For This Ravens-Hater, Ray Lewis' Retirement Evokes Conflicting Emotions

As I emerged from doing some nursery-painting yesterday, Krissy was cooling down on the treadmill with Sportcenter on mute. As my brain processed the words in the crawl at the bottom of the screen, I couldn’t help but read the news aloud. “Ray Lewis is retiring?” I am not by any means a Ravens’fan…actually, I mostly despise the Ravens, so the news didn’t exactly hit me like a ton of bricks. In fact, Lewis was often my main reason for derision towards the Ravens.

Sometimes it seemed like Vince McMahon gave Lewis some notes for his pregame entrance.

I think you could accurately quote me at one time as saying Ray Lewis was the most overrated defensive player of all time. My argument was not that he wasn’t any good at all, but rather any above-average linebacker could look like a tackling machine if he played his whole career behind massive road-grading defensive tackles as Lewis has. I also always found Lewis as somewhat of a product of his own hype, what with his endless choreographed pregame introduction dances and celebratory chest-poundings after tackles following 4 yard gains by opposing running backs. And it’s hard to write any Ray Lewis career summary without mentioning the fact that he quite possibly (and maybe even probably) murdered 2 people earlier in his career... but let’s try to leave this to on-field exploits. (He’s also done a boatload of community and charity work over the course of his career…not saying that would cancel-out a potential double-murder, but let’s just leave all that out of the convo for the sake of this post.)

Fortunately for Lewis, his play on the field made that pesky double-murder thing easy to forget.

Over time, my stance on Ray Lewis (similar to my stance on Derek Jeter) has softened, and my respect for him as a player has grown. He was great against the run, he was a punishing tackler, and (without looking at the stats) he has to be among the all-time leaders in interceptions among linebackers. Probably more than all of that, he was 1 part The Undertaker, 1 part George Patton. Other generations have Butkus and Mike Singletary, but I can’t think of a more intimidating presence on the field in my lifetime. I have seen All-Pro caliber running backs run away from the hole to avoid a Lewis hit. And by all accounts, few football players have ever fired up the troops and served a leadership role to Lewis’ extent...and maybe his whole shtick, which always appeared to be very self-promoting, was more passionate preacher than petulant prima donna after all. While I think part of my overrated comment is valid (the part about him having great players around him his entire career), I've done a 180 on thinking he was simply above-average. No matter how much of a Raven-hater I am he belongs in the conversation of greatest middle linebackers ever, proving once again that greatness is greatness regardless of what jersey color you wear.