What Happened to That Guy? Jermaine Lewis

In the debut episode, John Eisenberg talks to legendary Super Bowl XXXV returner Jermaine Lewis, who fell out of love with football, and in love with alcohol, before finding the sport again.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Readings and welcome to What Happened to That Guy? A
new Ravens podcast about former players and life after football.
I'm your host, John Eisenberg. You may have read my
columns on the team's digital outlets, the website the app.
I've been writing there for almost a decade. Before that,
I wrote for The Baltimore Sun for twenty four years.

(00:30):
I've also written ten books of sports history on baseball,
horse racing, pro football. Over the years, through my books
and daily journalism, I've been fortunate to interview a host
of retired football stars, guys like Johnny and IDAs, bart Star,
Jim Parker, Roger Staubach, Ardie Donovan, and many others their

(00:52):
legends whose time of on field glory had long faded
by the time I sat down with them, but it
was still fascinating to spend time with them. I'll give
you an example. I spoke to Bob Lily, one of
the greatest defensive tackles in NFL history. He played for
the Dallas Cowboys in the nineteen sixties and seventies. If

(01:13):
you haven't heard of him, I'd suggest googling him. A
violent player named after a flower, Lily drove quarterbacks into
the turf for years. But after football he became, of
all things, a landscape photographer. I spent a day with him,
driving around the sparse plains of West Texas as he
snapped pictures of gorgeous fistus. Here's another example. Jim Taylor.

(01:37):
You've probably heard of him, Vince Lombardi's legendary Hall of
Fame fullback. He died fairly recently, but I once spent
an afternoon with him that I'll never forget. We were
talking about the fabled Green Bay Packers sweep, the simple
running play that the Packers road to glory. Taylor was
probably seventy by now, and he'd had a stroke, but

(01:58):
he was still fit, pressively fit. His muscles bulged through
his white T shirt as we spoke. Well, he got
so excited talking about the sweep that he decided to
try to recreate it right then and there, in the
middle of our interview, he jumped out of his chair,
pulled me up, took me by the shoulders, and positioned
me right in front of him. Then he lowered his

(02:19):
shoulder into me. Jim Taylor man. He hadn't played in
forty years. He'd spent his post football life in business
in his native Louisiana, but he was still so intense
and so competitive that he wanted to block me. Former
players fascinate me. We cheer for them when they're young men,

(02:42):
and then they disappear from our lives when they stopped playing.
Only they're still young, usually in their thirties, with decades
of life ahead. I don't know about you, but I'm
a curious person. I can't help wondering how did their
lives proceed after football? These people we cared about so
much at one point. What did they do? Were they
happy or sad? Rich or poor? What happened to that guy?

(03:09):
That's what I'm going to explore in this podcast, the
eternal mystery of what happens to players, former Ravens, in
this case, guys from different heiress in the team's history.
What happens to them when the cheering stops and suddenly
they're exposed to the same real world issues that the
rest of us deal with, balancing their checkbooks, staying healthy,

(03:30):
supporting their families, finding something to do in life. It's
a vulnerable time for most of them, a period of
contemplation and adjustment. Some are ready for it, but a
lot aren't. I'm going to devote this first episode to
a player you probably remember, Jermaine Lewis, the star receiver
and kick returner from the Ravens early years, one of

(03:53):
the team's most popular players in his day. I'm starting
with him because he was so honest with me in
recounting why he wasn't ready for life after football and
what happened to him. My whole story with after that
play is just that's almost a book at this point
because things that I went through and the lastes I learned.

(04:17):
What's the single best moment in Ravens history. We could
debate that for hours, but one of the top three
or four, no question, is Jermaine Lewis's kickoff return for
a touchdown in Super Bowl thirty five. If you're old
enough to remember it, I'm sure you agree. January thirty first,
two thousand and one, Tampa, Florida, a pick six gave

(04:39):
the Ravens a seventeen nothing lead in a third quarter.
The football world was beginning to accept the idea that
this young franchise from Baltimore was going all the way,
but the Giants ran the ensuing kickoff back for a touchdown.
The kind of freak play that could start a rally.
Would there be a comeback? Stranger things have happened. Everyone

(04:59):
w if it suddenly was game on in this Super
Bowl as the Giants kicked off yellowis good foot into
this one or kicked it full? Not real good though,
sixteen yard line. Jermaine Lewis. Jermaine was a local kid
made good from a tough background in Prince George's County.
He'd gone to the University of Maryland and onto the Ravens. Baltimore.
Fans loved him like few others on the team. He

