’ll be scared today.”

“If anybody walks up to him now,” a newspaperman said, “and asks him if he’s nervous, Mantle should bust him in the eye. Golly, Bill, do you realize you were in the big league before he was born?”

“He was born in 1932,” Dickey said, “and that was the year I played my first World Series.”

“And I’d been covering baseball years and years,” the guy said. “What’s been happening to us?”

After that there was a half-hour of relentless oratory at the plate, and then Whitey Ford, the Yankees’ prize rookie of last year, walked out in his soldier suit to pitch the first ball, and then the season was open and it was New Year’s Day.

Mantle made the first play of the season, fielding the single by Dom DiMaggio which opened the game for the Red Sox. He broke his bat on the first pitch thrown to him and was barely thrown out by Bobby Doerr. He popped up on his second time at bat.

When he came up for the third time the Yankees were leading, 2 to 0, with none out and runners on first and third. Earlier Joe DiMaggio had started a double play with an implausible catch of a pop fly behind second, as if to tell Mantle, “This is how it’s done up here, son.” Now Joe, awaiting his turn at bat, called the kid aside and spoke to him.

Mantle nodded, stepped back into the box and singled a run home. Dickey, coaching at third, slapped his stern approvingly. When the kid raced home from second with his first big league run, the whole Yankee bench arose to clap hands and pat his torso. He was in the lodge.

“New Year’s Baby” by Red Smith copyright © 2013 by the Literary Estate of Water W. “Red” Smith, reprinted from American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith 

Ray Rice just latest in parade of NFL law-breakers

Reprint from New York Post September 12, 2014

By Phil Mushnick

“Shocking Video!!!”

This week the news and sports media, on behalf of those who need help with two-plus-two, revealed there are two kinds of domestic violence:

1. The not-too-bad, the kind described only in words and a cost-you-only-two-games video of a woman being dragged from an elevator, and …
2. The shocking, throw-the-bum-out kind, as seen in this week’s inside-the-elevator, what-happened-in-Atlantic City-didn’t-quite-stay-there Ray Rice video.

Some of us, however, know better than to be shocked by common sense. After all, how else did the soon-to-be Mrs. Rice, as seen months ago in the first surveillance video, become unconscious, left for Mr. Rice to drag her from the elevator, if she hadn’t been cold-cocked — admittedly — by the other person in the elevator?

Shocking? What did we expect it to look like, a pillow fight?

There’s nothing shocking here. Even this week’s “shocked” reactions fall into their logical place given that the absurd now comes prepackaged and pre-programmed, as per a shamelessly short-sighted game plan.

On ESPN, Ray “Cold Case” Lewis sensitively spoke of his former Ravens’ teammate and ex-Rutgers star, Rice. While condemning Rice’s conduct, he said he had tried to “mentor” Rice.

That’s nice, but how could Lewis have been “disappointed” to see, in this latest video, what Rice did to her? Or was he “shocked” by it, too? What did he previouslythink had happened in that elevator to render her unconscious? Plus, according to reports, Rice already had admitted it!

Last week, just outside their stadium, the Ravens unveiled a statue of Lewis, one readers have suggested should be named, “The Statue of No Limitations.” Lewis remains a suspect in a double-homicide, one in which he pled guilty to hindering the investigation to determine who murdered those men.

Did it matter to the Ravens that if Lewis had nothing to do with the early-morning — always early morning — outside a night club — always a night club — murders why he made a financial settlement with their families? No more than it did to ESPN or to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — who was seen in a long, warm embrace of Lewis on national TV before his last game. How video sticks to the bones!

It didn’t matter to Goodell, the Ravens, ESPN or the NFL’s marketing strategists that Lewis played as an unrepentant concussionist, often penalized and fined for illegal, needlessly brutal attacks to the heads of opposing players, then stomping around their flattened bodies to perform self-smitten, ritualized blood dances.

And that blood dance is what this statue depicts! World gone nuts!

Yet, although the last guy any right-headed entity would choose to publicly represent it, Lewis immediately became ESPN’s gotta-have guy. ESPN didn’t even care if he were weak on discernible English; it snapped him up. Perhaps, as an unpaid star of the mirthfully brutal “He Got Jacked Up!,” ESPN owed him.

The NFL chose him to sell merchandise, Goodell hugged him, ESPN hired him, the Ravens placed a statue of him at their front door.

He pled guilty to obstructing the investigation of a double-homicide! He paid off the victims’ families! He claims he has no idea what happened to his bloodied white suit in which he fled the murder scene! Eyewitnesses recanted! Does that mean zilch to those who can think logically, responsibly?

What happens to that statue if … you slap bronze cuffs on it? But he’s not Ray Rice; there’s no video of those murders.

So Ray Lewis, now with ESPN and with six children from four women, appears on national TV to provide his sage opinion on matters of social responsibility and comportment by NFL players.

