A poor home and neighborhood brought a wealth of lessons - and love.

When the street lights flickered, Ray Lewis knew there were maybe five minutes left in the street football game before he would have to race home.

He had to be home before the lights came completely on. These games, wherever they were played, were a gathering place for Lakeland youths living in the projects.

“If you stayed on a certain side of town, you’d meet up with guys on the other side,” said Travis Houston, a childhood friend and high school teammate of Lewis. “We’d play football in the park, sometimes in the street.”

The road to professional football began on these streets across from Bryant Stadium and surrounding parks.

Lewis' athleticism stood out so much then that it caught the eye of a youth football coach, known as Coach Biscuit, who got Lewis involved in organized football for the first time at 10 years old. For Lewis, however, the street football games were more than just a game. They were an escape from a tough home life. As the oldest child of a single parent, he often had the responsibility of looking after his younger siblings while his mother worked.

“It’s a release,” he said. “It’s a real release. It’s something that even while you’re in school during that day, your mind is thinking about getting to that moment because you don’t have to worry about nothing else when you get out there. You’re like carefree — just go have fun and just go be a kid.”

Life wasn’t always carefree for Lewis. He watched his mother struggle, which formed a deep desire to one day make life easier for her. It was during these years that he says he developed the work ethic and competitiveness that would lead him to a Hall of Fame NFL career.

None of this would have been possible, Lewis said, without the heavy hand of his mother, Sunseria “Buffy” Jenkins. He said she became a role model, a hero, a best friend and someone whom he never wanted to disappoint.

“In Baltimore (when Lewis played in the NFL), every Sunday is Mother’s Day,” Jenkins said. “He announced that: ‘This is for my mother.’ Everything he went out and did, if I said I needed a touchdown, I need an interception, he went and made it happen. It all came back to my pain. He saw me get abused, he saw me get beat. He used to say, ‘Momma, you don’t need to go through this.’ That’s what made him the man he is today.”

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Ray Lewis was born May 15, 1975, the oldest of Jenkins’ two boys and three girls. A friend of his mother gave him his name. Lewis didn’t meet his father, Ray Jackson — a record-setting wrestler as well as a football player at Kathleen in the 1970s — until he was in high school.

Although his mother was married at times, for the most part, Lewis grew up in a single-parent home. At a young age, he was the man of the house in a poor neighborhood. Lewis recalled seeing peers, guys he thought were even better athletes than him, get caught up in the drug scene and never amount to anything.

“(In the early ’90s), crack cocaine stormed Lakeland,” he said. “It killed our city. We had some of the top athletes ever. Either they were selling it or they were on it.”

Jenkins was determined that neither Lewis nor any of her children would end up like that. She was a hard disciplinarian.

Lewis was known as a joker in the classroom, always trying to make people laugh. But once in the sixth grade, it went too far. His teacher talked to Jenkins, who showed up in class as Lewis was acting up, and disciplined him in front of the classroom. After that, she said, she had no problems with him.

Jenkins said she needed Lewis to be disciplined because she needed him to take on responsibilities that most kids don’t have to worry about.

“I kind of took some of his childhood away because I worked, and being a single parent, he had to take care of his brother and sisters,” Jenkins said. “So that’s how he learned to cook the noodles and oatmeal. He helped me so much cleaning the house. So he was a good kid.”

A Baptist, Jenkins made sure her children went to church and to bible study. They had chores.

“I didn’t give them time to get into trouble. And if they did do something, I was right there on them, no matter what,” she said.

It wasn’t all work. They played games.

“We were a game family,” she said. They loved playing croquet. She took them to Skate World on Friday. There were block parties. And let’s not forget the pillow fights.

"I went through so many pillows," she said.

Like all kids they tried to stretch the rules.

When Jenkins was at work, they weren’t supposed to have other kids over, but kids will be kids. And Lewis would sneak into her car with his brother and sisters and take them for a joyride around the neighborhood.

Jenkins said she tried to be their friend, but she was still the parent.

