Like His Art, Lewis Speaks from the Heart | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The third week of the Little Rock Touchdown Club season featured one of the greatest middle linebackers in NFL history.

In a 17-year professional career, all with the Baltimore Ravens, Ray Lewis played in 228 games and started 227 of them. His only missed start came in his rookie season.

He finished with 2,059 rushes, 41.5 of which were sacks, for 503 yards of loss. He led the NFL in rushes three times.

His 1,568 solo tackles rank him first in NFL history, with No. 2 London Fletcher trailing him by 184. Experts say the record will never be broken because there will never be another athlete like Lewis, who also held the high school wrestling record.

He played in 13 Pro Bowl games.

Lewis’s career has cast a shadow over his person, but there was plenty to learn about him as a person over lunch on Tuesday.

For example, wrestling, which he did to break the records of his father, whom he never actually knew.

That he and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson have remained close friends since their days as teammates at the University of Miami.

LRTDC founder David Bazzel had a clip of Johnson being interviewed by Peyton and Eli Manning on Monday Night Football, and Johnson mentioned that the Hurricanes were playing Colorado when the starting linebacker got hurt.

Johnson said Lewis started the second half and had 18 tackles in those two. He started every game after that.

On Tuesday, we learned that despite a difficult childhood, Lewis never showed any disrespect to his mother, who for years banned him from playing football.

She was a pastor and during a six-year period of financial hardship she sent Lewis to live with his grandmother or great-grandmother.

At 16, he returned home but lived in the garage because “the man she married” (Note: he did not say stepfather), “hated me.”

It was in this garage that Lewis discovered his biological father was a wrestler. When he took up the sport instead of basketball, his father’s former coach gave him a 1975 book that showed all of his father’s wrestling records.

Lewis set himself the goal of breaking all of those records and he did just that, finishing the season with, by his own account, an 89-10 record.

During a Q&A with Bazzel, there was no doubt that Lewis has long been a determined man.

At Miami, he was an All-American in two of those three seasons and recorded 398 tackles.

Forgoing his senior season, he was selected by the Ravens with the 26th pick of the 1996 NFL Draft. He told LRTDC that he was surprised that teams selected linebackers ahead of him, and that when he got the call from Baltimore, his first thought was, “Who is Baltimore?”

The shadow over his life — now largely forgotten — began after the 2000 Super Bowl, when Lewis and two of his friends were charged with murder. Lewis turned witness and received a year of probation for giving false statements to police. His friends were cleared of all charges.

The very next season, Lewis and his Ravens won the Super Bowl, and he was named Most Valuable Player.

For the past 24 years, he has dedicated his time and energy to various charitable organizations and founded the Ray Lewis 52 Foundation to promote mentoring and financial assistance to underprivileged youth in the Baltimore area.

No doubt his own childhood played a major role in that decision, because when he was told his mother would have to pay $15 to play organized football, he said, “There’s no way my mom has that kind of money.”

Every speaker at the LRTDC conference, now in its 20th year, has spoken differently. On Tuesday, Ray Lewis was more subdued than most, but every word came from the heart.