But the Ravens were astounded by how good he was and how complete they felt he could be, and he was only a junior. And they liked him.
On the field, he did all three things the coaches and scouts wanted to see – he ran in space, he could catch the ball and get into space, and he picked up blocks and was willing to take on bigger defenders trying to get after his quarterback. He was a competitive runner and he didn’t go down easy and was more slippery like a pinball bouncing off awkward tacklers in the Big East. He was also thick for a small guy, rugged they thought.
He also ran a 4.4 in the 40-yard dash. It doesn’t get much faster than that.
But, once again, the Ravens liked who Ray Rice was and where he’d come from on the hard side of life.
Born Raymell Maurice Rice on January 21, 1987 – just 10 days after Ozzie Newsome suffered his first of three losses to the Broncos & John Elway in The Drive — he was raised by his mother and didn’t have it easy. He grew up in the projects just to the north of The Bronx outside New York City right off I-95 in a town called New Rochelle, an otherwise bedroom community for The Big Apple.
He played most of his youth football on cement in a common area outside of his childhood home in the projects simply called “The Hollow.” It made him tough.
When he was an infant, his father Calvin Reed was shot, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time in a New York drive-by shooting as an innocent bystander. This tragedy threw his mother, Janet Rice, into the work force needing two jobs to support Ray.
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Some kids in the neighborhood didn’t have fathers because they were in jail or had abandoned them, but his dad was taken away before he ever got a chance to know him. The criminal who killed his father served just 11 years of jail time before his release in 1999, when Rice was just 12 years old. Ray Rice has never met his father’s murderer.
Rice lived a childhood using food stamps to get groceries and free lunches at school. In his adolescence, his mother was fired from a $6 per hour job as a day care worker, and he promised her that he would use football as a way to give her a better life.
He was introduced to football when he was still in elementary school by his cousin, Myshaun Rice-Nichols. Nicknamed “S.U.P.E.,” and just 13 years older than Rice, he was a budding rapper on the club circuit in New York and had just moved to California and secured a record deal. Before moving west, he lived with Ray and his mother in their sixth-floor apartment and spent his days as an artist and father figure to Rice. He was Rice’s prime role model and someone who was building a better life to escape poverty.
S.U.P.E. was his rap name, and he always told folks it was an acronym for: “Spiritually Uplifting People Everywhere.”
On March 21, 1998, S.U.P.E. was the victim of a drunk driving accident and died in California, never realizing his dream and shattering the world of Rice and his mother yet again. Janet. Rice-Nichols was just 24 and Rice was 11, and the event shaped the rest of his life and his drive and determination to succeed.
Rice routinely wore: ‘R.I.P. 914 S.U.P.E.” on a nasal strip during his Rutgers career to honor his cousin, who always told him to follow his dreams.
Rice was a solid citizen, a kid who avoided all of the temptations of the streets of New York and was one of head coach Greg Schiano’s favorite players at Rutgers.
New Ravens offensive assistant Craig Ver Steeg had been Rice’s coach at Rutgers and raved about him. A year earlier, veteran Ravens scout Lionel Vital, who is now the Director of Pro Personnel for the Atlanta Falcons, brought Newsome a tape of Rice as a budding junior and said, “Watch this kid. He’s going to be special. We gotta get this guy.” Vital was incredibly respected by Newsome and all of the scouts on the Ravens staff.
