Long ass article but good read..
Jalen Ramsey: The man, the mouth, the legend
Before he was named an All-Pro cornerback, before he was punched by A.J. Green, before he was suspended for s--t-talking the media and then proceeded to s--t-talk the entire NFL, before he stood on the sideline of Jacksonville's field in a splendid shearling coat and predicted, incorrectly, that the Jaguars were going to go to the Super Bowl and "win that bytch" -- before any of those things happened -- Jalen Ramsey sat on a bench and cried.
It was Nov. 20, 2016, and Jacksonville was about to lose to Detroit and drop to a dismal 2-8. With less than 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the camera lingered on the rookie cornerback for what felt like an eternity. His eyes welled up and he stared into the middle distance, shaking his head like a patient who had just received a devastating prognosis. It was a raw, gutting display of vulnerability and a rare glimpse into an athlete's psyche. While Ramsey is a fount of highlight-worthy plays and oh-no-he-didn't quotes, the shot of him silently weeping during a meaningless game might've been more revealing than anything he's said over the past two years.
Naturally, he was mocked on the internet. And yet: When I ask him why he cried that day in Detroit, he doesn't seem embarrassed in the slightest. "That was a low moment," he says flatly before taking a slurp of his Powerade slush. It's June, and we're sitting across from each other in a Sonic Drive-In in Smyrna, Tennessee, the sleepy Nashville suburb where Ramsey grew up. "It was like, 'This is getting old. Don't nobody care. Maybe I shouldn't care too.'"
But of course he continued to care. Which is why, when he looks back at the experience, he isn't ashamed. He tried. He desperately wanted to win. So he cried, because he was devastated and felt no need to conceal his emotions, just as he's never felt compelled to conceal any part of himself.
"I don't really care what people think about me, to be honest," he says. "At. All."
Such pronouncements -- You can't hurt me! -- typically draw skepticism, and rightfully so. No one drives through life with blackout windows; most of us are affected, in some way or another, by the love and hate we encounter in others. But the more time I spend with Jalen Ramsey, the more I realize he isn't like most people. If legendary cornerback Darrelle Revis was an island on the field, the 23-year-old Jaguar is an island off it, a self-governing state that refuses to engage in diplomacy with the outside world. As a player, his hermetically sealed brain elevates his game to extraordinary heights. As a person, it can make things complicated.
Ramsey pumps up the home crowd against the Bengals last year. The cornerback got into A.J. Green's head so thoroughly in that game that the Cincinnati receiver punched him, resulting in ejections for both. DAVID ROSENBLUM/ICON SPORTSWIRE
THE FACT THAT Ramsey is famous at all is a small miracle. He's a cornerback who plays in a tiny market; if he's in the news, it's usually because he's a reliable purveyor of juicy sound bites, often batting back reporters' queries with quotes that are perfectly tailored for aggregation and televised debate. Since he was drafted fifth in 2016, Ramsey has talked a city landfill's worth of trash, the likes of which the league hasn't seen since Steve Smith Sr. hung up his mouthguard. (As a rookie, Ramsey called the legendary wide receiver an "old man.")
As a result, when we meet earlier in the day, at a Logan's Roadhouse in Smyrna, I'm prepared for the second coming of Deion Sanders. But Ramsey rolls in quietly, his longtime girlfriend, Breanna Tate, in tow. I don't know what I expected -- a WWE-style entrance? A Deion-esque ensemble? -- but this isn't it: He's dressed plainly, in sweats, and he slips wordlessly into a booth. Ramsey brushes a few peanut shells off the table and regards me suspiciously, as though we're lined up across from each other on the field. When I ask him if he likes doing interviews, he scrunches his nose. "As long as they're not boring," he says.
He grew up less than 10 minutes from here in a modest home where his father, a firefighter, still lives. "It's hella country," he says. "If you go five minutes any type of way, you're around cows, horses, fields, barns." While he talks, Tate studies the menu. She's extremely petite and extremely pregnant. (In late July, she'll give birth to their daughter, Breelyn.) "I plan on having, like, five kids," Ramsey says.
