WP:Still Ticking -Patrick Ramsey's been sacked more times than a can of chicken soup

[TK]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33218-2003Dec3.html

Still Ticking

Patrick Ramsey's been sacked more times than a can of chicken soup on special at Safeway. But that doesn't mean he isn't good for the Redskins' soul

By Sally Jenkins

Sunday, December 7, 2003; Page W18

Any sorehead disbeliever who questions a modern football player's capacity for pain would do well to spend time around Patrick Ramsey. The least desirable uniform in the NFL is surely Ramsey's. His battered set of clothing and equipment, which holds the distinction of having been tackled, clubbed, speared, pounded, kneed, stepped on, dirtied and bloodied more than any other quarterback's in the entire league, is flimsy cover for his 6-foot-2 and 217-pound body.

"You learn how to take a hit," says Patrick Ramsey, "learn how to fall, how to ... keep them from hurting you."

"Actually," says the Redskins trainer, Dean Kleinschmidt, "he's 170, when the swelling goes down."

What Ramsey would like all of you to know, especially the folks back home in Ruston, La., is that he's fine. "I actually feel pretty good," he says.

He'll be fine, that is, as long as Grady Jackson doesn't fall on him again. You may ask, who is Grady Jackson? Grady Jackson is the answer to the intriguing if guilty question: What's the hardest lick Ramsey has taken in his brief but riddled career as the Washington Redskins quarterback? "Boy, do I have to narrow it down to one?" says Ramsey's friend and offensive lineman, Jon Jansen.

Consider: After eight games Ramsey had been knocked down an NFL-leading 68 times, and outright sacked 26 times, second highest in the league. What's more, it was a seemingly pointless kind of pain; the Redskins were on a four-game losing streak, Ramsey had failed to finish three different games because of various injuries, and observers, as well as members of his own family, were wondering whether he was going to survive his first full season as a starter.

Ramsey's wife, Ginny, had begun watching the Skins' road games at home with her pastor and his wife, Denny and Bridget Henderson, because she didn't want to watch alone. But the TV, she found, was even worse than being in the stadium. "When I watch on television, they show his face," she says, "and I can see the pain."

The Ramseys met the Hendersons when they were searching for a local church that offered a Wednesday night service, since they couldn't attend church on autumn Sundays. A friend recommended the Gathering, a young-adult service at McLean Bible Church conducted by Henderson, an ebullient young preacher of 28 with spiky yellow hair. Ramsey introduced himself after services one evening and invited Henderson to dinner, and the two couples have been close friends ever since.

Each Sunday when the Redskins are traveling, the Hendersons drive out to the Ramsey home in Purcellville and do their best to reassure Ginny. But comfort is not always available. "It's hard, especially sometimes when he looks like he's not getting back up," Henderson says.

Ginny is a young woman of 23 with masses of deep brown hair pinned above her neck, and softly pretty looks that belong on a Victorian-era cameo. "She's an old-fashioned Southern girl," Ramsey says. But her Southern manners desert her as she watches defensive linemen slam her 24-year-old husband of little more than a year to the ground. If one of them stands over him posturing, she snaps, "Get a grip." When Ramsey is slow to get up, there is nothing she can do but stare at the television and will him to his feet.

"He's all right, he'll be okay, he's getting up," Henderson says.

"I don't know, y'all," Ginny says. "I don't know."

When Ramsey climbs to his feet, she finally relaxes, and that's when the phone starts ringing. It's usually her parents, or his, calling to say that it's going to be okay.

By now, more than midway through his second season, Ramsey has become a connoisseur of pain, an expert taster of the types, varieties and degrees of it. In searching for his worst moment, Ramsey sorts through calamitous plays the way some people mull over the dishes at a buffet: Should he choose from among the 11 sacks in his first two games as a starter last season? Or should he choose from among the four helmet-jarring sacks against the Dallas Cowboys this year, when Roy Williams took shots at him like a deer target?

Grady Jackson wins the prize. "The funny thing is, it was a play no one would probably remember, but me," Ramsey says. It came against the New Orleans Saints last season in what was the first NFL start of his career, and a thorough indoctrination into the violence of the league. Jackson is a massive defensive tackle of 325 pounds, who has since been traded to the Green Bay Packers. It wasn't so much how hard Jackson hit him, Ramsey says, "it was the weight." Ramsey fired a pass -- and completed it for a touchdown -- just as Jackson hit him. Ramsey collapsed to the turf and Jackson dropped on top of him like a freight elevator. Ramsey felt the air go out of him with a wumpf, and for a moment was afraid he might become a permanent indentation in the turf. "I could feel my rib cage collapsing," he says.

