| [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
 |   |
|
EVENTS [an error occurred while processing this directive] CENTERSFantasy Central Inside Game Video Plus Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities 
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE [an error occurred while processing this directive] |  |
Go with your gut Modell had an inkling this Ravens team could be special
Even at training camp in early August, Art Modell had a feeling about things this season. It was a revelation that in retrospect deserves some acknowledgement. In April, on draft weekend, he had already predicted his Baltimore Ravens' first playoff run of their five-year existence. But just before lunch on another sweltering summer day at Westminister (Md.) College, Modell went further. And he did so, as he usually does, with a wry, mischievous smile on his lips. "With unusual constraint for me, I want to be very, very sober with this thing," Modell told a visiting reporter, without much prompting. "But I think this could very well be the best football team I've had in my 40 years in this league. "That takes in a lot of players, a lot of territory and a lot of eras. And a lot of near misses. Five times we've come within a play of going the distance. So that taught me a lesson, to be less anticipatory with fewer expectations. But this is a good, good football team. I want to make it clear I'm not printing playoff tickets. Yet. But they have been plated." That's vintage Modell, of course. Leave 'em laughing is his credo. But Modell is enjoying the biggest and last laugh, and rightly so. His 40 years in the NFL wilderness over, the game's promise land beckons. Last year it was Tennessee's colorful Bud Adams getting his first taste of the Super Bowl in 40 years of professional football ownership. This year, it's Modell's turn. Two longtime AFC Central rivals who had to painfully uproot their franchises in order to succeed and prosper elsewhere. Modell knows a good story when he hears one, and these days, it's him. At heart, the Baltimore Ravens' 75-year-old owner is a football fan and a football man. And this week he traversed much of the landscape of his life-long love affair with the game. Nobody in football looks back like Modell. A gifted raconteur, he likes to linger over the past, enjoying the moment and the memory with fondness. It's impossible to give him a listen without hearing a tale or two you've never heard. Didn't know that Modell owns 67 -- that's 67 -- season tickets for the New York Giants, his Ravens' Super Bowl opponent? Neither did we. "I became obsessed with professional football when I was nine in 1934," Modell explained. "I would go with my cousins, we'd walk five miles to Ebbets Field. On Thanksgiving day, the old Brooklyn Dodgers of the National Football League would play the old New York Giants. That was the beginning of my love affair with pro football." After Brooklyn's NFL franchise disbanded, Modell, a Brooklyn native, transferred his loyalties to the Giants. After War World II, he began buying Giants season tickets, adding even more when they moved from the Polo Grounds to Yankee Stadium. "I bought some even after I moved to Cleveland. For family, friends, creditors," Modell quipped. "It's been a great experience." Modell and the Giants' venerable owner, Wellington Mara, personify the old guard in the NFL. The two are close, their wives are close, and the families even spend some holidays together. "We can't keep up with all his grandchildren," Modell says of Mara. "The last Thanksgiving dinner he had 58 grandchildren. So I went up there to visit and hand out season-ticket applications."
Mara and Modell are two of a dying breed in the NFL. Football is their only business. Not a hobby or plaything. This may well be the last Super Bowl with two owners who have never bothered to diversify their portfolios. "I have an enormous amount of respect for the man and what he stands for," Modell said of Mara. "What he has meant to the league. He is the National Football League to me." When Modell returned home early Monday from the Ravens' AFC title-game victory, a win that almost caught him unprepared for the outpouring of congratulations and good wishes that were to come, he found 27 message beeping on his home answering machine. The one that touched deepest came from former Cowboys president Tex Schramm. "Tex was crying on the phone," Modell said. "He was saying how much Pete [Rozelle, the deceased NFL commissioner] would have enjoyed this, a Mara-Modell engagement. That meant a lot to me." Through all the ugliness of his celebrated break up with the city of Cleveland -- and Modell was demonized perhaps like no other sports figure in recent memory -- it was hard not to like Modell personally. You had to really try, or bleed Browns' orange (or brown, for that matter). Today, outside of Cleveland, the rancor has evaporated. And Modell has found a new home. If Baltimore wasn't really his abode before this season, it is now. If nothing else, this Super Bowl run means that Baltimore now belongs to the Ravens. Modell's Ravens. Gone are the storied Colts. Gone is the ghost of Bob Irsay. It's a new team, in a new town, in a new time.
"I'm beginning to understand the trauma that this family, slash, organization went through when it left Cleveland," Ravens head coach Brian Billick said recently. "What it means for us to be doing well now. What it means for this city to embrace and appreciate Art the way it has. "You can't help but want this for Art. Listening to Art talk about this league and this game is like watching NFL Films. He's seen it all and he's been there." But until now, Modell had never been here. On the brink of the Super Bowl. And if you think his forecast of greatness this summer looks like a no-brainer in retrospect, it didn't a few short months ago. Before this season, a Modell team last reached the playoffs in 1994, his second-to-last year in Cleveland. The Ravens had broken even at 8-8 in 1999, but had yet to have a winning record in four seasons in Baltimore. The Browns under Modell won the 1964 NFL Championship, and lost in the NFL title game in 1965, 1968 and 1969. Cleveland reached the AFC title game in 1986, 1987 and 1989, but each time lost memorably to Denver. It appeared to be Modell's fate to fall agonizingly short of the game's grandest stage. But thankfully, appearances can some times be deceiving. "This comes along once in a blue moon," Modell said. "This is my blue moon."
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
