Using his immense size, unmatched athletic ability and unrivaled technique, Pro Bowls became routine. But the Ravens’ losing ways in his early years in the league never wore well with the big guy.
By the end of the 1998 season, Ogden, who routinely would come to my live show at The Barn on Monday nights near Christmas and don a Santa Claus hat – a gargantuan, 6-foot-8, Afro-wearing version of Kris Kringle – had nearly had enough.
Ogden confided in me after another depressing season at the end of the Marchibroda era that his days would be numbered in Baltimore if he didn’t feel the team could make progress and win. He didn’t always win at UCLA, but at least he felt as though they were competing. More than that, Ogden had purchased a home in Las Vegas and spent much of his offseason seeing old friends on the West Coast who needled him about what losers the Ravens were.
His career would be too short to spend it losing football games. He was already wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. He had already been given the highest individual honors an offensive lineman could garner in the NFL. Now, it was clearly about winning and winning soon.
The vanilla, predictable offense that Marchibroda was running at the end of 1998 with a weak-armed Eric Zeier and a banged-up Jim Harbaugh was killing Ogden, and you could see his frustration on the field. Routinely, he would take off his helmet and slam it to the turf, screaming at no one in particular to either create some positive results or release him from his misery in Baltimore.
But then the change occurred.
Immediately, he liked Brian Billick. Here was a guy with an offensive philosophy, a plan of attack. Billick was a guy with a track record for running offenses. A guy who would make the necessary adjustments that Marchibroda was either unwilling or unable to make. Ogden noticed and started reconsidering his position to leave Baltimore.
The one thing that the Ravens always had on their side was the fact that his family – father Shirrel and mother Cassandra – hailed from Washington, D.C. After seeing Jonathan go off to school 3,000 miles away and having him live nearly the same distance, it was great for family relations to play his football just 45 miles away from his parents’ home.
It should be noted that Ogden has great embarrassment and admiration for his mother’s extensive community and player involvement in Baltimore. She is omnipresent at Ravens’ games – home and away – and has been from the moment he was drafted. She began the first-ever NFL mother’s association, which garnered her huge publicity throughout the league but caused big Jon to take relentless grief from his buddies on the team. Sort of a book club for NFL moms.
“What can I do about it?” he would say to his pals with a smile. “She’s my Mom. That’s just the way she is!”
Cassandra, who fronts an assistance program for minorities interested in going into the legal field, just thought she saw a need to have a support group for the many mothers she met at various team functions and games.
He loved his parents. He loved playing in Baltimore near them. But he hated losing.
Shortly after Billick arrived – before training camp began in 1999 – Ogden made it very clear that he liked the direction the team was heading in with the new coach. He gave resounding approval by re-upping with the Ravens for six years and $44 million with a $12 million signing bonus instead of using a voidable-years clause in his contract that would have made him a free agent after the 1999 season.
“A lot of people thought I was stupid for wanting to stay here,” Ogden would later tell Sports Illustrated. “But I never had any doubts. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who kept looking for greener pastures. I was at peace with where I was, so why change?”
The money was insane. But that would have happened anyway, anywhere. If Ogden had hit the free agent market, he probably would have gotten more money once teams started in on the bidding. He’s that good, that special.
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But Ogden would be the first to admit that the money was somewhat irrelevant because it’s money he will never spend. Ever.
His frugal nature is almost as legendary as his talent.
“With J.O. it’s just the little things,” said starting right guard Mike Flynn, who along with Spencer Folau, make up Ogden’s inner-circle of friends on the team. “He’s just cheap and I can’t explain it. You’ll go out to a movie with him and he doesn’t even want to spring three bucks for the popcorn. You think it’s like a joke with his $42 million contract and all – and we ride him about it – but he’s dead serious.”
While rookie running back Jamal Lewis was busy buying engraved $1,300 watches for all of his linemen, starters and reserves, late in the 2000 season after gaining 1,000 yards – including Ogden – the offensive line had to employ psychological warfare on Ogden to get him to foot the $2,000 bill for dinner at a fancy steakhouse after he got his fat contract.
Flynn, the team’s diplomat and philosopher, summed up Ogden thusly: “He’s just a big dork like Spence and me.”
Ogden told The Washington Post, “Some of the guys, I know if you talked to them, they’re like, ‘He’s a strange cat, that Ogden. He’s a weird one.’ I just am…I’m always kind of crazy, slightly.”
After spending time with him in a clubhouse for more than five years, you become numb to what an unbelievably large man he is. I’ve spent my share of time in NBA and college basketball locker rooms, so seeing big guys is not out of the ordinary in my line of work. You tend to become very desensitized to even the largest of football players, especially when they are standing next to each other. But it’s completely different when they mix with the real world.
The first time I’d seen Ogden away from the football field and away from his contemporaries was at a restaurant in downtown Baltimore at a team function in 1996. He walked through a crowded dining area and every head turned, every jaw dropped at his freakish enormity. I thought about it, and for a moment I felt sort of sad for him. I knew him as the “big dork” and gentle giant of the team’s clubhouse. He’s always been a really regular guy and easy to talk to (as long as he was sitting where you could look at him at eye level) and approachable. As he moved through the room that night and I saw the public reaction, you couldn’t help but feel the constant tug of him being a walking freak show. Like a circus act, and a very famous one at that.
“Sometimes I wish I could just blend into the crowd, be like every other person,” Ogden said. “See what it’s like to walk in a crowd and have no one even pay attention to you. I look at it like this – everyone is the way they are for a reason. I figure God put me here to be this big and athletic and I guess He wants me to play football. He didn’t put me here to be just anybody.”
Certainly his counterpart, linebacker Ray Lewis, is “not just anybody” anymore.