(05:21):
was a turk and a little guy in a big
man's game, a quick darting receiver who caught passes in
the slot and excelled as a kick returner. Thirty gee,
lu kicks it outside. He's at the forty five, He's
at midfield, down the far side. He's gone all right,
jermy loss goes all o, my god. He took that

(05:43):
kickoff all the way back for a touchdown, starting in
the middle of the field and ending up in a
sprint down the sideline right in front of head coach
Brian Billick in the entire Ravens bench. Years later, Billick
still smiles when he talks about it. I don't have
a lot of memorabilia, but one of them my fondest
pictures is in the Super Bowl of Jermaine running down

(06:03):
the sideline on that kickoff return, and I'm in behind him,
reacting the way you can imagine cold. Yeah. Yeah, him
looking up at the scoreboard, which he would do a
lot because he used that to see, well, who's behind me,
which I always thought was very unique because he told me, yeah, coach,

(06:24):
I'm not just looking at myself. But that's one of
the pictures that I treasure because it's sitting in my office.
And you're right, when they finally had that breath of
life and had the kickoff return for a touchdown, whatever
faint hope they had, you knew emotionally when Jermaine goes
the length of the field at that point the game
was over. Come back, Yeah, no doubt about it. The

(06:48):
game was over. The Ravens were going to win the
Super Bowl. Jermaine Lewis had delivered the knockout blow. Eighty
four four number eighty four. There was bedlam everywhere when
Jermaine ran that kickback all the way on the sidelines,
in the stands throughout Baltimore and anywhere that people cheered

(07:08):
for the Ravens. Jermaine himself was over the moon, excited
to produce such a big play, But amid his excitement
were the first stirrings of the problems that would cause
him to struggle after he was through playing football. Weeks
before the Super Bowl, his wife had delivered a stillborn child.
That's like a big totally, I mean hused to so

(07:31):
much of the memory Germaine goes back to that Super
Bowl year, the impact he had us living through the
tragic loss of a child that affected everybody on this team,
everybody in the community, and dealing with that yet at
a time when obviously we had the unparalleled success the
Super Bowl and he was such a big part of it.
On the field in Tampa, Jermaine spoke out loud to
his late son, whom he named Geronimo, as he ran

(07:54):
that kickback. A year later, the Ravens let him go
in an expansion draft. It was a shock, a bummer.
He was at the Pro Bowl when he got the news,
but he had no choice but to move on. He
spent an unsatisfying year with the Houston Texans, got cut
spent two years with the Jacksonville Jaguars. By two thousand
and four, his life was a disaster waiting to happen.

(08:16):
He estimates now that he suffered one or two concussions
per season in the NFL, and he played nine seasons,
so that's at least a dozen concussions, perhaps as many
as eighteen. Most were attributable to the fact that his
number one job was returning kickoffs, a part of the
game so violent that the NFL has since enacted numerous
rules trying to make it safer. Lewis's job was to

(08:39):
catch a kick and hurtle forward straight into the teeth
of a coverage unit comprised of two hundred and forty
pound athletic freaks bearing down on him at top speed.
The coaches would decide beforehand whether he ran left, right,
or up the middle. By two thousand and four, Germaine
dread at hearing them call middle return, where the roughest

(09:00):
to those collisions occurred. It was too valient. These are collisions.
I kept telling why he keep calling middle? It just
became real bad. The effects of all the concussions overwhelmed him.
Toward the end of the two thousand and fourth season.
During one of the last games, I had got knocked out.
Then I tried to come to work. I couldn't sit
in the meeting rooms. I was having like claustrophobia. I

(09:22):
just couldn't even watched the game. It's like I watched it,
but I can't see it. That's and I was like,
I'm done. The Jets wanted to sign him. He turned
them down. Suddenly he couldn't stand the idea of playing football.
He was thirty, just three years removed from his moan
of stardom in Super Bowl thirty five. When he looks

(09:45):
back now, Jermaine can see where he went wrong. As
he played football at Maryland and in the NFL, he
gave no thought to what he might do after he
was through with the game. He was young and rich
and famous. He didn't worry about the future. I knew
that it was coming as far as the end of football,
but I really didn't have a solid plan of you
know which that Rex and I was going to go

(10:07):
to You think you'll figure something out because I really
put all my focus in on football. That was a mistake.
Just knowing the aids that I am now, I haven't
played football maybe fifteen years. You gotta have something that's
going to occupy your time or something that you could
start a satin career at you That's where I got
to the game late. Ryan Billick isn't sure that it
helped that Jermaine was local, surrounded by friends who'd watched