Finally, Grady Jackson removed his bulk, and got to his feet, but as he walked away, he stepped on Ramsey's shin and dug his cleat into his leg for good measure. Ramsey lay there for a long moment, and then he raised himself to his hands and knees, slowly, and he opened his mouth, and he emitted a primal scream, a long guttural ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

"Just trying to shake it off," he says.

What Ramsey did next was something he would do repeatedly from then on, no matter how savage the blow he sustained, or hopeless-seeming the Redskins' circumstances, until it has earned him the abiding respect of everyone on the sideline, in the stadium, and in the league.

He got back up.

By midseason this year, TV broadcasters were diagramming Ramsey's injuries on-screen for viewers like a home-study class in skeletal anatomy. He looked and felt like the equivalent of a low-impact car-wreck victim: He had a slightly separated left shoulder, a dislocated left pinkie, a badly bruised right foot, various minor sprains had come and gone, his left forearm was badly swollen with a huge contusion, and a nasty scab lingered above his right elbow, where he had skidded on artificial turf and rubbed his skin down to the second layer.

That wasn't counting the soreness, a base-line ache that started somewhere in the center of his bones, so deep that no aspirin can get at it. Any football player will tell you that you start with pain, and it only grows worse as the season wears on. Your hands or feet get swollen because they've been stepped on, your back and hips hurt from blows you don't remember, and even your face hurts. Eyelids. Your eyelids hurt. Scalp hurts, too. It's only the most serious matters that you actually define as injuries.

Ramsey's formal injury report from week to week was only the half of it. In order to understand the whole of it, you'd have to watch him stand in front of his locker after a game and pull his jersey and pads off, revealing the welts, swellings and discolorations on his skin. "He's got so many bruises that the first thing we have to do is stop the bleeding, and get the swelling to go down," Kleinschmidt says.

Those bruises and lacerations were a road map to the Redskins' record at the midpoint of the season. They all too vividly summed up how the Skins had gotten to 3-5: After winning three of their first four games, they had spun out with a four-game losing streak. Head Coach Steve Spurrier was vilified by critics for a supposedly flawed offensive system that left Ramsey frighteningly unprotected, while owner Dan Snyder was accused of chaotic management that made it hard for a team to jell. Between penalties, breakdowns and a constant battering, it seemed a recipe for ruining the health and confidence of a young quarterback.

Most frustrating for the Skins was that in a league full of bright young quarterbacks -- St. Louis's Marc Bulger, Atlanta's Michael Vick, San Diego's Drew Brees, New England's Tom Brady and the New York Jets' Chad Pennington -- Ramsey had somehow played as promisingly as any of them despite the problems. After a terrible decade in which 14 different quarterbacks had started for the Skins, Ramsey had established himself as their quarterback of the future -- if he lived.

The concern for Ramsey's health reached a climax on November 2 against Dallas. The Cowboys sent everything they had at Ramsey, rushing him with as many as nine men, and the Redskins failed miserably to protect him. Ramsey went to the locker room once for X-rays and finished the game with that dislocated pinkie and bruised forearm. There now existed a real possibility his career could be damaged if the Redskins couldn't find a way to better protect him.

"Longevity becomes a concern when something like this happens," Ramsey says. His agent, Jimmy Sexton, concurs. "The licks he's taking will take a toll over time," says Sexton.

By now, Ramsey was doing three-a-days in the training room. You could find him in there at all hours, with ice bags or electrodes for electro-stimulant treatments attached to his inflamed muscles. Kleinschmidt treated him with ice whirlpools, massage, elevation, compression and, occasionally, shots of local anesthetic or nerve blockers. But Ramsey also took matters into his own hands. One Tuesday in midseason, he decided to spend his day off by shopping with his wife and spending some of his extremely hard-earned money. They drove to a mall near Redskins Park, and strolled into Brookstone, where they surveyed shelves full of high-tech gadgetry: digital binoculars, golf range-finders, grill-ready thermometers, telescopes, remote-control wris****ches. And then Ramsey saw it, the object shimmering in the middle of the showroom. It was a . . . Human Touch massage chair: "With advanced robotic technology [our] Human Touch Technology™ system replicates actual massage techniques used by chiropractic professionals."

