BALTIMORE RAVENS 2001 TRAINING CAMP--HBO HARD KNOCKS
“Hard Knocks” – A Look Back
By Ted Gioia, NFL Films
Long before Hard Knocks became a fixture of both reality television and sports cinema, late NFL Films President Steve Sabol felt the idea of building a television series from an NFL Training Camp was a long shot. “Steve originally didn’t think it would translate,” NFL Films Senior Producer Bob Angelo said. Angelo was the director in the field for the first two seasons of Hard Knocks, and though he and Sabol planned to center the inaugural season on a character study of three or four rookies trying to make an NFL roster, the production was quick to adapt once the cameras were rolling.
The debut season of Hard Knocks featured head coach Brian Billick and his defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens. Billick was supportive of the show, and the producers loved having access to personalities like Ray Lewis, Shannon Sharpe, Tony Siragusa, and Rod Woodson — players who were such good TV that the producers had to expand their focus beyond just the unsung, first year Ravens. “When the rookies had to stand up at dinner and perform, Shannon Sharpe fell off his chair in hysterics. That’s when we knew we had a good thing going (with the veterans), too,” Angelo said.
As with any new idea, however, there were some growing pains. Initially, the Ravens told the NFL Films crew that they would not be able to mic-up players or coaches. Because of this, audio engineers were running all over the field with boom microphones in an attempt to capture each interaction between players and coaches. “It wasn’t more than ten minutes into the first practice before we started to piss Brian off,” Angelo recalled. Before long, the crew was wiring shoulder pads regularly to make it easier on themselves and the team.
Guts, Glory and Snacks: A History of 'Hard Knocks'
By Jason Gallagher, Excerpt from Rolling Stone Magazine, August 5, 2014
The Tony Siragusa Show
He's enormously entertaining, immensely frank, hugely ambitious. He's the Goose, and he's bigger than ever.
September 09, 2001 by Kevin Cowherd, Baltimore Sun
Your first interview with the next Artie Donovan, with the newest anointed working-class hero of Baltimore sports, begins with a phone call at 11 at night from Ravens PR guru Kevin Byrne.
"Goose will meet you at 10 tomorrow morning," says Byrne, which turns out to be the good news.
The bad news? "He'll meet you at Tiffany's," Byrne continues.
Tiffany's, it turns out, is a restaurant co-owned by Ravens nose tackle Tony "Goose" Siragusa. It also happens to be in the town of Pine Brook in north-central New Jersey, which happens to be at least a three-hour ride from Baltimore -- unless, that is, you get sucked into the angry maw of rush-hour traffic headed into New York, in which case they may never find your body again.
So you get up at dawn the next morning and go hurtling up I-95 to the Jersey Turnpike, shaking like a cement mixer from four cups of rest-stop coffee. Somewhere around Newark, you peel off onto 280 west and take it all the way to the end and finally you arrive at Tiffany's, which proves to be one of those glitzy sports bars determined to prove it's a serious eatery as well, sort of an upscale Ruby Tuesday, only with even more polished teakwood and recessed TVs and sports memorabilia on the walls.
Ten o'clock comes: no Goose. Ten-thirty comes and you're still drumming your fingers on the bar, nursing a Diet Coke.
Finally, at 11:15, the big man, all 6 feet 3 and 340 pounds of him, appears. And for the next few hours, you get a sense of what life for the brash, charismatic Tony Siragusa has been like since the Ravens beat the New York Giants in the Super Bowl last winter and he became a gen-u-ine national media sensation.
In between bantering with the waitresses -- "I like your hair. No, really. Don't you like her hair?" -- and schmoozing the lunch crowd, he's fielding one cell phone call after another, which, judging by the conversation on Siragusa's end are business-related.
In the midst of all this, a camera crew is filming him for the just-completed HBO series Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Baltimore Ravens, and he sits for a 45-minute interview and delivers the funniest, most profane rant you've ever heard about training camp, at this point still a couple weeks away: "It's definitely a pain in the a--. ... I don't know, maybe Knute Rockne decided this was the way to win. I think we should all play Sega or something."
"When Tony walks in the door," says Tiffany's manager Matt Kaup, "he's always the focus of attention."
"Off the field," says Siragusa's best friend on the Ravens, defensive end Rob Burnett, "Goose is almost a rock star."
Even while eating lunch at the bar -- right now he's inhaling an order of baby-back ribs, part of the high-protein, low-fat diet he goes on each year before training camp that makes him absolutely miserable -- the Goose's hyper-celebrity affords him no rest.