Tate sighs. "I wanted four, he wanted six," she says.
Ramsey grins. "The Lord said be fruitful and multiply."
The two attended the same high school; like Ramsey, whose father and older brother played college football, Tate, who ran track at Ole Miss, comes from an athletic family. Her older brother is Golden Tate, a Pro Bowl wide receiver with the Lions. When I ask Ramsey if he's ever matched up against Golden, who is seven years older than he is, he shakes his head. "Yeah, he wouldn't want that."
Would he give you any trouble?
"None at all."
Golden's pretty fast.
"Not fast enough."
Tate rolls her eyes and smiles gently, like someone hearing a child tell a knock-knock joke for the ninth time.
Ramsey was prone to roughhousing as a boy; his mother, Margie, would panic when she'd pick him up from day care and notice that his arms were covered with bruises from crashing into things. I ask him when he first thought he'd play in the NFL. "Out the womb," he says, cutting into a piece of steak. I laugh. He doesn't.
More ESPN The Magazine
Inside Odell Beckham Jr.'s quest to recapture the magic that made him the NFL's most eye-catching talent
Hang Time: Todd Gurley's happy place
Nick Saban is more than a scowl
Subscribe to The Mag
Ramsey's 27-year-old brother, Jamal, thinks Jalen was unusually confident at a young age because he grew up tagging along with him, which forced Jalen to keep up with older boys. He was also relentlessly competitive. "He's the biggest sore loser," says Jamal, a firefighter. "If you'd beat him at a game, he'd kick you out of his room." Whenever Jalen was losing at Monopoly, he says, he would jumble up the paper money and insist that it was impossible to tell who was winning. Jamal laughs. "I'm surprised he had friends."
Few are spared. Recently, Tate tells me, Ramsey was playing basketball with his 9-year-old nephew and the kid's friends. "He was dunkingon them," she says. Later, Ramsey's mother stepped onto the court. He dunked on her too.
By the time Ramsey entered high school, his talent was undeniable, but he was just 5-foot-3. Surely then, I say, he didn't think he was the best player in Tennessee. "I didn't think -- I was," he retorts. Aside from baseball, which he says he lacks the coordination for, he's excelled at every sport he's ever tried. He picked up lacrosse for a season and, once he figured out how to handle the stick, ran circles around the competition. ("There's not a lot of black people who do it," he says, smiling.) He's never tried skating, but if he trained for six months, he says, he could probably crack the NHL.
At first I thought Ramsey was self-mythologizing. But as he recounts his athletic exploits, it becomes clear that his unshakable confidence stems from lived experience. He's cocky as hell because he's never been humbled by failure. At 5, he was the strongest, fastest kid in his neighborhood. At 10, he was the best football player in the region. At 15 ... You get the idea.
After knee surgery and a well-timed growth spurt, Ramsey was widely recruited, ultimately landing at Florida State. He started from day one, the first Florida State cornerback to start as a true freshman since Sanders. "I expected to, and Coach [Jeremy] Pruitt expected me to," he says of his defensive coordinator. "Nobody else did." The obvious omission is former head coach Jimbo Fisher, now at Texas A&M. In February, when an A&M assistant tweeted a graphic touting Fisher's record with defensive backs, Ramsey clapped back online: "He didn't teach me not one DB technique ..."
Ramsey describes Fisher, with uncharacteristic brevity, as "OK." I tell him I've never met the coach. "You're not missing out," he replies. During Ramsey's sophomore year, Fisher once reamed him out after he pushed a blocker into quarterback Jameis Winston, kicking him out of practice. When I bring up the incident, Ramsey starts fiddling with his phone. "Here it is -- I've got the video," he says. He also saved a screenshot of the SportsCenter news alert.
FSU's defensive coordinator that year, Charles Kelly, now works on Pruitt's staff at Tennessee, coaching special teams and safeties. He downplays Ramsey's ejection ("He was competing on a play -- he doesn't know but one speed") and says Ramsey's personality was perfect for his position. "You've got to be the most mentally tough person on the field," he says. "If you make a mistake, everybody in the stands knows it." Great cornerbacks, Kelly says, have big egos and short memories; they possess a singular ability to block out noise.