He bought it on the spot, and he wasn't done shopping either. Next, his eye roved to the larger furniture -- and there it was. The Tempur-Pedic Mattress System: "Developed for NASA to relieve extreme G-force pressures," the "temperature-sensitive visco elastic material molds to your exact body shape." Did that sound like something Patrick Ramsey needed after a long day face down on the football field, or what?

Ramsey bought it, too. In one fell swoop, he dropped a couple thousand dollars on a massage chair and an astronaut bed, on the off chance that they would help him recover from Sunday afternoons. As soon as the furniture was delivered, Ramsey settled into the massage chair in his study -- Ginny said it was too black and ugly for the living room.

The bed was more problematic. On the first night he and Ginny climbed into it, they shifted around uncomfortably while the hard foam molded itself around them. It was like trying to sleep in a large orthotic shoe. "It's taken some getting used to," Ginny says, giggling. On each successive night the heat-sensitive visco-elastic material further enveloped them. One night, Ginny woke up and found she was sleeping in a large indentation. "It was sort of like trying to climb out of a ditch," she says.

Since the shopping spree, not a day has gone by that Ramsey hasn't spent time in his massage chair. He sinks into it for half an hour at a time, letting the Human Touch work his sore muscles. Sometimes Denny Henderson comes over, and sits with him and talks while the massager hums. Recently, Ramsey dropped into the chair, and popped in a tape of the Dallas game. With Henderson watching silently alongside him, Ramsey gazed at the screen until he came to a play where Dallas safety Roy Williams sacked him. Here came Williams, blitzing out of the defensive backfield at a full run, passing straight through the offensive line untouched by a mortal soul. Just as Ramsey threw a scoring pass to receiver Taylor Jacobs, Williams launched himself at Ramsey like a human missile. It looked like Ramsey blew up. It seemed impossible that his arms and legs remained attached to his body.

Ramsey backed up the tape -- and replayed it. Then he hit the slo-mo button. Moment by moment, he and his pastor watched again as Williams hit him, and his arms and legs went askew.

"I ain't going to lie to you," Ramsey said. "That one hurt."

What's apparent to Henderson, or to anyone who has watched Ramsey closely, is that his temperament and physiology seem to come with a built-in capacity for absorbing immense punishment. It doesn't seem to matter how often you hit him, or how hard, whether he takes a helmet in his shoulder or kidney or diaphragm, he always bobs back up like a balloon toy, almost jauntily, and makes another play. "I've never seen somebody take hits like he does and not react," says Redskins quarterbacks coach Noah Brindise. "It seems like he doesn't even know he's getting hit, half the time."

Ramsey's performance against the Seahawks was important, coming as it did after the Dallas trauma; it signaled his willingness to continue to stand in and throw to the end zone (14 TD passes through 11 games). It also suggested the Redskins had, if only temporarily, solved some of their pass-blocking problems, and that, at least for one week, they had decided to pull together rather than pull apart. If so, significant credit had to go to Ramsey. "I think he has really endeared himself to the team by showing that he is able to stand back there and take a licking," Brindise says. Each time he does, Kleinschmidt wraps more tape around him, and looks for new and creative ways to hold the kid together.

"Baling wire and prayer," Kleinschmidt says. "Then we just roll him back out there."

It would be a sincere mistake to suppose that Patrick Ramsey is as nice as he seems. He's got a cherubic face, with brown bangs that he keeps combed straight down his forehead, and yes-sir, no-ma'am manners. "He's Opie," says Brindise.

Ramsey's off-the-field demeanor is so insistently pleasant and soft-spoken that Snyder even had doubts about drafting him out of Tulane. When Snyder and former Redskins executive Joe Mendes flew to New Orleans to evaluate him, Snyder kept saying, "He's too nice. I don't know if he's tough enough. He's too nice."

Tell that to the deer.