A 50-ish woman named Arleen from Parsippany approaches with her husband, Steve.
Arleen wants to see Siragusa's Super Bowl ring. The ring happens to be in Siragusa's jeans pocket at the moment to protect it from rib sauce. But he dutifully fishes it out.
Arleen is dazzled. The ring is the size of a doorstop: bright gold, inlaid with glittering diamonds. There are pimps walking around with more understated jewelry.
Arleen announces that she's a New York Giants fan -- Giants Stadium is 20 minutes east of here and if you don't worship the Giants in these parts, they will break your kneecaps.
As she stares at his ring, the irrepressible Siragusa feels the urge -- no, the overwhelming need -- to have some fun at this poor woman's expense.
"The Giants got one, too," he says of the ring. "I think they got it at a Taco Bell or something."
Everyone at the bar breaks up. So do Arleen and Steve.
"With a chalupa, right?" says another guy, playing along.
Then Goose smiles and tells Arleen: "Nah, I'm a Giants fan myself," explaining that he grew up not too far away in Kenilworth, where Sunday afternoons in the fall in the blue-collar Siragusa household revolved around what time the local gridiron heroes came on TV.
Arleen goes away happy. Before someone else comes up to him, you whip a tape recorder under his chin and bring up this business of him being the reincarnation of former Colts star Artie Donovan, the newest salt-of-the-earth hero for a gritty, unpretentious town mad for football once again.
The Goose's face softens and he nods.
"I think there's a reason people associate me with Artie Donovan," he begins. "Artie Donovan, straight out, tells it like it is. He doesn't pull any punches, he's a normal guy. You can sit down and have a beer with him.
"If I were to look at Artie and see what similarities we have, I'm as blue-collar as you're going to get. I'm a jeans guy. I like the fun things and stuff. But I never forgot where I came from, who I am."
Which is a good thing, you tell him.
Because here come Arleen and Steve again.
When the Ravens begin their 2001 season today against the Chicago Bears at PSINet Stadium, Tony Siragusa will be entering his 12th year in the National Football League, his fifth in a Ravens uniform.
At 34, with two battered knees that have all the consistency of overcooked pasta -- he missed most of camp after arthroscopic surgery on one -- he is nearing the end of his career. "If I didn't think we had a shot at the Super Bowl," he says, "I probably wouldn't be playing this year."
But what a run No. 98 has been on since the Ravens stunned the world of pro football last January.
Siragusa's Q rating -- the measure of how likable and recognizable a celebrity is to consumers -- didn't just go through the roof, it kept going into orbit. If there was an award for America's most overexposed athlete, it would be hanging on Siragusa's mantelpiece right now.
Baltimore had embraced the Goose for years, but now it was as if the whole country suddenly discovered this personable, funny, iconoclastic athlete with the bowler's gut and the stevedore's mouth.
In the off-season, his schedule book looked like Bill Clinton's. He appeared on Letterman, on Regis Philbin's talk show and Wheel of Fortune. He showed off his acting chops on the HBO hit comedy Arli$$.
(On the other hand, The Sopranos never called, which still seems to pain this quintessential Jersey guy. Hell, Siragusa had the whole swaggering, wise-guy, you-looking-at-me? shtick down before Tony Soprano whacked his first rat and took his first Prozac. "I could really help that show," Siragusa says earnestly.)
He also played in a ton of charity golf tournaments, rubbing elbows with Hootie and the Blowfish, former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, actor Samuel L. Jackson and former U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen.
He did a commercial for Baltimore meat distributor Esskay, signed on to represent Jack Antwerpen's car dealerships, and sat for an interview with Playboy magazine, where he discussed everything from anal-retentive NFL front-office types obsessing about how high players wear their socks to what he likes about, ahem, adult films (hint: it ain't the plot lines). He also posed for the cover of last week's TV Guide.
More recently, he was one of the featured players in HBO's Hard Knocks, with his unmerciful ragging of the Ravens rookies the comic high point of the series:
"Nobody ever gave me anything!" he railed to the HBO cameras. "When I came into this league, I got a $1,000 signing bonus. Not $12 million, not $5 million, not $400,000. You look at all these guys drafted first round, All-This and All-That. They're gonna come in here with their nice cars. Don't park 'em near me! 'Cause I'll slam my door open and you're gonna have dents all alongside your car."