In other words: They think like Jalen Ramsey.
The Jags didn't get quite as far into the postseason as Ramsey predicted last year. RICHARD PHIBBS FOR ESPN
BY THE TIME we drive to Sonic, the humidity is stifling, but we sit outside anyway. "This was our spot in high school after every game, every track meet," Ramsey says. After inhaling his slush, he orders a pony-keg-sized cookie dough milkshake for himself and some ice for Tate to chew on. When I speculate that he's consuming extra calories to support her pregnancy, he laughs. "I'm pregnant too!" he says.
I ask Ramsey what he did to piss off A.J. Green. Last season, when the Jaguars were playing the Bengals, the cornerback buzzed around the famously soft-spoken wide receiver like a 6-1 mosquito, jawing away for the better part of the first half. Then, with less than 20 seconds left, Green snapped; after Ramsey shoved him, he whipped around and attacked the younger player, punching him in the head like an aggrieved older brother. Both players were ejected.
"I called him soft, called him a punk," Ramsey says. "Talked to him. Said whatever I wanted to say. Did whatever I wanted to do." He snorts. "Receivers are, like, naturally soft. So sensitive."
On the field, Ramsey seems driven purely by his id, but there's a method to the madness he provokes. "It gets them out of their game, and it gets me into my game more. If I'm talking smack, I gotta back it up." He claims he largely avoids personal insults (in college, he used to sift through Instagram for opposition research on receivers' significant others), instead providing running commentary on the game -- mocking poorly run routes and QB preferences, sort of like a disrespectful Cris Collinsworth. "That gets under people's skin more than anything," he says. "I'm not clowning -- I'm talking facts. Yelling out their stats."
How do you monitor their statistics during the game?
"It's easy to keep track of, like, one catch for 6 yards," he says. (Later, I check the box score from the Bengals game. Green had ... one catch for 6 yards.)
When pressed, Ramsey doles out praise as gamely as insults. He's a fan of Antonio Brown -- "He's easily the best receiver in the NFL. Easily," he says -- and DeAndre Hopkins. "He's had freaking 100 quarterbacks -- all trash," he says. "I could be his quarterback. I could literally be his quarterback." When Ramsey says "literally," his drawl seeps into the word and it expands like a sponge: "liiiiht-er-uh-ly." (Hopkins returns the praise, calling Ramsey one of the best defensive players in the league. He adds, smiling: "He's probably the most talkative cornerback in the NFL.")
In general, Ramsey continues, fans underestimate the effect that quarterback play has on wide receivers. For example, he says, look at Danny Amendola, who just signed with Miami. "Or is it Edelman?" he asks out loud. He mulls it over. No -- he's thinking of Amendola. "He just got a brand-new contract and he is terrible," he says. "People think he's so great. No, he's not. Tom [Brady] made him look good. Tom could take me as a receiver and I'd be a first-team All-Pro."
"It'd be another thing if he talked trash and didn't back it up," running back Leonard Fournette says of teammate Ramsey, above. "He's a dog. That's who he is." RICHARD PHIBBS FOR ESPN
When I mention that the Patriots still have All-Pro tight end Rob Gronkowski, he makes a face. "I don't think Gronk's good." Registering my involuntary blinking, he course-corrects. "Let me say -- I don't think Gronk is as great as people think he is." Before the Patriots game, he explains, he had the Jaguars' analytics staffers pull some numbers for him. "Any time Gronk has been matched up with a corner, he's had a very bad game -- and that corner has had a very good game." (Gronk has performed much better when lined up in the slot than he has on the perimeter, where he's more likely to encounter elite corners -- his catch rate drops from 71 percent to 56 percent, which is lower than that of the average NFL tight end.)
I ask him what Gronk did in the AFC championship. "Literally nothing. He may have had, like, one catch," he says. (Ramsey is correct, though Gronkowski left before halftime because of a concussion.)