The complicity of sports’ shot-callers in shoving us backwards while destroying the integrity of their own products continues its gangrenous growth. Players and coaches who should be disqualified are jumped to the front of the “qualified” line.

Yet, the same networks, leagues, advertisers and even the makers of kids’ video games that hard-sell the worst acts are now bound to make shame-shame at Ray Rice.

Recently, SNY hired Plaxico Burress to talk football. He was twice hit with restraining orders following domestic disturbance police calls. He was 31 — four years older than Rice — when, early one morning, he illegally carried a loaded Glock into a night club. You know the rest. He did two years.

“Plax, as we take another look at this Ray Rice video, give us your thoughts.”

And the guy who was with Burress, left the scene with the gun then ducked cops for two days — Giants teammate Antonio Pierce — was hired by ESPN!

After doing hard time, Michael Vick was hired to star in commercials, including one for an insurance company. WFAN recently reached out to hire him!

What did FOX like about Randy Moss? A career so soaked in selfishness that not even his enormous talent as a receiver could prevent him from being good-riddance expendable; he changed teams six times. Or was FOX equally impressed by his arrests and convictions?

By the time Subway, Omaha Steaks and Chrysler chose Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh to star in its advertisements, Suh had a rep and record as a reckless driver and for any-old-time lawlessness. He was voted by his peers the “NFL’s Dirtiest Player” — with a suspension and more than $200,000 in fines to prove it.

But he chose a 2012 Thanksgiving Day game to kick Texans quarterback Matt Schaub in the groin. That he previously was known as a bad guy landed him the endorsements, but now there was a shocking video — seen and repeated all week on national TV. So what they paid him for next would cost him.

I don’t know when sports first determined to make bad guys good guys, but I do know that it’s time to stop what never should have started. And that includes choosing the most vulgar, women-trashing, gun-loving, rap-sheeted rappers — 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Kid Rock — to serve as sports’ VIP cross-promoters.

Sunday on NBC, studio analyst and ex-NFL defensive back Rodney Harrision on Cowboys’ quarterback Tony Romo: “He’s so reckless with the ball. If I’m a teammate of his, I’m very disappointed.”

Really? Before Suh, Harrison was voted the “NFL’s Dirtiest Player.” He was regularly penalized and fined — more than $200,000 — for late or excessively dangerous hits. He was suspended for HGH use. One wonders if his recklessness was disappointing to his teammates.

Apparently, though, it all looked so good on Harrison’s résumé that NBC couldn’t let ESPN beat it to the hire. For shame, Ray Rice. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

Two-plus-two equals four. Shocking!

Uptown Swing: Can Tulane Football Win Over New Orleans?

Reprint from Grantland SEPTEMBER 5, 2014

by MATT HINTON

For big events, like Saints games, or the Sugar Bowl, the Superdome is a facility par excellence. It’s a cauldron in the best possible way. I had the privilege of being in the Dome when Az-Zahir Hakim dropped the ball in 2000, sealing the Saints’ first playoff victory, and when Steve Gleason blocked a punt in the team’s first game in the Dome after Hurricane Katrina, indelible moments of raw, ear-splitting pandemonium. I saw Virginia Tech’s redshirt freshman quarterback, Michael Vick, run figure eights around Florida State’s defense in the 2000 Sugar Bowl, his talent so expansive it seemed to fill all 162,434 square feet even in a losing effort. When the Superdome experience is good, there’s nowhere better.

When it’s not good … well, it’s a Tulane home game. I’ve taken in a handful of those over the years, too, and the juxtaposition in energy is so palpable it’s disorienting. Just as the Dome amplifies the combined electricity of 70,000 people, it also amplifies the overwhelming void of 60,000 empty seats. Sounds echo. The air conditioning, set for capacity, blasts away like an industrial Aeolus. Conversations can be overheard from sections away. Once, I picked out the sound of popcorn popping at the concession stand, from my seat. Cheering is less a collective compulsion than a self-conscious initiative. Everyone can hear you, and it feels slightly silly and inappropriate — not to yell, necessarily, but to be noticed caring enough to yell. The marching band, while enthusiastic enough, is bite-size for a college outfit, presumably so as not to alarm people when the brass section pierces the chatter.

There were more alleged Tulane fans milling in the background of Treme scenes than there were in the stands in that clip — although admittedly probably more people than actually watched Treme.

For nearly four decades, playing in the shell of one of the most iconic venues in sports has been Tulane’s unique burden, an omnipresent reminder of just how far from the big time Green Wave football actually resides. On occasion, the school has opted to host homecoming games in a local high school stadium built in 1937, ostensibly because it offers better tailgating. The truth is, the neighborhood setting just feels right.

