The Ravens Won the Super Bowl. It Wasn't Easy. It

The Ravens won the Super Bowl. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t pretty. It was Ravens football at its best. For me, it was one of the more emotional games I’ve ever seen played, and as a Ravens fan, with it being Ray’s last game and Ed’s first Super Bowl, this game meant a hell of a lot to me. I could talk about the game and how fun it was to watch and how crazy the blackout was and how awesome Beyonce was, but I don’t want to talk about those things. I want to talk about Ray Lewis. I’ll start by saying that Ray Lewis is my favorite defensive football player in the NFL. He’s why I love the Ravens. Before I knew anything about Ray Lewis’s life, I knew he was one of the greatest linebackers of all time. He was a relentless competitor who played for one thing, his team. When I learned about his past I didn’t really know what to think. For those of you who don’t know, Ray Lewis was involved in an altercation outside of a night club in Atlanta following the Super Bowl in 2000. A group of people approached Ray and two friends and a brawl ensued resulting in the death of two men. Later, Ray and his friends were charged with murder. Ray later plead guilty to obstruction of justice for lying to the cops about his involvement and the two friends were acquitted because they acted in self-defense and that was that. I read everything I could about the case. I read tons of newspaper articles, interviews with people involved, anything I could get my hands on. And then I listened to motivational speeches Ray has given. I listened to a speech he gave when they named a street after him in Baltimore. I listened to his teammates talk about his leadership and selflessness. Then, I made up my mind that I believed Ray didn’t kill anybody, and that he changed after the incident and devoted his life to helping others. So I formed that opinion, and resumed my Ravens, and Ray Lewis, fandom, and Ray went on to have an illustrious career. That career ended this Sunday at the Super Bowl. The Ravens beat the 49ers and sent Ray off with a win that would go down in history. Tragically, before, during, and after, the Super Bowl, all anybody who wasn’t a Ravens fan was talking about was Ray Lewis: Murderer. “Congrats Ray, you now have as many super bowl rings as murders,” “I hate the Ravens, Ray Lewis is a murderer,” “Uh oh, better get the lights back on before Ray murders someone else,” “How many people will Ray murder at the after party?” Frankly, it made me sick how casually it was thrown around, how easy it was for these people to call Ray Lewis a murderer. I asked a friend who I was watching with who had made a comment like that why he had said it and he replied, without a trace of doubt, “Because he killed two people.” When I asked how he knew that he said, “Dude, it’s like, a fact. He knifed two guys outside of a night club.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I know with any certainty Ray Lewis’ involvement in the deaths of those two men. What I do know is that nobody does. Thousands and thousands of football fans treat Ray Lewis’s guilt as an established fact. I wonder if the exact same thing had happened to them, what would they expect their friends to think. The state allowed Ray Lewis to plea to obstruction of justice because the state had no way of connecting Ray Lewis to a murder. There was no tragic misstep like the OJ trial or the Casey Anthony trial, there was simply no evidence. And for people to throw everything exceptional about the man aside for something like that, I think, is just wrong. Ed Reed said, after the Super Bowl, ”For him to walk out like this, I told him, “Ray Lewis is football. The way football is supposed to be played on and off the field. He’s been through a lot, a lot of can’t even imagine walking in his shoes…To send him out like this, he deserved it. He deserved every bit of this.” Put an asterisk next to his name, question what happened that night, but don’t throw away everything he’s done as a football and as a player because of something that you will never ever truly know. .

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