Ricky Ray almost gave up on football
Staying healthy key to star QB posting more big numbers
At the wise age of 22, Ricky Ray very nearly gave up on football because football had given up on him.
The National Football League snubbed him on draft day. Teams weren’t vying for his services as a free agent. The phone remained eerily quiet.
And so in what has become CFL legend, Ray drove a potato chip delivery truck as part of the Frito Lay management development program. His personal game plan called for overseeing 10 route salesman in a year’s time and then working his way up the ranks.
Thankfully for fans of the threedown game, Ray never reached the rank of supervisor. About a month into the job, the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers called with a last-minute invitation to training camp. He dressed for three games and decided to resume his chase of the dream.
In 2002, Ray landed in Edmonton as a late invite to Eskimos’ training camp. On that day, head coach Tom Higgins said he knew very little about the kid from Sacramento State and wondered if he had what it took to secure the No. 3 job on the depth chart.
Did he ever. Twelve years later, Ray is the highest-paid player in the CFL (he quietly re-worked his deal with the Toronto Argonauts last week to bring his guaranteed income this year to roughly $470,000). With Anthony Calvillo retired, Ray takes over as the marquee quarterback on this side of the border — with all due respect to the likes of Henry Burris, Darian Durant and Travis Lulay.
Not bad for a guy who knew next to nothing about the CFL upon his arrival as anonymous nobody in the City of Champions.
“I knew Sacramento had a team for a year or two,” says Ray, who hails from the Northern California town of Shasta. “I knew a couple of the guys who played up in Canada and then came down to the NFL, guys like Jeff Garcia and Doug Flutie and stuff.
“But going to a new country and being in training camp and not knowing if you’re going to make the team and trying to get used to the new rules — the extra guy, the three downs — it was a lot to learn in my first year.”
The student quickly became the master. And while these are early days in the 2014 season, Ray will probably be in the mix for the CFL’s most outstanding player award — especially with Calgary tailback Jon Cornish battling through a concussion.
Provided, of course, No. 15 can stay out of the trainer’s room.
“I don’t really think about that a lot,” says Ray, who has yet to throw an interception in three games this season. “Obviously, it would be nice to stay healthy. The last couple of years, I’ve dealt with some injuries and I’ve missed some significant time. But you can’t really do much about that.
“You do your preparation working out and all that and try and prevent it. But other than that, I mean, you want to be smart out there when you’re playing and not take unnecessary hits, but it’s a physical game. You just go out and play as hard as you can and not worry about what could happen.
“But as far as thinking about what we could do being healthy in this offence? I just take it game by game and worry about what we can do in the next game.”
In 2013, Ray set a CFL record with a 77.2 per cent completion mark. With three Grey Cup championships to his credit, the most outstanding player award is the only void on his resumé.