Redman got Dilfer a few days later, lacing his favorite purple sweatpants with Icy Hot just before practice. It worked for a few minutes and got a few smiles, but unlike the car incident, Dilfer just changed his trousers and plotted the next crime.
Dilfer, taking a cue from his own on-field work ethic, was never complacent about his pranks. He always moved on to the next bullet in his arsenal.
The following week Dilfer got especially creative for a practice session. On the way to practice he stopped off at the supermarket and bought a block of pepper jack cheese. Needless to say, he wasn’t planning a lunch of cheese and crackers.
He obtained Redman’s helmet early in the morning and pulled the padding out and replaced it with a perfectly sculpted block of cheese. The experts who witnessed the dirty deed said it took Dilfer nearly an hour to properly mold the dairy product so it was identical to the padding.
“I put the helmet on and it felt sort of funny but I didn’t think anything about it,” Redman said. “I got on the field and all of the guys were riding me, calling me ‘Packer’ and ‘Cheesehead.’ I started throwing the ball around and then I started to smell it. By then, it was too late. I couldn’t go back into the locker room because practice had already started. Two hours later, I didn’t smell so good.”
Finally, Redman had taken enough abuse. Instead of getting mad, he got even.
On Friday, Dec. 15, the day the team was scheduled to leave for Arizona to play the Cardinals, Redman got his youthful paws on the keys to Dilfer’s truck, parked out in back of the facility. Redman sneaked out the side door of the locker room and lifted the hood of Dilfer’s Bravada, unhooking the battery connection. Two hours later, Dilfer, in a hurry to rush home before coming back to catch the team bus for a cross-country flight, couldn’t start his car. Not wanting to come back into the facility, mainly because he didn’t want to give Redman the satisfaction of knowing that he’d been stung, Dilfer started to enlist the quiet help of every security guard in the complex. Eventually, one of the hired help found the missing battery connection and got Dilfer on his way to the airport, where he was nearly late for the team flight.
“When you are winning, everyone has a sense of humor,” one key member of the offense said. “The amazing thing is, with all of the horrible stuff we did to one another, nobody ever got salty.”
In the training room of the team’s complex in Owings Mills, there is a “fine board.” Basically, it is football’s version of baseball’s kangaroo court, where players are given nominal fines for jumping offside, fumbling, penalties, missing an assignment, etc. At least it started as a semi-legitimate endeavor. But the team had made so few mistakes that by midseason, the fines got unbelievably petty and silly. The stakes were raised and levity was added.
“If a guy got his picture in the paper, it was a fine,” one Raven said. “It was basically a bunch of bullshit just to ride someone. One guy took a $50 fine just for getting quoted. Someone got hit for $100 for appearing on TV.”
Along with the fine board came a “wall of shame,” which included humorous photos, inside jokes and prank stories.
No one escaped the wrath of mysterious postings and fines.
Left tackle Jonathan Ogden was injured in a game in Cleveland and a photo appeared in The Baltimore Sun the next day showing him in obvious, demonstrative pain. Not only did the entire offense ride him for the photo and fine him, but the photo appeared on the “wall of shame” as a testimonial for why he should be the team’s 2000 Ed Block Courage Award winner. The award, a serious and prestigious honor, is presented to the player who endures the worst injury or hardship during the season.
Ogden, a notorious cheapskate, took the fine in stride and said, “At least it got me out of practice.”
Flynn tells of an aborted prank for the wall involving the mysterious receding hairline of Banks and Dilfer.
“I had a few pictures lying around of Trent and Tony when they still had a full head of hair,” Flynn said. “Neither one is bald, but they both probably wish they had more of their hair left. So I was in the back of the training room working on the copier. The top of the walls are open air and you can hear what people are saying in the next room. I guess I was being a little too loud with what I was doing and just as I was finishing up my project, Dilfer sticks his head in the door and says, ‘What are you up to Flynn?’ Of course, I’m trying to block and cover up my scheme. But he’s pretty much on to me and says with an absolute straight face, ‘Vengeance will be swift if you’re doing what I think you’re doing.’ And he said it twice. ‘Vengeance will be swift!’ I had seen what had happened with Redman and I learned pretty quickly that you don’t mess with Dilfer.”
HEAR NESTOR AND TRENT DILFER SPEAK AT LENGTH ABOUT HIS POST SUPER BOWL XXXV DEPARTURE IN 2006 HERE:
Playing pranks was all well and good. The trick was to pull off the caper without ever getting caught. Implicated? Fine. Suspected? No problem. But caught red-handed would be cause for immediate retribution.
The whole team was in on most of the jokes, but the quarterbacks were absolutely shameless in their will to sink to new lows.
After the 24-23 win over the Tennessee Titans at Adelphia Coliseum on Nov. 12, Redman approached me with a pair of dark socks rolled into a ball.
“Take these and do something with them,” he said.
“What the hell are they?” I asked.
“They’re Tony’s (Banks) socks. I stole them and I need to put them someplace where he’ll never find them. He’ll never know if I give them to you.”
It should be noted here that Banks and Ray Lewis had an ongoing feud over who was the best-dressed guy on the team on road trips. “I think the wardrobe meant more to him than winning the (Super Bowl) ring,” one teammate quipped. “He and Ray went at it pretty good and it was a real ego thing, a real source of pride.”
Wanting to keep my relationship solid with the recently benched Banks – just in case, hey you never know – I elected to allow Redman to find another accomplice.
