Ray Lewis Wants You To Get Pissed Off For Greatness

Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis is best known for watching a dude murder someone his leadership abilities and unstoppable determination.  His pre-game pep-talks (read: screaming a bunch) are the stuff of legend and always entertaining. On Tuesday, Lewis paid a surprise visit to the Stanford men’s basketball team, who were preparing for their semifinal game against UMass in the 2012 NIT Tournament at Madison Square Garden.

Tom FitzGerald at SFGate was kind enough to share the video of Lewis giving his pep talk. Have a look for yourself:

I think this video proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Ray Lewis is the greatest motivational speaker of all time. Despite showing a shocking amount of Dadlap in the video, Lewis manages to get the team insanely fired up by stringing together a barely-related series of thoughts that all more or less boil down to “LIVE FOR THE MOMENT” and/or “THERE’S NO TOMORROW.”

I love trying to make sense of what he’s actually saying here. “Forget that there was any sunlight left?” What does that even mean? He wants us to envision some sort of Cormac McCarthy The Road-type scenario? He wants us to eat babies? That’s probably what he’s getting at there. He asks the team whether they’ll be thinking about one of three men: themselves, the man by their side, or the man that they’d give everything in their heart for. That last one’s George Clooney, right? MY LIFE FOR YOU, CLOONEY.

The best part of the video may be when he gets into the home stretch and the camera shows the reaction shots of the players just vaguely nodding and trying to follow what he’s trying to say, with the one Wolfman Jack-looking gangly white kid looking around at everyone uneasily, like, “Yeah, I totally get it, who says I don’t?” Well, regardless of what jibber-jabber Ray was spouting, it must have done the trick, because Stanford defeated UConn on Tuesday and blew out Minnesota on Thursday to claim the NIT championship.

The moral of the story is: it’s easy to get teenagers excited about stuff.

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