Ray Lewis, ex-Baltimore Ravens linebacker, to release memoir

Ray Lewis, the ESPN commentator and former Baltimore Ravens linebacker, will release a memoir in October that will address the murder allegations that almost ended his career, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Simon & Schuster will publish “I Feel Like Going On: Life, Game, and Glory” later this year. The book will be co-written with Daniel Paisner, who has previously collaborated on celebrity memoirs by Ed Koch, Serena Williams and John Kasich, among others.

According to the publisher, Lewis’ memoir will deal with “his struggles off the field, including his father abandoning him as a child, his best friend’s murder, and his own wrongful incarceration that threatened to cut short his football career.”

Lewis and two of his acquaintances were arrested in Atlanta in 2000 and charged with murder after two men were stabbed to death in a fight following a Super Bowl party. Lewis entered a plea agreement with prosecutors, and testified against his two friends in exchange for a reduced charge of obstruction of justice.

He was sentenced to a year of probation, and fined $250,000 by the NFL. His two friends were later acquitted. Later that year, Lewis told ESPN The Magazine that the experience was “like no fairy tale ever told, me going through a murder trial and then being up for MVP.”

“I’m still angry,” Lewis said, “... at the NFL, for hitting me with one of the biggest fines in sports history for a misdemeanor while the league’s drug users, drunken drivers and wife beaters never get hit half as hard. I’d like to know when I get to stop paying for a crime I didn’t commit.”

Lewis’ memoir will also “[reveal] his controversial opinions on the business of football and offers insights about the torturous aspects of the sport that you don’t see on television,” according to Simon & Schuster.

Lewis retired from football in 2013, after a Super Bowl game that the Ravens won. He finished his career with two Super Bowl wins, a Super Bowl MVP, more than 1,300 tackles and 41.5 quarterback sacks.