Jalen Ramsey: The man, the mouth, the legend
Before he was named an All-Pro cornerback, before he was punched by A.J. Green, before he was suspended for s--t-talking the media and then proceeded to s--t-talk the entire NFL, before he stood on the sideline of Jacksonville's field in a splendid shearling coat and predicted, incorrectly, that the Jaguars were going to go to the Super Bowl and "win that bytch" -- before any of those things happened -- Jalen Ramsey sat on a bench and cried.
It was Nov. 20, 2016, and Jacksonville was about to lose to Detroit and drop to a dismal 2-8. With less than 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the camera lingered on the rookie cornerback for what felt like an eternity. His eyes welled up and he stared into the middle distance, shaking his head like a patient who had just received a devastating prognosis. It was a raw, gutting display of vulnerability and a rare glimpse into an athlete's psyche. While Ramsey is a fount of highlight-worthy plays and oh-no-he-didn't quotes, the shot of him silently weeping during a meaningless game might've been more revealing than anything he's said over the past two years.
Naturally, he was mocked on the internet. And yet: When I ask him why he cried that day in Detroit, he doesn't seem embarrassed in the slightest. "That was a low moment," he says flatly before taking a slurp of his Powerade slush. It's June, and we're sitting across from each other in a Sonic Drive-In in Smyrna, Tennessee, the sleepy Nashville suburb where Ramsey grew up. "It was like, 'This is getting old. Don't nobody care. Maybe I shouldn't care too.'"
But of course he continued to care. Which is why, when he looks back at the experience, he isn't ashamed. He tried. He desperately wanted to win. So he cried, because he was devastated and felt no need to conceal his emotions, just as he's never felt compelled to conceal any part of himself.
"I don't really care what people think about me, to be honest," he says. "At. All."
Such pronouncements -- You can't hurt me! -- typically draw skepticism, and rightfully so. No one drives through life with blackout windows; most of us are affected, in some way or another, by the love and hate we encounter in others. But the more time I spend with Jalen Ramsey, the more I realize he isn't like most people. If legendary cornerback Darrelle Revis was an island on the field, the 23-year-old Jaguar is an island off it, a self-governing state that refuses to engage in diplomacy with the outside world. As a player, his hermetically sealed brain elevates his game to extraordinary heights. As a person, it can make things complicated.
Ramsey pumps up the home crowd against the Bengals last year. The cornerback got into A.J. Green's head so thoroughly in that game that the Cincinnati receiver punched him, resulting in ejections for both. DAVID ROSENBLUM/ICON SPORTSWIRE
THE FACT THAT Ramsey is famous at all is a small miracle. He's a cornerback who plays in a tiny market; if he's in the news, it's usually because he's a reliable purveyor of juicy sound bites, often batting back reporters' queries with quotes that are perfectly tailored for aggregation and televised debate. Since he was drafted fifth in 2016, Ramsey has talked a city landfill's worth of trash, the likes of which the league hasn't seen since Steve Smith Sr. hung up his mouthguard. (As a rookie, Ramsey called the legendary wide receiver an "old man.")
As a result, when we meet earlier in the day, at a Logan's Roadhouse in Smyrna, I'm prepared for the second coming of Deion Sanders. But Ramsey rolls in quietly, his longtime girlfriend, Breanna Tate, in tow. I don't know what I expected -- a WWE-style entrance? A Deion-esque ensemble? -- but this isn't it: He's dressed plainly, in sweats, and he slips wordlessly into a booth. Ramsey brushes a few peanut shells off the table and regards me suspiciously, as though we're lined up across from each other on the field. When I ask him if he likes doing interviews, he scrunches his nose. "As long as they're not boring," he says.
He grew up less than 10 minutes from here in a modest home where his father, a firefighter, still lives. "It's hella country," he says. "If you go five minutes any type of way, you're around cows, horses, fields, barns." While he talks, Tate studies the menu. She's extremely petite and extremely pregnant. (In late July, she'll give birth to their daughter, Breelyn.) "I plan on having, like, five kids," Ramsey says.
