THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511100598
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
Tomorrow night, the Cleveland Browns play the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday Night Football. For years, that has been one of the fiercest rivalries in professional sports. Two knuckle-busting factory towns, just a couple of hours apart by highway, send their boys out onto the field to fight for regional bragging rights, settle a few bar bets, and, in a good year, decide the division championship.
That ended forever last week when Art Modell, the Browns' owner, announced that he had put wheels under the team and would tow them to Baltimore at the end of the season.
Among Browns fans - actually, among fans of any team sport - a lot more than a rivalry died. If any of us had a shred of naivete left about the value of fans to a professional sports franchise, Art Modell wiped it away.
If we felt shocked, or deceived, or betrayed, it's our own fault. We should have learned by now not to be that trusting. Modell was asked to choose between a town's total loyalty and a big basket of dollar bills. There was a time when that might have been a tough choice. Not any more. Not in the wide, wide world of sports.
Forget all that dazzle you hear about the Dallas Cowboys being America's Team, or how tough it is to get Redskins tickets. Over the past 10 years, the Cleveland Browns had the second-highest average attendance in the National Football League, over 70,000. Only the Buffalo Bills were higher.
That means that every Sunday the team was home, people would pack drafty old Cleveland Municipal Stadium to its aging rafters, risking frostbite and hypothermia - and, if Denver was in town, cardiac arrest - to watch football.
No cheerleaders. No pep bands. Just a rust-belt style of dump-the-clutch, jam-the-throttle football. It didn't even matter if the team was losing. This isn't Houston, or Los Angeles, where the fans will stay home to watch Matlock reruns if their team slips below .500.
Odd thing. Of all the games I've watched in that old stadium, I don't remember a single fan complaining. The announcers in the press box would whine about the cold, and it was tough to get wealthy people to go near the place because there were so few thermally controlled luxury suites.
And therein lies the problem. One of the biggest draws for Modell moving to Baltimore - besides an up-front payment of $50 million and 30 years of free rent - was that they promised him a big new playpen with lots of revenue from concession stands and luxury suites. Seems that during the Depression, when they built Cleveland Stadium, they skimped on the luxury suites.
In the strange new calculus of professional sports, the 70,000 working-class citizens who jam the cheap seats week in and week out are of less concern than the number of car dealers and stockbrokers who can be wheedled into renting a room-sized humidor where they can nibble at canapes, watch the action on closed-circuit TV and still say they'd ``been to the game.''
The mill hands who crowd the bleachers, it seems, are just there to provide atmosphere. Human wallpaper.
Further muddling Modell's announcement was that the people of Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland sits, were to vote the very next day to overhaul the old stadium with their tax dollars. Instead of waiting for the vote, Modell skipped Sunday's game, slithered to the surface in Baltimore and announced, out loud, that the city and county governments had refused to work with him to keep the Browns in Cleveland.
That was such a bold, noxious lie that Cleveland's mayor, Michael White, could hardly speak, so great was his rage. But he did manage to distribute copies of letters proving that the county, city and state governments had tried to work very closely with Modell to make him a happier, wealthier man.
But not as wealthy as a move to Baltimore would make him. Modell said he is being drained by free-agency salaries and a lack of any outside income other than running the Cleveland Browns. He had to make the move to survive, he said.
We have developed, as a society, an odd sense of poverty when a man sitting on a $100 million asset hears the wolf baying at his door. Have you ever stood in a grocery line and seen the owner of an NFL franchise paying for his bread with food stamps? I didn't think so. Neither have I.
As a perverse exclamation point, the trusting people of Cuyahoga County, in a political atmosphere in which a call for higher taxes for education can get a politician likened to Marx and Lenin, voted Tuesday to keep paying higher taxes on cigarettes and alcohol so their stadium can get a makeover worthy of an NFL team of the 1990s. If not the Browns, then a team from some other city where the owner's vision of loyalty is clouded by the color green.
Such is the state of professional team sports: The clubs trudge from town to town, like the circus in summer, and overpaid players frog-hop from team to team with such rapidity that it's impossible to know the starting lineup of a club you've followed since childhood.
Despite it all, in towns like Cleveland and Buffalo, Denver and Detroit, the fans vote to raise their own taxes and pay bloated ticket prices just to have a team to call their own. Until an Art Modell comes along and tells them, point blank, that there is nothing more they can do to make themselves worthy.
It's enough to make you just change channels and start following golf, or NASCAR. After all, nobody's heart is broken if Corey Pavin moves from one town to the next, or if Dale Earnhardt switches sponsors. And none of those guys have had the crust to demand that the taxpayers subsidize their lifestyle.
At least not yet. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Art Modell...
by CNB