Banks saw extremely limited action in six games down the stretch, including stints in every postseason game, usually for a set of downs or two, handing the ball off or running the most vanilla of plays.
Twice at PSI Net Stadium toward the end of the regular season, Banks was brutalized by a shower of boos when he came onto the field.
“Anytime your home crowd doesn’t invite you to be on the field in a game that you’re trying to win, it’s gonna effect you,” Banks told me after a Week 1 victory in Pittsburgh, seeing Kordell Stewart get tortured at Three Rivers Stadium by the Steeler faithless. “I used to say it didn’t affect me, that I was tough enough to be able to deal with it. It’d be little things. You squeeze the ball a little harder, you’re not as accurate as you want to be. You drop back a little faster, a little slower because you’re worrying like, ‘I gotta be perfect on this play.’ So it’s definitely going to affect you.”
Little did he know that 10 weeks after these comments, it would be his turn to see the dark side of life as a quarterback in the NFL.
As the quarterbacks on the team grew close during the season – none of them had even met prior to training camp in April – many of the relationships on the team’s offensive line had been formed years earlier.
One of the first lessons of life in the NFL that I learned during the 1996 season came by befriending former Ravens center Steve Everitt.
Everitt was a 300-plus pound Jesus Christ-lookalike with a body full of tattoos, a heavy metal music fetish and a budding career as a fine artist (one of the most interesting guys I’ve ever met in the NFL).
“Dude, you will never see a group of guys closer on a football team than the O line,” Everitt would say. “Because we have to do everything together – watch film together, block together, scheme together – we will always be closer than any other group.”
So close was that first offensive line unit, the one that Ogden was drafted into as a starting left guard in 1996, that any underlying racial discomfort felt in the locker room was quickly banished.
There was Everitt, a big white guy who liked to be called “Mongo” (from the movie “Blazing Saddles”), next to Orlando Brown, an enormous 6-foot-7, 350-pound black man from the mean streets of Washington, D.C., who liked to be called “Zeus.” When they met, Brown, who came into the league as an undrafted free agent from all-black South Carolina State, said that he had never been friends with anyone who was white until he met Everitt.
And they became best friends.
An offensive line will do that to you. Bond or perish.
For the 2000 Ravens, the bonding of the offensive line was formed through several years of playing together. Ogden, the left tackle, was the unquestioned leader of the group and a future Hall of Famer. Right tackle Harry Swayne was entering his second year with the Ravens, but he was in his 14th year in the league and had two Super Bowl rings from Denver to show off to his linemates. Center Jeff Mitchell missed his rookie season with an knee injury, but was entering his third year as a starter in the NFL and was beginning to fulfill the promise he had shown coming out of Florida as a highly regarded prospect. The guard position was filled with promise, but both Edwin Mulitalo and Mike Flynn were beginning their first full seasons as starters in the NFL.
Mulitalo was a steal in the 1999 draft as a fourth-round pick, a guy who Ravens Director of College Scouting Phil Savage told me on Draft Day would be an immediate starter in the league. As usual, Savage was correct. Mulitalo moved into the starting lineup midway through his rookie season and seemingly never got beaten.
Flynn is the most interesting of case studies. An undrafted, lightly regarded big man out of the University of Maine, he was the least likely to succeed but the most likely to work the hardest to compete. A perennial taxi squad guy – he had been with the team since 1997 and cut several times – the three-sport athlete in high school was always bouncing around as the good guy of the clubhouse, but Billick loved his intelligence, work ethic and fortitude.
Privately, Billick would tell you that Mike Flynn is one of his all-time favorites.
“He’s the heart and soul of that line,” Billick said. “He’s got that sloppy body, but on game day he has a passion for the game. The first year I was here I rode his ass. I was on Mike incessantly, but I knew he could take it. He’s a tough son of a bitch.”
Flynn was rewarded in 2000 with a penciled-in starting spot in training camp. Holding off three different players in training camp who had started in the NFL, Flynn played all 20 games for the Ravens during their Super Bowl run, including four at the center position as a fill-in for Mitchell when he was injured.
Flynn’s best pal on the team – and perhaps the strongest friendship bond in the entire organization – was right tackle Spencer Folau. Folau, also an undrafted free agent in the 1996 class, appeared to be miles ahead of Flynn on the depth chart through their first few years in the league. Folau, who dominated play in NFL Europe two seasons earlier, was actually given a two-year, $2.7 million offer sheet as a restricted free agent after the 1999 season by the New England Patriots. The Ravens matched the offer and needed Folau several times during the 2000 season to spell the aging Swayne.
Both Flynn and Folau had seen several of their fledgling trenchmates shipped out of the organization during their four years together. But their bond and friendship has been enduring.
“We’ve been through so much together,” Flynn said. “We both came in not knowing anybody or anything and we perservered. He’s one of my best friends in the world. We both questioned our roles so many times, whether we were ever going to get onto the field, let alone win a Super Bowl. I wasn’t even thinking of winning a Super Bowl. I was just trying to survive and keep my job and show that I belonged once they gave me a chance.”
Folau described it as a sort of dog-years approach in a friendship.
“I’ve known Flynn for four years and we joke about how it feels like we’ve been friends since we were kids,” Folau said. “Football does that to you. Every year is like 10 years of friendship because of the time you spend together and what you go through.”
Every player who ever lands on an NFL roster is going to a new city, with new teammates, new coaches, new everything. Basically, you have no friends at all in your new environment and you have to bond quickly or be cast out. The friendship Flynn and Folau share is so rare because they’ve actually been together for four years.
“We’ve seen 50 other guys come in and out of this room,” Folau said. “There are only a handful of us who have been together for more than a year or two. And of those, some guys are married with kids and stuff, so they don’t hang around the team as much.”
Folau became one of those “married” guys after the 1999 season, and his wife Heather gave birth to their first child two days before the Ravens defeated the Raiders in Oakland on Jan. 14, 2001 to go to the Super Bowl.
Now, he was a parental “slapdick.”
No one is quite sure when or who coined the term “slapdick.”
Defensive tackle Tony Siragusa is fond of using it as a catch-all phrase of affection. It has been shortened in many references to just plain, old “Slappy.”
Flynn and Folau have a difficult time defining it, other than to say that it’s embodied in what they represent.
“I am a classic slapdick,” Flynn said. “I’m a non-superstar. We were a team of slapdicks. You need them to win. I’m a scrapper. Look at the Redskins. They signed all of those players for all that money. They didn’t have enough slapdicks. They didn’t win.”
SEE MIKE FLYNN’S COMPLETE PERSONAL VIDEO (NARRATED WITH NESTOR) DURING THE EPIC SUPER BOWL XXXV PARADE ROUTE ON JANUARY 30, 2001 HERE:
