Ultimately, it was Ray Lewis’ alibi. He didn’t know his friends were bad guys.
Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell later called them “hangers-on.”
Lewis said he couldn’t drop them even if he wanted.
“Thugs helped get me where I am, helped raise me and I love some of them,” he told ESPN Magazine. “I’m supposed to just erase everybody when I become a millionaire?”
That’s the crux of it, the dilemma pro athletes often speak of, the conflict many face when they become rich and successful, a problem the smart ones deal with in a way that shows far more maturity than Ray Lewis possesses.
“It’s difficult,” New York Giants linebacker Jessie Armstead said. “Where does everybody think they get us from? We come from our own neighborhoods. We have friends in our neighborhood who are out there trying to make a living, so what are you supposed to do? All of a sudden say, `I don’t speak to those guys anymore’?
“You still have to go through the neighborhood. Your family lives there. You can’t move all of your family out of the neighborhood. You still have your grandmother over there, you still have your uncle, your cousins. You might move your mother out of the neighborhood, but you still have to go back there to see your grandmother.
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“You can’t move everybody out. They don’t pay us enough money to move the whole family out.”
But here’s the difference. Here’s why Jessie Armstead isn’t Ray Lewis, a friend from their University of Miami days.
Here is why Armstead is a hero and Lewis a guy who thinks his only demons are inquisitive reporters.
“You’re still one of the boys,” Armstead said, “but then you have to make a decision where you say, `Hey, I can hang with you all, but if you decide you want to go that way, then you know I’m not going that way. Respect me in that aspect.’ You have to be the one to draw the line and make that decision.”
Armstead did not make that decision recently. He did not find himself a grown man in a limousine with other grown men and knives, then trying to figure it all out.
“You have one second to decide what to do,” Lewis said of the moment when he joined the fight outside an Atlanta club a year ago that left two men dead. “People say the smartest thing to do is walk away. But it isn’t the most loyal or most courageous thing to do. It may not even be the right thing to do, if you care at all about your friends…”
Armstead cared about his friends. He cared a lot. But he was smart enough as a 17-year-old to figure it out then. To say no when a bunch of his closest friends piled into a car one night and went off to rob a fast-food joint where another friend worked and was waiting to hand over the money.
It wouldn’t stop there, of course. Armstead–who had been caught shoplifting a year before, took one look at his mother that day and knew he would never go there again–saw his friends move on to more fast-food restaurants, some video stores.
They saw the 21 robberies as a prank. But the judge didn’t and sentenced two of Armstead’s best buddies, two gifted football players, to sentences of 20 and 16 years, of which they served six and almost four. Armstead guessed that one of his friends would have been a top-10 pick in the NFL draft, the other a low second-round or high third-round choice.
“They’d both be in the league,” he said.
Armstead knows he just as easily could have ended up where they did.
“I wish now I had told someone,” he said. “They would have hated me but they wouldn’t have gone to prison.”
Ray Lewis didn’t tell either. Not really. Not when two men are dead and no one is in prison being punished for the crimes.
But Lewis has no regrets.
And Armstead is still the hero.
“It’s all about choices,” he said.
It always is.