For Art Modell, maybe tonight makes it all worthwhile. His Baltimore Ravens have given him the Super Bowl championship that he never won in Cleveland, and money beyond anything he ever counted in Cleveland, but tonight his supporters will cheer for something beyond crowns and cash. They want to give him immortality.
The Ravens play the Washington Redskins here tonight, in front of the usual sellout crowd plus a national television audience. This means it is more than a football game. It’s a platform. It’s a moment on television for all those who believe Modell belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to shout it out to the whole country.
Nestor Aparicio, the guiding hand behind WNST radio, has been urging Modell’s entrance into the hall for several years. But now he’s put his words into action. He’s organized his listeners, and the readers of his Web site, to “stand up for Art in the second quarter.
“At the beginning of the play when the cameras come back from their break,” Aparicio writes, “we are trying to get the stadium to erupt
in a cheer of ‘Induct Art.’ If we’re loud enough, we might stop the game or force John Madden and Al Michaels to discuss Art Modell and what he’s meant to our city, our community and the game of football since 1961.”
Around here, we know what he’s done for Baltimore. We spent a dozen years between the abduction of the Colts and the arrival of the former Browns of Cleveland. In the wilderness years between Robert Irsay and Modell, we groveled for a team, and the NFL big shots secretly mocked us. They told us to stage a meaningless exhibition to show our passion, and we filled up our ballpark, and the NFL sneered at us. They told us to take our money and build a museum.
We had museums. We wanted football again.
Modell brought it to us. He was suffering financially in Cleveland — by pro football’s gold standards — and he wanted a new ballpark, and wanted to feel appreciated, and instead he felt Cleveland took him and his football team for granted.
So he bolted.
He cost Cleveland a franchise — for a short while — and he turned his name into an obscenity in his former hometown. He has been vilified there, and sometimes vilified here. We were not oblivious to the parallels with Irsay and our Colts sneaking off to Indianapolis.
But Modell came to Baltimore and brought life back to our Sundays in autumn. From Modell we got a new ballpark — for which we paid a few hundred million of our own dollars, actually — where you could see all the action from any seat in the house — for which we were given the “honor” of buying Permanent Seat Licenses — and from this came the great Ray Lewis and his gang, and tailgate parties, and parades, and feeling a whole community bonding around a grand athletic passion.
For Baltimore? Beautiful.
We thank Modell for the memories.
But we can’t erase history, nor pretend that Modell’s move to Baltimore didn’t involve something far bigger than the rebirth of football here.
It’s part of an awful pattern. Ask them about it in St. Louis or Oakland, or Los Angeles or Houston. Or in Cleveland or, the sad truth of it, in Baltimore, where we wept bitter tears for a long time and cursed the NFL and all of its big shots and bled over their sheer heartlessness and their obliviousness to the love affair that had once existed.
It’s part of a pattern where professional sports teams bully the communities that nurtured them, and thus expose the myth of the two-way love affair between a community and a team.
It’s always the same. Owners declare: Build me a new ballpark, and include sky boxes and luxury suites to pamper the high-rollers. But we can’t afford a new ballpark, communities reply, not with our struggling schools, and our underpaid cops and teachers and firefighters, and our decaying roads and our undernourished neighborhoods. Build me, the owners reply, or I move.
Thus giving entire cities the forearm shiver.
Nestor Aparicio calls it “our biggest civic nightmare” if Modell had never come to Baltimore. Without him, he writes, “There’d be no Vinny Testaverde. No Ted Marchibroda. No stadium downtown. No Army-Navy. No Jamal Lewis. No Ring of Honor. No Monday Night Football. No draft day parties. No wins. No losses. No purple anything.”
He’s right about that. We’ve gotten lots of glad moments, lots of brand new traditions, because Modell came here.
That puts him in the Maryland Hall of Fame.
But it keeps him out of the NFL Hall of Fame.