Tate sighs. "I wanted four, he wanted six," she says.
Ramsey grins. "The Lord said be fruitful and multiply."
The two attended the same high school; like Ramsey, whose father and older brother played college football, Tate, who ran track at Ole Miss, comes from an athletic family. Her older brother is Golden Tate, a Pro Bowl wide receiver with the Lions. When I ask Ramsey if he's ever matched up against Golden, who is seven years older than he is, he shakes his head. "Yeah, he wouldn't want that."
Would he give you any trouble?
"None at all."
Golden's pretty fast.
"Not fast enough."
Tate rolls her eyes and smiles gently, like someone hearing a child tell a knock-knock joke for the ninth time.
Ramsey was prone to roughhousing as a boy; his mother, Margie, would panic when she'd pick him up from day care and notice that his arms were covered with bruises from crashing into things. I ask him when he first thought he'd play in the NFL. "Out the womb," he says, cutting into a piece of steak. I laugh. He doesn't.
More ESPN The Magazine
Inside Odell Beckham Jr.'s quest to recapture the magic that made him the NFL's most eye-catching talent
Hang Time: Todd Gurley's happy place
Nick Saban is more than a scowl
Subscribe to The Mag
Ramsey's 27-year-old brother, Jamal, thinks Jalen was unusually confident at a young age because he grew up tagging along with him, which forced Jalen to keep up with older boys. He was also relentlessly competitive. "He's the biggest sore loser," says Jamal, a firefighter. "If you'd beat him at a game, he'd kick you out of his room." Whenever Jalen was losing at Monopoly, he says, he would jumble up the paper money and insist that it was impossible to tell who was winning. Jamal laughs. "I'm surprised he had friends."
Few are spared. Recently, Tate tells me, Ramsey was playing basketball with his 9-year-old nephew and the kid's friends. "He was dunkingon them," she says. Later, Ramsey's mother stepped onto the court. He dunked on her too.
By the time Ramsey entered high school, his talent was undeniable, but he was just 5-foot-3. Surely then, I say, he didn't think he was the best player in Tennessee. "I didn't think -- I was," he retorts. Aside from baseball, which he says he lacks the coordination for, he's excelled at every sport he's ever tried. He picked up lacrosse for a season and, once he figured out how to handle the stick, ran circles around the competition. ("There's not a lot of black people who do it," he says, smiling.) He's never tried skating, but if he trained for six months, he says, he could probably crack the NHL.
At first I thought Ramsey was self-mythologizing. But as he recounts his athletic exploits, it becomes clear that his unshakable confidence stems from lived experience. He's cocky as hell because he's never been humbled by failure. At 5, he was the strongest, fastest kid in his neighborhood. At 10, he was the best football player in the region. At 15 ... You get the idea.
After knee surgery and a well-timed growth spurt, Ramsey was widely recruited, ultimately landing at Florida State. He started from day one, the first Florida State cornerback to start as a true freshman since Sanders. "I expected to, and Coach [Jeremy] Pruitt expected me to," he says of his defensive coordinator. "Nobody else did." The obvious omission is former head coach Jimbo Fisher, now at Texas A&M. In February, when an A&M assistant tweeted a graphic touting Fisher's record with defensive backs, Ramsey clapped back online: "He didn't teach me not one DB technique ..."
Ramsey describes Fisher, with uncharacteristic brevity, as "OK." I tell him I've never met the coach. "You're not missing out," he replies. During Ramsey's sophomore year, Fisher once reamed him out after he pushed a blocker into quarterback Jameis Winston, kicking him out of practice. When I bring up the incident, Ramsey starts fiddling with his phone. "Here it is -- I've got the video," he says. He also saved a screenshot of the SportsCenter news alert.
FSU's defensive coordinator that year, Charles Kelly, now works on Pruitt's staff at Tennessee, coaching special teams and safeties. He downplays Ramsey's ejection ("He was competing on a play -- he doesn't know but one speed") and says Ramsey's personality was perfect for his position. "You've got to be the most mentally tough person on the field," he says. "If you make a mistake, everybody in the stands knows it." Great cornerbacks, Kelly says, have big egos and short memories; they possess a singular ability to block out noise.
