Headed to the Hall

Linebacker Ray Lewis elected to pro football shrine in first year of eligibility

Ray Lewis never put any limits on himself. Even as a young kid growing up in Lakeland, Fla., surrounded by poverty and crime, Lewis not only told his best friend, Kwame King, that he was going to make it out, he vowed that he was going to make it big.

The second of the Ravens’ two firstround picks in their inaugural draft in 1996, Lewis set his sights not just on becoming an immediate NFL starter, he wanted to become the best middle linebacker in the NFL. After establishing himself as a perennial Pro Bowl performer, Lewis promised Ravens owner Art Modell that he’d deliver him a championship.

Lewis learned Saturday afternoon that he can now check off another box and revel in the highest individual honor of a player’s career. Exactly five years after he played his last game and went out as a Super Bowl champion, Lewis was elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

“It’s so fitting from this perspective: You tear your triceps in October, right, and you fight your butt off to get back and I come out and I say, ‘This is my last ride.’ Nobody knows where it ends,” Lewis said after the newest Hall of Fame class was introduced during the NFL Honors awards show. Lewis did his trademark dance after he was introduced. “Then, for it to end in New Orleans, for my last ride to walk off a football field forever a champion and then now to be here five years later and now to walk off a Hall of Famer, I don’t know who else writes that story. It’s the greatest story.” See LEWIS, page 4