Now, with football back in season, his weekly radio program on WJFK-AM is gearing up again. Which is where you track him down again this past week, at the glittering new Coliseum sports bar in Cockeysville, where he'll be doing the show this season with his co-host Keith Mills. (The Goose will be a local TV star as well; highlights will be broadcast on WMAR-TV, where Mills is a sports anchor.)
Siragusa has just become a father for the third time, as his wife, Kathy, delivered little Ava Kathleen into this world. Their other daughter, Samantha Rose, is 4, and Anthony Jr. is almost 2.
Maybe you saw that touching scene in the final Hard Knocks episode where, after kissing and cuddling with the new baby in the hospital, Goose launches into a harangue about how "maybe Shannon Sharpe will believe me now" -- that is, see that Kathy was pregnant and Siragusa wasn't just trying to get out of camp.
Then, with perfect timing, he delivers a middle-finger salute to Sharpe. Oh, it brought a tear to your eye.
(A few weeks earlier, when it appeared Kathy's due date could conflict with the Ravens' opening game, Siragusa had joked: "Hopefully, I can put her on a roller coaster down at the Jersey shore and she can have the baby early.")
But if he's preoccupied with the new baby or a knee that's still tender from the surgeon's high-tech scalpel, he's doing a terrific job of masking it.
The radio / TV show is all yucks and shoulder-punching jock bonhomie, as Siragusa has brought along his own guest, new Ravens quarterback Elvis Grbac.
In the course of 90 raucous minutes, during which football and the Ravens prospects for the coming season are only loosely discussed, Siragusa bangs back eight Miller Lites ("I'm usually buzzed by the end of the show") as well as a plate of linguini, baby-back ribs and various appetizers.
He also:
* Sheds his shirt when Grbac notes he's lost weight, revealing a gut considerably flatter (although this is a relative term with the Goose) from the 20 or so pounds he lost since his surgery.
* Announces -- perhaps disturbingly to many -- that he's wearing a thong. It is unclear if he's joking. (Grbac, in the spirit of the moment, announces he's wearing boxers).
Reveals that upon meeting Grbac for the very first time, he greeted his new teammate with: "You're not a world champion and I am."
Mercifully, the show goes much more smoothly than his very first radio program with Mills four years ago, when four or five beered-up construction workers chose the occasion to get in a brawl not far from the microphones -- much to Siragusa's delight.
"This was during the first 15 minutes of the show!" Mills recalls. "Right away, Goose starts yelling: 'This is the greatest place I ever saw! A round of drinks for everyone!' "
The fun-loving Siragusa is clearly comfortable in bars, and considers himself the standard-bearer for convivial fat-guy beer drinkers everywhere. That Siragusa was also on display in Hard Knocks, when the old pro took some rookies out for beers at a tavern in Westminster. Gazing around the room and sensing a distinct "red neck" factor, he turned to the rookies, most of whom were African-Americans, and said: "If I were you guys, I wouldn't rap in this place. We could get killed."
"I have never seen an athlete who [cares less] about political correctness," says Mills.
Still, with just a few days until the Ravens' opener, it's clear Siragusa also is focusing on the upcoming season, gearing himself for the long, grueling campaign to come. And unlike some of his teammates, he doesn't try to downplay the enormous expectations Baltimore fans have for the 2001 Ravens.
"If we don't win the Super Bowl, it'll be an incredible failure," he says evenly.
Then he tells you about watching the video replay of the Ravens' Super Bowl one night at Tiffany's (not long after he had displayed the gleaming silver Vince Lombardi Trophy on the bar and invited patrons to touch it -- but only if they weren't Giants fans). He tells you how he shushed the crowd at the bar so he could concentrate on every play, hang on every word from the announcers.
"I watch the highlight film and I get chills," he says. "I want that feeling again."
This is what a nose tackle does in the violent world of the NFL: As soon as the ball is snapped, he fires into the beefy, redwood-sized guy across from him, unless he happens to be double-teamed by two beefy, redwood-sized guys, which, in Siragusa's case, happens quite often.
Then he slaps and scratches and kicks those blockers until he gets a shot at the ball carrier.
But in Siragusa's case, if he doesn't get a shot at the ball carrier, that's OK, too. Because that means that, with two blockers tied up, Ray Lewis, the Ravens' ferocious All-Pro middle linebacker, is free to zero in on the running back like a pit bull -- no small reason the Ravens' defense set a record for fewest points and rushing yards allowed last season.
Siragusa has been doing this sort of grunt work for a long time, ever since the Indianapolis Colts signed him as a free agent out of the University of Pittsburgh in 1990.