(10:30):
him grow up and become a star, a wealthy star. Frankly,
it might have been in Jermaine's best interest to have
maybe gone someplace else initially, to get away from this environment.
Sometimes when you're a young man and grow up in
a certain situation that can follow you, particularly when you
become a high profiled athlete in the local ball club,
that it's hard to separate. That takes a certain amount

(10:51):
of maturity that I think Jermaine had to kind of
work his way through. So no plan. Too many concussions,
maturity issues, and one more problem what happened alcohol. I
have developed a drinking problem after I started playing. I
was injured doing the kick returns and part returns. It
became collisions. At the end of my career, when I

(11:14):
got to Houston and I got to Jacksonville, they would
call him middle returns. I was just getting rocked he
turned to alcohol to soothe his pain and agitation. After
his time in Jacksonville, he moved back home to his
place in Owings Mills, near the Raven's Facility, where he
lived with his wife and their son. They had two
more sons. Germaine had plenty of money, all the time

(11:36):
in the world to start a new life, but he
couldn't focus on anything, and he drifted. Weeks went by
months when all he did was in the day drinking.
I won the coat, but then I didn't like football
because I was getting hit. But I didn't like football. Now, well,
now what'll I do. I just had this gap in
my life from what I'm going to do, from the

(11:56):
time I ended planning till now, it wasn't clear. I
was this off, like having a bad meat. If you
got an injured knee, you're gonna limp, you got injured brain,
You're gonna have a catastrophic situations in your life. You're
making poor decision. Out the poor decision, and you don't
know why. Then you might you might wake up and forget,

(12:16):
you know what happened. Just it just wasn't good. It
all played out in private until he drove his car
into a sign in front of a volunteer fire department,
and the police arrested him for leaving the scene and
resisting arrest. He was drunk. A tipster had spotted his
car weaving, called the police and alerted them, saying he's
gonna kill someone. Jermaine's mugshot ran in newspapers around Maryland,

(12:40):
shocking the fans who remembered his Super Bowl touchdown. I
had two d y. Everything just became public because I'm
from Maryland. You know everything I do with I'm magnified.
So that's when I was like, ah, I got some issues.
He'd been popular with his teammates throughout his career, his
deep voice and booming laugh a constant presence in the
locker room, but he no longer wanted to be around

(13:02):
his former teammates or anyone else for that matter. The
thing bowen alcoholic. I isolated myself. I wasn't out partying
and I had just started. Yeah, isolated. Just give me
that bottle. This is on the dark days. It's give
me that bottle foot the day, and I was pretty happy.
He got divorced, but his now ex wife remained in

(13:22):
his life and worried about him. Really worried he'd stop
watching football entirely because of the bad memories had dredged up.
He'd get headaches just sing a game on TV. Sensing
that the father of her kids was headed for a
bad ending, his ex wife intervened and convinced him to
enter a treatment program called After the Impact. It's located

(13:43):
in Michigan on a Bucolic rural campus outside Detroit. The
program is for veterans, first responders, athletes, anyone dealing with
health or behavioral issues stemming from post concussion stress or
post traumatic stress. Jermaine landed in a group with other
former NFL players and several military veterans. We talked about

(14:05):
brain issues because the army guys were having a lot
of brain issues, you know, weird behavior. I could identify
with some of the head situations. And then it felt
like I wasn't alone when I found out other people
had these things going on with him. They were hearing
explosions and they had you know, friends down next to him.
I didn't have that, you know, it woke me up.
His thirty day treatment program included group therapy sessions aimed

(14:27):
at regaining focus and of course, abstaining from alcohol. As
it ended, the group attended an NBA game in Detroit.
There were waitresses taking drink orders, and Germaine raised his
hand and ordered one. A former NFL player in this
group gave him a look he'll never forget. I was like,
give me a double on the double. But my friend
I was in there with me. He looked me in

(14:47):
the eye. He shook his head. That's the last time
I ever ordered a drink that was like three and
a half. You just the look that he had on
his faith Because he'd been tempted to drink, he decided
to stay in Michigan for another thirty days. The counselors
told him to start writing goals down in a book,

(15:10):
small goals he could attain daily chores to give him
a sense of accomplishment and the feeling that he was
re establishing control of his life. He started working out
again so he felt better physically. After spending sixty days
in Michigan, he returned to Maryland in early two thousand
and sixteen. He was sober and felt better, but he

(15:30):
still didn't have a job or a plan. Knowing that
could lead to trouble, he phoned a football coach he
knew at Saint Francis, a Catholic high school in downtown
Baltimore that was developing a nationally ranked football team. One
thing led to another, and Lewis was hired to coach
the wide receivers. Fulfilling his duties wasn't easy. He could
handle the football part, telling young receivers how to get

(15:53):
open and use their bodies and hands. That came naturally.
The problem was he couldn't drive. He'd lost his license
because of his DUIs. For a while, he took cabs
to practice, but his son was on the JV and
Jermaine worried that his son's friends would laugh at the
assistant coach slash dad, who came to practice in a cab.
For a time, Jermaine and his son stayed at a

(16:14):
nearby hotel and just walk to practice. Eventually he got
his license back, but one of the stipulations was his
car now had a breathalyzer attached to the starter. Jermaine
had to blow clean before the car would start. You're
out in the real world. Stuff like that happens when
you playing football. Stuff, A lot of stuff I don't
know what happens. It gets taken care of when you're adult.