This is around the point when I might start to worry about sounding condescending, if Tulane hadn’t just spent three years and $73 million based on that very premise. No, the school fully agrees: On Saturday, the Green Wave will host Georgia Tech in the first game at 30,000-seat Yulman Stadium, the “crown jewel” of the university’s effort to embed Tulane football more deeply in the culture of the city.

At first glance, everything about the move feels right for an aspiring program. The location feels right: The stadium is part of the university’s main Uptown campus, only a few miles from the Superdome but a world apart in terms of logistics and aesthetics. (Tulane’s campus is in the middle of a largely residential area, adjacent to Audubon Park; the Dome is downtown, adjacent to I-10.) The size feels right: A real estate agent might describe a capacity of 30,000 as “cozy,” but cozy is of a piece with the urban campus, and with the realities of the fan base; according to the NCAA, Tulane averaged just shy of 20,000 people for home games in 2013, and has only exceeded 30,000 since the turn of the century for games against in-state rivals (LSU, Southern) and high-profile opponents from adjacent states (Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Texas). The timing feels right: The Green Wave are coming off their first winning season in more than a decade, which came under then second-year coach Curtis Johnson, a New Orleans native, and they’re in their first season in the American Athletic Conference after 18 years in Conference USA.

And so far, at least, the response has felt right: The maiden voyage against Georgia Tech is sold out, according to athletic department spokesman Roger Dunaway, making this the first sellout for Tulane football since the program abandoned Tulane Stadium (capacity: 81,000) in the early ’70s. Single-game tickets for the opener went on sale on August 15 and sold out in 14 minutes. Students have claimed 4,800 tickets, per Dunaway, and if they all show Saturday it will mark the most students at a Green Wave game in more than 40 years. The stadium is the most positive development for the long-term potential of Tulane football in those students’ lifetimes, or in the lifetime of just about anyone who can remember having once been a student.

In another lifetime, Tulane had the makings of a Depression-era powerhouse. In 1922, the program was a founding member of the Southern Conference, the precursor to the SEC, and it won or shared six SoCon/SEC championships in the subsequent two decades. From 1930 to 1939, the Wave racked up a 73-22-6 record,10th-best in the nation in that span, and played in both the Rose and Sugar Bowls when the concept of a “bowl game” was still a recently concocted novelty for the sake of boosting tourism.

Since the early ’50s, however, there has been only depression. In 1951, new university president Rufus Harris effectively withdrewTulane from the burgeoning SEC arms race by reducing coaches’ salaries, cutting scholarships, and demoting physical education from a major to a minor, vowing not to allow athletics to overshadow academics; after 15 years of futility, the Green Wave formally left the conference in 1966 in favor of independence and, as far as football was concerned, irrelevance.

From 1952 to 2011, Tulane’s winning percentage (.353) ranked 95th out of 98 schools that competed at the highest level over that entire span, ahead of only Northwestern, New Mexico State, and Vanderbilt. On more than one occasion — most recently in 2005, following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina — the university has flirted with the possibility of dropping out of Division I sports altogether.

For most coaches, the job has been a kind of Bermuda Triangle. Before Johnson, 10 of the previous 11 head coaches left Tulane with a losing record during their tenure, a list that includes a young Mack Brown and a lot of other guys who may as well have disappeared in Lake Pontchartrain. Besides Brown, the only other man to escape the spiral of futility in the last six decades was Tommy Bowden, who arrived with innovative offensive coordinator Rich Rodriguez in 1997, oversaw what has to be the most improbable undefeated season in NCAA history in 1998, and hopped the first plane to Clemson ahead of the bowl game. Before last year, the Green Wave had made exactly one postseason appearance since Bowden’s departure, in 2002, one of two winning seasons since his breakthrough.

Johnson knew the record he was inheriting intimately, because he knows New Orleans. He grew up in the city and spent the last six years before landing the Tulane job on Sean Payton’s staff with the New Orleans Saints. He won a Super Bowl ring in the city. As wide receivers coach at Miami, he won a national championship ring with Ed Reed and Reggie Wayne, two star players he recruited from the city. At an earlier stop, Johnson was the guy who convinced fellow New Orleans native Marshall Faulk to leave home for the far-flung locale of San Diego State.

Johnson knows the neighborhoods where these guys live, and he knows their high school coaches, some of whom he grew up with. When he first took the job, Johnson pitched academics: “At Tulane, we’re not talking about a four-year plan,” he told me before his first season, in 2012. “We’re talking 40-year plans.” If anything, though, his short-term goals are ahead of schedule. At that point, the new stadium was still two years away and the prospect of a winning season even more distant; the departure for a more attractive conference was not yet conceivable. Would he even survive to field a team in the “crown jewel”?

He has, with a win-loss record and a tangible selling point his predecessors can only envy. Now comes the hard part: Convincing the locals the hometown team is finally worth the price of admission.