John MacKinnon
Edmonton Journal
EDMONTON — It’s probably not so surprising Edmonton Eskimos quarterback Ricky Ray grew up to be the unassuming, unflappable leader he has been for most of a decade for the CFL club.
After all, this son of a sawmill worker from the northern California town of Happy Camp grew up idolizing NFL star quarterback Joe Montana, winner of four Super Bowls with powerhouse San Francisco 49ers teams that included fellow Hall of Famers Jerry Rice and Ronnie Lott.
It was the late, great city columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle who famously nicknamed Montana “Joe Cool,” but Ray was too young to know that at the time.
“I just remember watching Monday Night Football a lot,” Ray said Thursday. “My older brother, Barney, was a big Dan Marino fan and I was a Joe Montana fan.
“We both had the little uniforms. I had the Montana uniform and he had the Marino uniform. We were always out in the yard playing. Or we were in the house, watching Monday Night Football, playing with footballs all over the place.”
Ray grew up in Redding, Calif., actually, and his coach in football, baseball and basketball was often his dad, Steve, who worked 18 years in a sawmill to support his wife, Julie, and their six children.
“He just got me involved in sports when I was young and he expected a lot out of me,” Ray said. “It wasn’t something where he drove me and I’m out there practising at midnight and I’m hating him.
“It was all enjoyable stuff. He just made me realize that if you put a little bit of extra work in, it’s going to go a long way. And that when you go out there, you go out there to play hard. You want to have fun, but you’ve got to put in 100-per-cent effort every time.”
If the work ethic his teammates and, especially his coaches, appreciate so much comes from his dad, Ray reckons his low-key, laid-back personality is a gift from his shy, equally hard-working mother.
In his nine seasons with the Eskimos, Ray has led the club to three Grey Cup appearances, including championships in 2003 and ’05. He also was the Grey Cup MVP in ’05 and holds a slew of Eskimos passing records.
Despite that, Ray is underrated, if anything, by the club’s demanding fans, particularly those who equate leadership with animated behaviour, fist pumps, rah-rah, the whole nine swaggering yards.
That’s just not Ray.
“Yeah, he definitely brought me up that way,” Ray said of his dad. “He coached me a lot when I was young, whether it was football, baseball or basketball and he definitely instilled that into me, not to be a showboat, just to go out there and play hard and any of that extra stuff, there’s no room for that.”
Steve Ray taught his children to always make time for preparation, for practice.
“Just being prepared,” Ray said. “I can remember playing baseball when I was younger and going out to pitch in the backyard before practice.
“And sometimes, whenever we didn’t have a practice day, we were always out there getting that extra work in. He definitely instilled in me that you’ve got to practise, put in extra time and always want to win. He wasn’t very happy if I was just going through the motions.”
If discipline is knowing what you have to do and doing it as well as you can all the time, then Steve Ray surely taught his son discipline. But a by-product of that is the quiet toughness Ray displays when he gets up, uncomplainingly from hellacious hits and just gets on with it. Among other things, Reed noted, that helps the psyche of the offensive line, and the team as a whole.
“I just watched my dad,” Ray said. “He got up to go to work every day and never complained.
“He’d come straight from work to take me to practice and then put in extra time with me.
“I just saw how hard he worked and it definitely rubbed off on me.”
For first-year Eskimos head coach Kavis Reed, all those life lessons Steve Ray taught his son add up to something invaluable that many fans miss.
“Leadership,” Reed said, simply. “I think one of the main reasons why Ricky doesn’t get all the accolades or the acclaim that a lot other quarterbacks get is that he’s so stoic about the way he approaches things.
“He is not a very demonstrative guy. He’s going to go about communicating in a very calm fashion. That’s very important to a young football team. But his leadership is far, far greater and more important than what people have given him credit for. That has been vitally important to our success this year.”
By leadership, Reed means things like Ray being among the first to the video room most days and “definitely the last guy watching film” on a daily basis. It means quietly, precisely explaining to a receiver in a meeting room what spot he needs to hit, and on time, to grab one of Ray’s well-placed passes.
“These kinds of things, in terms of helping to instruct the young guys and help them to accelerate their understanding of the game are vitally important, much more than a guy pumping his fist after a big play,” Reed said.
It also means Ray, having internalized the lessons of his father, is his own most demanding critic.
“Ricky is so conscientious about his work that before you get a chance to correct him, he’s telling you the correction,” Reed said. “So, you don’t have to yell and scream at him because he’s going to say, ‘I screwed up there, I should have done this.’ You’re a little more lenient with him in terms of corrections.”
It’s no accident that after the Eskimos defeated Calgary 33-19 in the Western Semi-Final last Sunday, Reed presented the game ball to Ray, to the deafening cheers of his teammates.
“I really wanted everyone – and I know everyone in that locker-room understands this – to acknowledge him as our leader,” Reed said. “Naturally, by position, he’s a leader, but more important, by the things he’s done in terms of leadership skills, that have helped us to get to this point.”
Reed didn’t need to emphasize another point that the Eskimos all understand and draw great confidence from – their playoff fortunes on Sunday in the Western Final against the B.C. Lions start with Steve Ray’s second son, Ricky.