(16:36):
You make poor decisions. You got deal with some of
these consequences. Just turnaround, continued. The Ravens called and asked
him to announce a draft pick, which put him back
in the public eye, only in a better light. From
the university to Maryland wide receiver Jermaine Lewis. With the
forty seventh pick in the twenty seventeen NFL Draft, the

(16:57):
Baltimore Ravens select Tious Bowser. He approached this former college teammate,
Kevin Plank, and asked about working at under Armour. That
led to a job in customer service, an office job
not exactly his cup of tea, but a great sign
that Germaine finally was getting his life together. Once he
was at under Armour, he discovered that the company staged

(17:19):
a series of all star camps for high school football
players around the country. He got involved this year. The
camp circuit consisted of ten stops from coast to coast.
Jermaine worked them all. So now I'm doing camps, I'm
working at coaching. It's like I just hit every goal.
I still deal with the Cacustos situation, but I was

(17:39):
just working around it. I'm trying to look back. It's
like sodom and go more behind it. I don't look
back at the path. I always trying to look forward.
You know. I'm happy to be a lie. The little
things making me happy. Now I was stressing him. I
didn't know what I was going to do these days.
He lives by a lesson that the football coaches at
Saint Francis teach their players. A leader does for others,

(18:01):
they say, and I had to take that to my family.
I'm gonna just do for my family. Instead of other
people watching my money, I watching myself now. They say,
making money work for you. So that's what I'm doing.
I still got a newity money. I haven't touched my
retirement yet. Hopefully it won't happen if but I just
do small things, more hands on me, taking care of
me and my family. That's the bottom line, you know,

(18:23):
getting the Lewis through the finish line. His family and
friends knew he was feeling better when he started going
to Ravens games again. There's an alumni group former players
who get together to watching a box Germaine spends the
day with him and comes home smiling. These days, a
lot of things make him smile. I'm planning like a thousand.
I fort flowers the other day just because it made

(18:44):
me happy. I was like, I would making look like
Pimlico out here. We're gonna have flowers everywhere it comes spring.
You know, I did, and I was happy doing it.
I appreciate now that hard time I went through because
I look at life totally different, so much positive things
that I have going on, and then just look at
my family, my boys. Direction was missing. If it's not

(19:08):
pointing in the right direction, you know it's not going
to turn out well. Until recently, Jermaine never would have
agreed to talk about life after football on a podcast,
But it's a better story now. One he doesn't mind telling.
God is good. That's if you know, if people listening,
you know, things can't change. There's always a hope. As
a matter of fact, he wants to tell the story,

(19:31):
get the word out. He knows they're going to be
other retired NFL players facing the same struggles that he did.
But when you got a lot of money like that
through your twenties, can't process how much life you still
gotta live. Some of'm gonna learn the hard way, but
they'll come through strong enough. You'll come through there you

(19:54):
haven't the first episode of what happened to that Guy?
I want to think Germaine for telling his story so
honestly and vividly. The next episode will focus on one
of the greatest players ever to suit up for the Ravens,
Peter Bullware, the linebacker and pass rusher Deluxe, who was
among the first and shrines in the team's Ring of Honor.

(20:17):
He's moved on from football and has quite a tale
to tell. That episode will be available in two weeks,
and after that, new episodes will continue to drop every
other week throughout the two thousand and nineteen season. You're
going to find out what happened to guys like Kyle Boehler,
the quarterback who has handed the keys to the Ravens
offense more than fifteen years ago, and Matt Burke, the

(20:39):
center on the two and twelve Super Bowl team. I
don't want to give away the store here, but Burke
is now a stand up comedian. Anyway, I hope you
find all the stories interesting and keep coming back for more.
There'll be additional information online about each of the former
players I'm featuring at Baltimore Ravens dot Com. Slash What

(21:01):
happened to that guy? You can go there now for
details about some of the amazing franchise punt return records
that Jermaine Lewis still holds. I'm John Eisenberg. Thanks for
listening to What Happened to that Guy?