In other words: They think like Jalen Ramsey.
The Jags didn't get quite as far into the postseason as Ramsey predicted last year. RICHARD PHIBBS FOR ESPN
BY THE TIME we drive to Sonic, the humidity is stifling, but we sit outside anyway. "This was our spot in high school after every game, every track meet," Ramsey says. After inhaling his slush, he orders a pony-keg-sized cookie dough milkshake for himself and some ice for Tate to chew on. When I speculate that he's consuming extra calories to support her pregnancy, he laughs. "I'm pregnant too!" he says.
I ask Ramsey what he did to piss off A.J. Green. Last season, when the Jaguars were playing the Bengals, the cornerback buzzed around the famously soft-spoken wide receiver like a 6-1 mosquito, jawing away for the better part of the first half. Then, with less than 20 seconds left, Green snapped; after Ramsey shoved him, he whipped around and attacked the younger player, punching him in the head like an aggrieved older brother. Both players were ejected.
"I called him soft, called him a punk," Ramsey says. "Talked to him. Said whatever I wanted to say. Did whatever I wanted to do." He snorts. "Receivers are, like, naturally soft. So sensitive."
On the field, Ramsey seems driven purely by his id, but there's a method to the madness he provokes. "It gets them out of their game, and it gets me into my game more. If I'm talking smack, I gotta back it up." He claims he largely avoids personal insults (in college, he used to sift through Instagram for opposition research on receivers' significant others), instead providing running commentary on the game -- mocking poorly run routes and QB preferences, sort of like a disrespectful Cris Collinsworth. "That gets under people's skin more than anything," he says. "I'm not clowning -- I'm talking facts. Yelling out their stats."
How do you monitor their statistics during the game?
"It's easy to keep track of, like, one catch for 6 yards," he says. (Later, I check the box score from the Bengals game. Green had ... one catch for 6 yards.)
When pressed, Ramsey doles out praise as gamely as insults. He's a fan of Antonio Brown -- "He's easily the best receiver in the NFL. Easily," he says -- and DeAndre Hopkins. "He's had freaking 100 quarterbacks -- all trash," he says. "I could be his quarterback. I could literally be his quarterback." When Ramsey says "literally," his drawl seeps into the word and it expands like a sponge: "liiiiht-er-uh-ly." (Hopkins returns the praise, calling Ramsey one of the best defensive players in the league. He adds, smiling: "He's probably the most talkative cornerback in the NFL.")
In general, Ramsey continues, fans underestimate the effect that quarterback play has on wide receivers. For example, he says, look at Danny Amendola, who just signed with Miami. "Or is it Edelman?" he asks out loud. He mulls it over. No -- he's thinking of Amendola. "He just got a brand-new contract and he is terrible," he says. "People think he's so great. No, he's not. Tom [Brady] made him look good. Tom could take me as a receiver and I'd be a first-team All-Pro."
"It'd be another thing if he talked trash and didn't back it up," running back Leonard Fournette says of teammate Ramsey, above. "He's a dog. That's who he is." RICHARD PHIBBS FOR ESPN
When I mention that the Patriots still have All-Pro tight end Rob Gronkowski, he makes a face. "I don't think Gronk's good." Registering my involuntary blinking, he course-corrects. "Let me say -- I don't think Gronk is as great as people think he is." Before the Patriots game, he explains, he had the Jaguars' analytics staffers pull some numbers for him. "Any time Gronk has been matched up with a corner, he's had a very bad game -- and that corner has had a very good game." (Gronk has performed much better when lined up in the slot than he has on the perimeter, where he's more likely to encounter elite corners -- his catch rate drops from 71 percent to 56 percent, which is lower than that of the average NFL tight end.)
I ask him what Gronk did in the AFC championship. "Literally nothing. He may have had, like, one catch," he says. (Ramsey is correct, though Gronkowski left before halftime because of a concussion.)
is he the best gay athlete of all time