Ramsey has killed three of them so far with a bow and arrow in the fields behind the Redskins practice facility in Ashburn. And when Ramsey needs a day off to clear his head, he straps on his hunting gear and goes traipsing into the empty, ochre- colored woods behind his new home in Purcellville. Ramsey and Ginny chose Purcellville because they wanted some acreage, and the landscape reminded them just a bit of Louisiana, with thickets and underbrush where Ramsey can ramble with his dog and a bow and arrow. They got the plan for the house, a Cape Cod with a sprawling porch, from Southern Living magazine.

"Patrick is country strong, is what I call it," says his former offensive coordinator at Tulane, Frank Scelfo. "Country strong, and country tough. He didn't grow up sitting inside; he was outdoors. He's a heavy, rugged kid, and little things don't bother him; a cut, a bruise, a strain, none of that stuff bothers him."

Ramsey grew up in Simsboro, a small agri-industrial town near Ruston, where the local boys have a gun, fishing rod or bow and arrow perpetually in their hands. When he wasn't playing football he was crouching in hunting blinds, taking aim at deer or duck or turkey, or fishing for largemouth bass. Even then his hunting and fishing buddies marveled at his tolerance for hardship. "He'd be the last one to quit if it was cold and miserable," says childhood friend Tram Jones.

Ramsey inherited a constitution that's best described by that old-fashioned word "hardy" from his father, Chuck, who worked, and still does, on Louisiana's offshore oil rigs. Chuck would drive five hours to the coast, and work a week straight on the oil platforms, 12 hours a day. Then he'd drive five hours back home and have six days off, before he'd turn around and go back. "He worked very, very hard my entire life; he was always working," Ramsey says. "There's no question my ethic comes from him. He taught me that you do not give up."

According to Kleinschmidt, Ramsey also inherited a high pain tolerance. It's the only way he can explain Ramsey's remarkable durability. Kleinschmidt is in his 33rd year as an NFL trainer and has known a lot of players, including the famously tough Billy Kilmer, of whom Ramsey reminds him. There are different versions of tough, Kleinschmidt has learned: One man might go to the hospital over a hangnail, while another man with a severe internal injury complains of nothing more than a stomach-ache. Ramsey, he says, falls into the latter category. "He's a near-record for tough. He's got an extraordinarily high threshold for pain; it's just bred in him."

People in Washington are just learning what the people in Louisiana have known about Ramsey all along. In high school, he stoically suffered some terrible physical beatings on a team that was 0-9 his senior year, but the only thing that knocked him out of a game was mononucleosis. He had to claw for a scholarship at Tulane, where he played behind a notoriously weak offensive line. He still managed to set 20 school records despite getting hit on just about every play, smacked down, blindsided or leveled face-front. Only once, in his years at Tulane, did Ramsey come out of a game injured. It was against Louisville, on a day when Tulane wound up throwing more than 50 times. On the play in question, Ramsey looked downfield and knew he had sure-thing TD -- if he could hang on to the ball for another split second. "He knew the thing was going to open, and he knew he was going to get hit," Scelfo says. "He threw it. And he got crushed." Ramsey made the play, but he came to the sideline with a badly bruised sternum. He still went back in for one more series, and got hit again. This time when he came out, he called Scelfo in the booth. "It's really bad," he said. "I can't do it." For once, he stayed on the sideline.

You'd think Ramsey would have gotten worn down by such constant punishment, but actually, it was the opposing defenses that got worn down. Ramsey made them pay for every hit, throwing 72 scoring passes in his career. "Defenses finally gave up," says Scelfo. "They just quit blitzing us."

Ramsey learned, through all those hard seasons, to avoid serious injury. "I think a lot of it is an art," he says. "You learn how to take a hit, learn how to fall, how to twist your body in ways to avoid direct blows, keep them from hurting you. Or maybe it's not an art, maybe it's just an acquired trait."

Ramsey's doggedness on the field was accompanied by a machine-like discipline off the field. He graduated cum laude with a double major in accounting and finance, and began arranging his future as if it were a punch list. He married Ginny Graham, his hometown sweetheart. They went on their honeymoon to the Florida Keys, returning home just in time for the 2002 NFL draft. He began life as a newlywed with a Redskins playbook.

What no one could have anticipated, especially given that cherubic face and mild demeanor, was how inordinately self-confident Ramsey was in his abilities. On draft day he was the third quarterback chosen, behind David Carr and Joey Harrington. Asked what he thought about that, he said, "I think I can be the best of all of us."

