Art Modell should be buried, not praised.

Vince Guerrieri writes: Art Modell's reign of terror is now over.

The day they put you under, what I do on your grave won’t pass for flowers
--Marshall Thibido (Henry Morgan) to J.B. Books (John Wayne), The Shootist

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

Modell, the owner of the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens for more than 40 years, watched his season end with a playoff loss, an ending far too common to Browns fans. But this one made Browns fans happy. It’s the last game for a football team owned by Art Modell. Next year, he’ll be nothing more than a fan.

In the past three years, Art Modell has undergone one of the greatest image rehabilitations this side of Ronald Reagan. He’s gone from a greedy meddling owner to a pillar of the community. He mismanaged two football teams enough so that he had to move one and sell the other, but he’s heralded as a man who brought the National Football League to prominence and God help me, is called a candidate for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

However, the only people who sing his praises are people who made money off of him. Ravenscoach Brian Billick said one day Cleveland fans will realize that city leaders and not Modell were the bad guys in the Browns’ 1995 move. Modell’s fellow owners sing his praises for negotiating the first of what has become an insanely lucrative television deal (from $4.65 million in 1962 to $18 billion today).

Fans in other football-mad cities (like here in Pittsburgh) realize that if Modell can move a team that consistently was one of the top draws in the NFL, then anyone can. Modell tried to engineer his own spin campaign by collaborating with Dick Schaap on his autobiography. Schaap died. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.

Art Modell shouldn’t be venerated. He should be buried, not praised. Owning a football team in Cleveland should be a license to print money, but Art Modell couldn’t do that right, so he had to flee to Baltimore, which should have been just as lucrative. But he couldn’t do that, and was forced to sell the team. The man who couldn’t make money with teams in Cleveland or Baltimore sold the team for $600 million -- 150 times more than for what he bought it.

Now, a little personal disclosure. I am a Browns fan. Growing up in Youngstown, I had a choice. We were equidistant between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, but my allegiances laid with the Browns. I don’t recall Red Right 88 with great clarity, but I have more than enough bitterness for the Fumble and the Drive. I hid my head in shame in the Volney Rogers Junior High cafeteria the season the Browns went 3-13. I agonized through the 1994 playoffs, when the Steelers beat the Browns for the third time that year.

In the fall of 1995, I was in college. The Indians were playing in a World Series for the first time since 1954, at a brand new stadium. The Cavaliers had a new arena. The Browns were still in Municipal Stadium, their home for their entire existence, since 1946.

The Friday after the Indians fell to the Atlanta Braves, I was jostled into a state of semiconsciousness by my clock radio. I was midway between dreamland and this world when I heard a voice on the radio say that the Browns were moving to Baltimore.

I was then completely wide awake.

Modell pleaded poverty, saying that he had to move the team to Baltimore because he could no longer remain competitive in Cleveland. He said the city had given stadiums to the Indians and the Cavs but not to him. So he took $50 million and a brand-new stadium in Baltimore and ran, after imposing a moratorium on stadium discussions and saying he’d never move the team.

It’s entirely possible that Modell was a shoestring away from bankruptcy. But it was his own doing. He took over Cleveland Stadium in 1973 and ran it, gouging the Indians for rent and doing nothing to improve the appearance of the Mistake by the Lake. The troughs in the men’s rooms would overflow at halftime of Browns games.

But Modell held on to Municipal Stadium because he could sell lots of tickets. At its peak, the stadium held nearly 80,000 people. And fans turned out. Despite the weather, they turned out. Despite the heartbreak, they turned out. By comparison, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh held around 57,000 people. The NFL blackout rule stipulated that a percentage (not a flat rate) of tickets had to be sold for the game to be on television. So Steelers fans could watch a game with 57,000 tickets sold. Browns fans couldn’t watch a game with 70,000 tickets sold. And who wrote the NFL blackout rule? Yep, you guessed it, Art Modell.

He said municipal officials are the bad guys because they wouldn’t build him a new stadium. But to most people on the North Coast, it’s Modell who’s the bad guy. He hasn’t even returned to Cleveland since his unceremonious departure. I sent him a letter this year asking him if I could have his tickets to the Browns-Ravens game in Cleveland if he wasn’t going to use them. I even included a self-addressed stamped envelope, but got no reply. (After the shellacking Jamal Lewis and the Ravens put on the Browns, he might have done me a favor.)

People talk of his charitable contributions in Cleveland, and that might also be true. But he was a meddling owner who took too active a role in football. He wanted to be the top dog, and to show it, he fired Paul Brown, possibly the greatest coach in football. One of the straws that broke his back and led to the move was the high-priced front-loaded signing of Andre Rison — a signing Modell wanted. When Earnest Byner fumbled in the AFC Championship Game, Modell cut him loose. Byner went on to power the Washington Redskins to a Super Bowl victory.

It’s not coincidence that the only two Modell-owned teams to win it all were made of people assembled by his predecessor (the ’64 Browns) or of a football mind while Modell was ill, if not incapacitated (the ’00 Ravens, put together by Ozzie Newsome). If there is one good thing that came of the Ravens, it’s that Modell hired Ozzie Newsome – a guy who’s 18 shades of all right – as the first black general manager in the NFL.

And for the second year, Art Modell is eligible for the Football Hall of Fame. His apologists are saying he’s due for a bust in Canton because of what he did for the National Football League. All he did was make them money.

But maybe John Huston was on to something in Chinatown. Whores, politicians and ugly buildings get respectable, he said. Maybe Art Modell is venerated for nothing else than being venerable. Maybe just by sticking around, he can be viewed as something other than an incompetent rat bastard.

Naah.