“By me not having a man in the house after my divorce and I became a single parent, I had to let them respect me,” she said. “That’s why Ray has that quote, 'Discipline is even when no one is looking, you have to be disciplined in yourself.' ... I made them respect me, and I made them respect God.”

Jenkins’ experiences made an impact.

“I saw a single-parent mother,” he said. “I saw a mother with five kids and no help. I remember the things she told me, ‘I don’t have time for you to be a child. I need you to help me. I need you to help me with your brother and sisters.’ So that for me, the first time somebody put crack in my hand and offered me to sell crack, do you know what my first response was? My mother will kill me. What? Never? That would never happen. So those options, they were never options. They were never an option.”

IT'S ALL ABOUT COMPETING

Growing up, it was all about competition — playing basketball, playing football in the streets or just racing each other. In Lewis' neighborhood, foot races were intense competition.

So who was the fastest in Lewis’ day?

“I wasn’t, let me say that,” Lewis recalled with a laugh, “Man, wow, that’s one thing I would say. When I say speed, wow, Lakeland had burners.”

In these races, pole to pole in the streets, Lewis never backed down.

“I would race because I love competition,” he said. “Racing taught me something, it really did.”

One race particularly stood out. Lewis often raced his friend Kwame King, who was two years older. Lewis lost to King, but the races were close and Lewis felt strong, like he was gaining on him. So Lewis asked King to race 60 yards instead of 40.

“When we took off, I remember getting to that first pole and I remember me and him being even,” Lewis said. “And the next thing that came to my mind was, oh my God, we have another 30, 40 yards. Really, I have more. From there, I remember looking to the side and in my head I was like, it’s over, because I knew, once I beat him, in my world, I had arrived. I was there. It was the high of my life that I accomplished something I never did. That was the last time we ever raced.”

There were pickup basketball games at Winston Elementary, where the low rims allowed everyone to perform Michael Jordan-like dunks.

Most of all, however, there were the street games where his love of football blossomed. Lewis played every position, even quarterback. Sometimes to make games more competitive, teams would trade players in the middle of games. There were no referees. Get a bloody nose, you get up, wipe it off and keep playing.

“It created a certain type of attitude, a no-worry-type attitude,” Lewis said. “Once you got done with that game and got home, you played the best game of your life. You played the Super Bowl of your life. You know if you did something bad, you didn’t want to get to school early because every kid would talk about it. But if you did something good, you wanted to start the conversation.”

It was in one such game that he caught the eye of a youth football coach he knows only as Coach Biscuit.

“I see them playing at Bryant Stadium, behind the scoreboard, little kids would be playing football,” the coach recalled. “I see him one day, and all of the other kids had a hard time tackling him and bringing him down.”

He found out who Lewis was from Desmond Clark and Maurice Washington. Clark was 8 at the time, but would later become a tight end for the Chicago Bears. He and Washington told the coach another thing about Lewis: The boy's mother wouldn’t let him play youth football.

FROM THE STREETS TO THE LUMBERJACKS

To this day, or at least when Lewis was interviewed for this piece in July, he never knew Coach Biscuit's real name.

Biscuit, it turns out, is Lynn Gore, a 17-year-old student at Lakeland High School at the time he noticed Lewis. Gore, and his brother Adrian, who was known as Cornbread, played football for Bill Castle's Dreadnaughts.

Gore took Lewis home one day and discovered he lived right behind him on 10th Street in Washington Park.

“I went to his momma, and his momma was a hard sell,” said Gore, who coached Lewis for 2½ years with the Lakeland Lumberjacks before joining the Marines. He reached a deal with her that he never told Lewis.

“What we agreed on, and he doesn’t know to this day, I agreed to be his babysitter when he got out of school. I would watch him and make sure he got to football, back and forth. It took me a few hours to talk his mother into letting him play football, so he wasn’t lying about that. She was set on not letting him play because she was working like two jobs at the time.”