If Ramsey hasn't exactly proved it yet, he has certainly suggested it. In addition to sheer physical talent and toughness, he is a thorough student of the game and a compulsive self-disciplinarian, and this is exactly what coaches mean when they say he has "all the tools." You can see him at all hours at Redskins Park carrying his playbook under his arm, a huge loose-leaf white plastic binder, like a graduate student. Inside the playbook is a case containing an array of colored pens and highlight markers. "I'm neat in everything," Ramsey says. He also carries a brown leather datebook, and when he flips open the book, inside are neat lists in pencil, with arrow-straight handwriting. "He has to make a list to breathe and eat," Jansen says.

In two years, Ramsey's only respite from the Redskins has been an occasional day in the woods or a night with the Hendersons. Sometimes they go to the local Swee****er Tavern, but for a really big night he and Ginny invite the pastor over to play brainteaser games. Catchphrase. Cranium. Taboo. Scattergories. Beyond Balderdash. On learning this, you may be tempted to feel, as Dan Snyder did, that Ramsey is simply too nice to play quarterback for the Redskins. But this is to oversimplify and seriously underestimate him; just because he isn't a hard-drinking egotist or a foulmouth doesn't mean he can't be the next Redskin great. Anyway, if it makes you feel any better, in the next breath, Ramsey will tell you how much he loves war movies: "Braveheart," "Band of Brothers," "Black Hawk Down."

Ramsey's birthday is on Valentine's Day, and each year he and Ginny exchange heart-shaped cards. Also, at his request, every year, she makes him a red velvet cake in the shape of a heart. And then she gives him a gift.

This year, it was a Benelli 12-gauge shotgun.

Patrick Ramsey sits at a table in the lounge at Redskins Park, eyeing a messy stack of white domino tiles. "I have to straighten these out," he says. He carefully arranges each, until they make a perfectly neat, unbroken square of tiles. As he talks, he is equally correct, polite and careful in everything he says.

Ramsey's penchant for doing things exactly right has smoothed over what could have been a difficult beginning with the Redskins. Given how firmly he has grasped the starting job, it's difficult to remember that Ramsey entered the season as one of the Redskins' biggest question marks, still struggling with the complexity of Spurrier's offense.

Ramsey spent most of his rookie season trying to recover from a contractual holdout -- not a good foot to get off on with his new team, particularly since Spurrier was just beginning his own NFL coaching career. For 16 days, he sat out of training camp on the advice of his agent, who believed the Redskins were offering an unfair deal. "It killed me," Ramsey says. "I had never missed a day of practice. I had never missed a day of anything, in my life."

Nobody thought he was doing the right thing, except for his agent. "You get up there and take what they're offering," his family and friends in Ruston told him. Every time he turned a street corner, there was someone else he knew, staring at him disapprovingly and saying, "Aren't y'all supposed to be in camp?"

The pressure got so bad that Ramsey actually left Ruston and moved to Memphis and stayed in Sexton's pool house for several days. He spent the time playing golf listlessly, and working out with another client of Sexton's, Donte Stallworth, who was a first-round pick by the New Orleans Saints. But then Stallworth reported to camp, and he was alone. Ginny was finishing college at Louisiana Tech and could only come visit on weekends. When talks briefly broke off and the Redskins explored trading him to Chicago, Ramsey despaired. "I don't even like talking about it," he says now.

At one point, Ramsey called Spurrier to try to explain himself. "Look, coach, I really want to play for you," he said, struggling inarticulately. "I really want to play for the Redskins." Spurrier just listened, and said, "Well, if that's true, I guess you'd be here." What Ramsey really wanted to do was yell at the phone, "I'm not the kind of guy who holds out. That's not what I'm about!"

Sally Jenkins is a columnist for the Sports section. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

[sashae]

God.. great article. You really gotta root for this kid. Here's hoping he comes back even stronger next year...

-s

[G-Town]

I love this guy!!!!!! I am not gay, not that there is anything wrong with that.

[bubba9497]

Ramsey is my hero

[DeathByLinebacker]

Hopefully he's been paying attention to Hasselbeck. One sack in nearly 3 full games.

[Tarhog]

*bump*

This is a great read. My Dad gave me the hardcopy version yesterday. Worth a minute or two.

[Lowghost]

Just when I thought that PR had my upmost respect, this article somehow made it go up another few notches.

Gotta love this kid

[Soliloquy]

Great article!