He's been sturdy and dependable, but he's never made the Pro Bowl, never been one of the league's glamour boys, never really gotten a whole lot of recognition except from his teammates.
Nevertheless, after a training camp holdout in 2000, he signed a new contract extension that paid him more than $2 million last year and will pay him at least that much this season.
Only, when they wheel you off the field on a cart with your neck strapped down and you can't feel anything in your hands and feet, you're not exactly thinking about the money.
That's what happened to Siragusa last year after a collision with Tennessee Titans running back Lorenzo Neal, during which Siragusa's neck snapped back in the scariest hit of his career.
At first, says Siragusa, "it felt like there were five or six or 10 people on my back." Then he couldn't feel much of anything at all. By the time they got him into the locker room, though, he could stand again. Which meant "I wanted to get back in the game."
Fortunately, common sense prevailed. The doctors ordered him to a hospital for an MRI, which showed a bruised spinal column.
"I call him the human billboard," Mills says of Siragusa's penchant for wearing the baseball caps and T-shirts of the various companies he represents.
Ravens coach Brian Billick smiles when the subject of Siragusa's various business ventures comes up. "He has a lot on his plate," the coach says.
Siragusa's agent, Pikesville-based Terry Lavenstein, says: "He's Artie Donovan with a twist -- and the twist is that he's a very sophisticated businessman. ... He sells himself better than anyone I know."
Privately, some in the Ravens organization have grumbled about Siragusa's relentless pursuit of endorsement opportunities. And at least one sponsor has blanched at the fee he demands for an appearance. But if he is hell-bent on wringing every last buck from his celebrity, it's not because he's a tightwad.
When Indianapolis gave him that $1,000 signing bonus -- after taxes, it came to a little less than $700 -- he promptly slapped it on a bar in his hometown and proceeded to drink it away with his buddies. "And we still had a tab of $150 after that," Siragusa recalls.
His largesse in the years since has become legendary. Two years ago, when former teammate Fernando Smith's house burned down, Siragusa bought Christmas presents for the whole family. When a brawl in the stands during a Ravens-Steelers game injured a Baltimore fan and she needed an emergency operation, Siragusa heard about it and promptly cut a check for $10,000 for the woman's family.
He's also one of the most tireless Ravens when it comes to raising money for charity through the Tony Siragusa Foundation, which helps underprivileged kids, and his work with Grant-A-Wish and Make-A-Wish -- a facet of his life he rarely publicizes.
Anyway, to hear him tell it, it's not about the money this season, it's about another championship ring, another huge, gold, gaudy bauble to wave in the face of all those Giants fans who come into Tiffany's in the off-season and taunt him with cries of "Ravens s-- !" -- which, because he's 6-3 and 340, he's supposed to take good-naturedly, instead of air-mailing anybody through a plate-glass window.
Siragusa says he's ready for the new season. And the rest of the Ravens are ready, too, he says.
"Being in the media spotlight puts a lot of pressure on you," he says softly. "Because the minute you [foul] up, you go from hero to zero."
And that, he knows, is a long, long slide.
Whatever happens, though, the Goose will still be the Goose. And in this era of bland NFL football, of nameless, faceless players who toe the league's corporate line -- at least when they're not in jail on drug charges or for beating up their wives -- that is not a bad thing to be.
HBO Series Gains Cutting Edge While Following the Ravens
By Ken Denlinger The Washington Post, September 7, 2001
Even if you don't know a football from a foot fault, you still could sense the essential story line of "Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Baltimore Ravens," HBO's six-part weekly series that ended on Wednesday night: Big guys sweat. They get hurt and humiliated. And cut. A few more than four dozen survive, earning the right to make a sinful amount of money for trying to knock the daylights out of other big guys each week.
If you had any feel for the Baltimore Ravens, you would have been all but certain of this: Coach Brian Billick was going to come across as The Smartest Coach in Football. And Tony Siragusa would be the player hogging the spotlight, a sort of 340-pound magnet for the half-dozen or so camera crews that followed several veterans and rookies from even before they reported to camp to the last cut.
Even if you don't know the NFL, if you were over 50 you'd think, "Didn't I see most of this before, like in 1960, when CBS News did 'The Violent World of Sam Huff '?"
All that's right on, but "Hard Knocks" still was compelling, done deftly by NFL Films and as complete as possible, given that the defending Super Bowl champions had ultimate editorial control. NFL Films tells wonderful stories -- and this one probably exceeded its usual high standards.
What you saw, of course, is similar to what you read in an authorized book. But it almost surely was as close to the truth as you'll get about camp -- and examined areas that "Violent World" didn't touch.
