“As a leader, I’ve been able to sit back and I’ve been able to watch my teammates,” Lewis said during the 2013 Super Bowl week. “Every teammate on this team right now, it is a new process for them. Every step is a new step. For me, it’s not. So, my quietness is always been as a leader to sit back and make sure everything stays in the proper order. Like if the plane ride is too crazy and too loud, I just go say something real quick, or if the meetings are not going the way they should, I’ll go say something. So, that has kind of been my thought process. My thought process has been my job as a leader is to get my guys to the dance, get them to understand what we have to do to get to the dance – how we need to practice and how we need to prepare. When you walk into the locker room, we don’t need nothing else – we don’t need cellphones, we don’t need nothing. All you need is your teammates and communication.”
As much as the fans and the television cameras capture those passionate raging speeches on the field – and the occasional postgame speech full of fire – that’s really not the version of Ray Lewis his teammates see 99% of the time.
“He’s always been easy to joke around with – for all of the players,” said Joe Flacco. “It’s always a good time and fun to be around him. He’s really just one of the guys in the locker room. But I’ll be telling Ray Lewis stories the rest of my life – to my grandkids!”
There are only so many times players can gather and “let the dogs out” or hear and repeat the “no weapon” routine. There is a difference between “do this for me” and “do this for us” or even “do this for yourselves.” Every football fan has seen a speech by Ray Lewis and been fired up and understands its role in its game day environment.
And any man who has spent 15 years being the last guy out of his team’s tunnel and has a theatrical presentation full of imagery and the wild, primal dancing of “The Squirrel” to the deafening music of “Hot In Herre” by Nelly is clearly open to criticism everywhere that isn’t Baltimore.
Consider the opening lyrics:
“I was like, good gracious, ass is bodacious
Flirtatious, trying to show faces
I’m waiting for the right time to shoot my steez you know”
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Or the refrain:
“It’s getting hot in here, so hot, so take off all your clothes
I am, getting so hot, I wanna take my clothes off”
If this was run up the corporate flagpole at any other NFL franchise as a choreographed presentation or a commencement to the war of beginning a football game, it would never happen, hence it’s easy to predict that Lewis’ run as the leading man, dancer, crowd organizer in Baltimore might be the last of its kind we ever see. It was bombastic. It was over the top. It was electrifying. And it was always controversial outside the sphere of Ravens fans.
Bisciotti once questioned whether it was the best thing for the team but says that he always personally thought it was fun. “I can tell you this, when I had clients or friends at the games, we all wanted to be down on the field to experience that sensation,” Bisciotti said. “It’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen and I go to a lot of sporting events.”
Harbaugh was skeptical at first and then he saw it from the inside and couldn’t imagine not having the home fans revved up like that in Baltimore as a home field advantage.
And “The Squirrel” dance, taught to Lewis by his uncle in Lakeland, has been a lightning rod for controversy from the beginning. And then there’s the ultimate question: Is the dance about the team or bringing more focus on Ray Lewis? In the beginning it was all about Ray Lewis being the biggest star of the franchise and inciting the Baltimore crowd to battle. In the end, more than a dozen years later, sometimes he almost seemed embarrassed to perform it and realized that at some point seeing a 37-year old man doing that dance looked more like a WWE routine but the grandness of the dance and the ritual it became for Baltimore Ravens fans who saw it as part of the show in coming to a game made it obligatory. You felt cheated if Ray didn’t do “The Ray Ray Dance.” As a fan and ticket holder, you felt ripped off if the Ravens offense came out of the tunnel. Even the opposing teams would line up on the north sideline in Baltimore and prepare to witness the greatest introduction in modern sports.
It was the ultimate home field advantage.
But Lewis always backed up his talk and dance with his walk and play between the lines. The Dance was audacious, over-the-top. You had better answer the bell after performing like that in front of 70,000 on a Sunday afternoon.
