It has become an enduring image: Ray Lewis, two-time Super Bowl Champion, legendary middle linebacker and motivator extraordinaire, driving his troops in a variety of colourful (and family friendly) ways with eyes popped, veins bulging and sweat glistening under lights. His love affair with the public eye has become a crutch for NFL Films.
After his Baltimore Ravens flipped the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game last year, Lewis wobbled out like a man suffering from heatstroke before collapsing to the turf at Gillette Stadium and kissing the grass as he was besieged by a phalanx of cameras. Away from the field, a far softer spoken Lewis took center stage in an endless series of interviews, robotically repeating vague and inconsistent platitudes about family, football and faith.
It’s a serious about-face for Lewis who, in 2000, was charged with murdering two men after a Super Bowl Party. The charges were not substantiated, and Lewis’ agreement to testify against the co-accused helped him escape legal blowback and NFL discipline. Irrespective of how you feel about the case’s outcome, it would be crass to hold the charges against Lewis for the rest of his life. But the rush to lionize him as an ambassador of the game given an over-the-top public persona that became increasingly (and obnoxiously) manufactured over time is bizarre.
Football has become an essential piece of Americana. In a piece for Slate, Jack Hamilton described the game as America’s “secular religion,” where a celebrity-crazy populace elevates its superstars to messianic proportions. Robert Griffin III, the second year quarterback of the Washington Redskins, has been hailed as a franchise savior after a single (albeit electric) season; so much so that fans located his wedding registry and showered the young multi-millionaire with gifts.
The fascination with celebrity is omnipresent, as is the perverse and counter obsession with deconstruction of celebrities when they fall. This zero-sum approach, ignoring all-too-human inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies, breeds a very specific type of character. Those who thrive learn to sling the kind of vanilla that we love to lap up.
Thus Lewis has always fascinated me. He designed a cult of personality that transcended his actual day job even as he declined. Lewis was one of the Ravens’ weakest defenders last year, commanding a starting slot on reputation and an erstwhile lack of options on the inside. Trumpeted as the team’s spiritual and emotional leader by his coaches and the media (universally seduced by his exaggerated modesty and in-game antics), he finally began to grate heavily as the Ravens thundered through the playoffs last season.
Lewis then made the widely expected jump to the media, and immediately flew out of the gate with wild conspiracies about the now infamous blackout that changed the tenor of the Super Bowl. Most former players would be scoffed at by caustic and jaded sportscasters. But Lewis still has us eating out of his hands.
We maintain an odd relationship with team sports. “Greatness” (an entirely loaded and subjective term) is driven by individuals sacrificing for the team, yet we hyper-focus on individuals at the expense of the team (see: Tim Tebow’s Broncos). This antiquated deference to personality cults filters sports-viewing through polarized lenses, confusing shallow narcissism with gravitas and dismissing individuality as distracting egotism (see: Chris Kluwe’s final year in Minnesota).
Saddling young athletes with immense social obligations is unfair. Leaving our expectations of character at the door sheds baggage; why not allow the players to be themselves, instead of automatons coached in delivering the company line?
A love of sports should be measured by the pure joy of athletic skill and intellectual strategy, instead of transient deference. While Lewis has indubitably earned a bust in the NFL Hall of Fame, it is the TV personality that he adopted — sobbing uncontrollably during national anthems, for one — that will define his legacy. That’s a shame, because it detracts from the fact that he was a damn good football player.