"It brought back some memories," former Baltimore Colts linebacker Stan White said.
Huff also had recollections about the enormous impact "Violent World" had on himself and sports fans, many of whom converted from baseball to football because of the film.
"Nearly every day," he said, "someone mentions it. Amazing. I think it brought a lot of women into sports."
"Violent World" followed Huff and other New York Giants through training camp with microphones attached to the inside of their shoulder pads and ended with an exhibition game against the Chicago Bears in Toronto. "Hard Knocks" is more complete, showing players being cut and the raw evaluations of the coaches who made those cuts.
Trouble is, "Hard Knocks" probably did not have close to the audience -- in proportion to the number of available television sets -- that "Violent World" did. Each segment debuted at 11 p.m. Wednesday and was limited to a cable audience. Huff didn't see it.
"First time I heard about it," he said yesterday, "was when you called."
A spokesman said HBO was pleased with the audience, 1.2 million homes each week during the summer, and called the series "a huge hit for fans who had never seen that part of football before."
"Hard Knocks" established its themes by talking before camp with veterans such as defensive tackle Siragusa, safety Rod Woodson, wide receiver Qadry Ismail and tight end Shannon Sharpe. It offered perspective about the ordeal, but none of those veterans was going to get cut. It would have been useful to follow a veteran on the bubble.
The drama came with the rookies: tight end Todd Heap, the top draft choice; defensive end Dwayne Missouri, chosen in the seventh and last round; and free agents such as cornerback Reggie Waddell, quarterback Ortege Jenkins and linebacker Kenny Jackson.
The most riveting moment of the series involved Jenkins. He had thrown some of the ugliest passes ever in any camp and had to expect the early-morning rap on his door by personnel assistant Joe Douglas -- with a camera crew present.
Even viewers who never have been fired or cuffed around were saddened as they saw nearly every step Jenkins took until he arrived in Billick's office. A camera caught Billick telling Jenkins that, at least with the Ravens, his NFL dream was over. It probably meant little to Jenkins when Billick said he never had played a regular season second in the NFL and had been cut twice in training camps.
All camps have their hijinks, and the best came when Siragusa locked the tight ends in their meeting room and during the annual rookie and King Ugly shows. "Violent World" did not touch on that aspect either.
More seriously, cameras twice followed Siragusa into hospitals. One was for touch-up knee surgery that will allow him to play in Sunday's season opener; the other was for the birth of his daughter, Ava Kathleen.
"We've now been through that in training camp," he said.
The rookie show and Billick-inspired King Ugly contest were hoots. The runner-up in the King Ugly voting, young tailback Jason Brookins, was so caught up in the irreverent spirit that he said there were five others in the room uglier than himself -- and proceeded to prance around and point them out. One was Billick.
Brookins still survived.
Team officials rolled their eyes when, during a news conference announcing that star running back Jamal Lewis would miss the season with a knee injury suffered during a practice, Billick borrowed a line from Shakespeare: "Sweet are the uses of adversity."
Billick can strut with the best. Off camera, he admitted that he hadn't just come across the line in Act II, Scene I of "As You Like It." He said he saw it in a book written by an another peacock, Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley.
There was plenty of off-color language, something Huff wouldn't permit, and some of the action seemed staged. Still, the cut process played out sensationally. Waddell and Missouri made the team, in large part because secondary coach Steve Shafer forcefully argued for Waddell and Ozzie Newsome, senior vice president of football operations, argued that defensive linemen are difficult to find.
The final show had players posing for the team picture and Billick saying they had "graduated from the school of hard knocks." That's where the show ended, although later in the day veteran offensive lineman Orlando Bobo was cut. That night veteran outside linebacker Cornell Brown was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. He was charged the next day and dropped from the team.
The show may be over, but the hard knocks never end.
None of Siragusa's teammates would admit to being bothered that he stole the show. Some surely were, and their families may have been more upset. Creating that possibility was one reason Billick allowed the project, because resentment over lack of publicity is something a team must deal with after huge success.
Yeah, yeah, said Siragusa, the Jersey tough guy 'til the end. And sure enough, some 50 minutes later, he was back in the game.
Siragusa just shrugs when that story is brought up. It simply reflects his blue-collar, lunchpail approach to the game, he says.
"I would have been more scared if I didn't go back in the game," he says.
In essence, that's why he had no problem holding out for more money last year, why he has no problem capitalizing on his every off-field opportunity to make a buck.