Lewis might not have known about the deal, but he was glad to be playing. It didn’t matter that his first jersey was a ragged No. 85 in which the 8 was nearly faded into oblivion.

“But I was so proud to put on that jersey,” he said. “I never forget, when I came home, I was like, 'Wow, this is really cool. I’m a part of a team.' Going forward, even today, I think that’s what the excitement for all young kids is to be part of a team. I think for me, putting on those pads kind of gave me that vision that wow, I made it.”

In his first game, the only game his mother attended, he had a 75-yard kickoff return on a reverse. That was the play he remembers to this day. The future Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker doesn’t remember anything about playing defense.

'NEVER QUIT'

Lewis remembers another play that made a lifetime impact on him. It wasn't his play. He wasn't even in the game.

He left practice — he was living in Mulberry at the time — and went to the Bartow-Mulberry game to watch his cousin, Tony Stancil, play.

Bartow’s running back broke lose, but Stancil set out after him. Stancil never caught him but chased him all the way to the end zone, even when it was apparent that he wasn’t going to come close to making a tackle.

“I saw a person never quit,” Lewis said. “He was chasing this guy and ran all the way to the end zone. Effort, it’s about nobody else. It’s really about you, 100 percent, on how much or how far will you push yourself.”

And this is when the work ethic developed. When he was young, it wasn’t hard to see what drove him.

“Being broke,” he said. “There was nothing else to think about. Seriously, I tell people all the time. ... You guys just don’t know. When you have nothing, the passion that’s created to make something, it goes beyond. You don’t even think about getting tired.

"Me personally, I never would think about getting tired. Why? I was not going home to where everything looked the way it was supposed to be. I was going home to where mom had to scratch out meals. But she made it happen. That’s why me and her are best friends because I was old enough to remember her making it happen, not having it happen, but making it happen.”

Whether it’s a former teammate, classmate or coach, the book on Ray Lewis when he was young was consistent. He was a great athlete, good personality, loved to laugh and he loved to have fun.

Oh, and he loved to dance.

Before Lewis gained personal wealth playing football, he earned money for his athleticism — but it wasn’t in the sports arena.

“We were extremely broke, all of us,” Lewis recalled. “So Kwame [King] started this dance group called the Hardy Boys.”

And King asked Lewis to be a part of what was at first a four-member group. After all, he could make some money.

“He was like, ‘Look bro, they’re paying $20,' ” Lewis said. “We’re getting $20. We can get $5 apiece, so we’re doing good. I’m like, ‘I’m in.' Anything to get $5.”

King was the leader of the dance group. He was two years older than Lewis and a mentor. Voted best dressed in his senior year of 1991 at Kathleen High School, the 6-foot-1 King played football and ran track. He was president of the choral department but also had a strong interest in dance and his African heritage.

King earned a choral scholarship to Florida A&M University and majored in voice until changing his major to education. He went on to earn a doctorate of education in child and youth studies from Nova Southeastern University.

King put together a routine and they practiced behind his grandmother’s house, meeting in the back yard.

“Kwame was kind of the brain and the genius in putting all the dance routines together,” Lewis said. “And we started traveling, going to Tampa. Our first dance show was in Tampa; you guys will never see the footage — ever. And so we danced there, and then we started dancing every Saturday night at Skateworld.

"You would skate up to a certain time, then you’d pull the skates off, and we used to dance. We’d dance against all the boys from Bartow and Winter Haven and Lake Wales. Then we took it and started dancing in the Martin Luther King parade. Then I got to college and I kept dancing in college to make money. We only started dancing to make money, but it turned into a legendary thing.”

It started as a four-man group, but it grew. King is co-founder of the nonprofit Imani Dance Program for Youth Development in Tallahassee.

“That group started with four,” Lewis said. “That group has now mentored and also sent 3,500 kids through college.”

Lewis’ famous “Squirrel Dance” — his signature pregame entrance onto the field for the Baltimore Ravens — didn’t begin with the Hardy Boys, but its roots are with the group.