Modell Is Still in Dawg House

A rich man spins.

“Cleveland has their team. I didn’t take the name. I didn’t take the colors. I didn’t take anything.”

A Big Dawg fumes.

“If he wins Sunday, there’s going to be a lot of people in this town jumping off a bridge.”

A rich man rationalizes.

“This constant vilification is wearing thin. The Cleveland Browns still have their legacy.”

A Big Dawg sighs.

“What legacy?”

The rich man is Art Modell, the 75-year-old owner of the Baltimore Ravens, padding around here this week in knit sweaters, soft smiles and silly jokes.

He looks less like a powerful club executive than an aging vaudeville act, a sideshow, somebody tapping across the Super Bowl stage in hopes of making everyone laugh and forget.

Big Dawg is the reason we can never forget.

His name is John Thompson, and he is not here, he is in Cleveland, where the weather is not super and the football team stinks, where he sells digital copiers when he’s not dressed as an animal.

Yeah, that’s Thompson, the huge guy with the droopy dog mask who has sat in the Cleveland Browns’ end zone for ages, typifying the loyalty and looniness of what were once the league’s best fans.

Remember them? There was an average of 65,000 a game at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. Not for one year, not for 10 years, but for 50 years.

I remember. I was there the last year, the last day. It was Dec. 17, 1995, the Browns’ last home game before Modell moved the team to Baltimore.

That day, Big Dawg took off his mask and wept. Many in his section wept. Many Cleveland players ran to the end zone and joined them.

I’ll never forget standing on the mud of the goal line, black clouds rolling above, fans hugging players and pleading, “Please don’t leave. Please don’t leave.”

Modell left.

And now he is here, playing the New York Giants Sunday, in his first Super Bowl in his 40 years of NFL ownership, the aw-shucks center of a slick campaign to alter public opinion.

This is not the man who left Cleveland and ended perhaps the most enduring love affair in sports history. This is the man who helped the NFL become an economic success.

This is not a man who violated one of sports’ most celebrated public trusts. This is the man who helped start “Monday Night Football.”

This is not about a legacy of shame. This is about the Hall of Fame.

In news conferences featuring adroitly placed anecdotes and historical references, this is what officials here are selling.

The Big Dawg isn’t buying.

“I understand Art Modell has done some good things for the league and all,” Thompson said in a phone interview. “But to close my eyes and imagine him holding a Super Bowl championship trophy . . . that might be the ugliest sight I’ve seen in my life.”

Modell is not the first owner to enter the Super Bowl through the littered back alley of franchise relocation. Heck, both owners in last year’s Super Bowl arrived in moving vans.

But Cleveland wasn’t distracted Houston or apathetic Anaheim.

Cleveland was serious, hard-core, body-and-soul love.

With every embrace every fall Sunday for half a century, Cleveland was everything we believed a football town should be.

Except it wasn’t willing to pay ransom to the caretaker who became a kidnapper.

Just like that, it wasn’t Cleveland anymore.

Just like that, it wasn’t just a league of football teams anymore. Every team is now a leverage broker and corporate raider, having been handed a powerful one-sentence weapon in its quest to hold its city’s public funds hostage.

“Hey, if the Browns could leave Cleveland . . . “

Modell is not ashamed of this. He is proud. The new taxpayer-soaking stadiums in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh are two of his crowning glories.

“I’ve given some thought to the residual effect, around the league, of my moving,” he said. “I think it precipitated some favorable action in those respective markets.”

Of course, three years after the Browns left town, the Browns returned. Same name, same colors, just as Modell said.

But the stadium was new and more exclusive. The players were new and terrible.

“It just isn’t the same,” Big Dawg said. “You know how Oakland looked when the Raiders were playing in that AFC championship game a couple of weeks ago? That used to be us. But not anymore.”

It is difficult to understand how a man can be canonized for NFL leadership after tearing away a chunk of the league’s fabric.

It is hard to fathom how a man who followed the money out of the most unconditionally loving fan base in league history can be construed as any sort of a leader.

But Modell and his people are trying.

The first 20 minutes of one of his news conferences earlier this week were devoted to his recitation of his NFL accomplishments. He did not mention Cleveland.

When somebody asked him about the hatred for him that still exists there, he sighed.

“I’m saddened by that,” he said. “It’s a sad commentary on the people of Cleveland.”

That last sentence being, of course, a sad commentary on Art Modell.

He could win this game Sunday, you know. It could be just as Big Dawg imagined it. The white-haired man with the thick glasses could be hoisting that trophy amid confetti and cheers, his lifetime-achievement award, his sentimental finish, red eyes everywhere.

Go Giants.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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