I cleared space to attend Owings Mills midweek Wednesday practices and talk to football players about football like I’ve done throughout my professional life. I spent private time this offseason, as I usually do, with Eric DeCosta and John Harbaugh to better understand the team and educate my audience. They respect my work. I had six dates carved out in my Maryland Crab Cake Tour to attend practices in Owings Mills but was told by Chad Steele in late July that I couldn’t even attend the free fireworks night at the stadium to cover the event for WNST when my employee Luke Jones needed the Saturday night off to be with his family. My company was unrepresented at a free, community practice because the Vice President of the Baltimore Ravens wouldn’t let me sit in my company’s seat or ask the coach a question after the workout.
Think about how absurd that is … I cannot represent my own media company at a Ravens practice after all of these years, and I’m being told I have to fly my employee all over the country to cover games because I’m suddenly uninvited? And it goes without saying that the Baltimore Ravens shouldn’t be discriminating about which member of a media organization would be representing that media organization at a team function. It’s patently unprofessional and would be considered illegal in a lot of walks of life. “Luke can work today, but Nestor can’t do his job” is NOT the job or role of the P.R. chief of a football team.
Do you smell the arrogance? You should.
And remember, the pressing charge is that “Nestor doesn’t cover the Ravens.” Meanwhile, I’m trying to get into practices, and I’m being denied. (No, it doesn’t make any sense.)
I would dare say that you would be hard-pressed to find any human more “invested” as a civic stakeholder in the Baltimore Ravens than me from the day Art Modell told me to always hold him accountable at the Signet Towers in the spring of 1996.
I’m hoping every time Chad Steele walks by the remarkably genial oil painting of Art Modell on the entry wall over the fireplace in Owings Mills he’ll know that I held him accountable, as requested by both of them.
No one has covered or invested spiritually in the Baltimore Ravens or the National Football League more than my media entity at WNST. We have literally spent several million dollars covering the football team the right way over half of my lifetime, which is one of the reasons you’re still here all these years later. There is nothing that brings more joy to my face than when local people mention a roadtrip, the Super Bowl march, a purple memory, a tailgate, Whiskey Joe’s, a show at The Barn, a tale of our mutual local journey of loving the football team and its bond to the community. It happens all the time, and it warms my purple soul.
8
My work, and my media entity through many years, have been an appreciated and a participatory part of telling the story of Baltimore Ravens football for a lot of people in this community. Again, I hope you will support me if my work has ever moved your purple spirit.
I know and have personally experienced more history of the Baltimore Ravens than anyone not named Byrne, Eller, Newsome or Koppelman. I have hundreds of coaches, front office friends, former players, staffers and Owings Mills alums in my phone and in my real world on social media. Some of the greatest relationships of my life have come from the NFL and the miracle of the franchise coming to Baltimore. My work has been an ongoing celebration of that – and that is colorfully painted across a lifetime of my unique content, events and history here at Baltimore Positive if you poke around.
I have mean, mean personal pride for the work I’ve done and the causes I’ve supported and the families we’ve helped feed over 31 years of being a tireless local champion of all things Baltimore and the Ravens – on and off the field.
Again, this is how I feed my family owning a small, local business in Towson. This is all I’ve ever done.
I will speak my truth here and provide lots of clarity about what it’s like to be a “real” media member on the NFL circuit post-COVID in the era of new media, but in the end this is really less about me and more about seeking the truth about how the Baltimore Ravens seek to do business locally in 2022 and beyond, and how they believe they’ll fully control their message in positioning Steve Bisciotti’s now-almost, five-billion-dollar global brand.
And the unconscionable arrogance of treating good people, good fans, season ticket holders and legitimate journalists poorly – in darkness.
Because they can …
8I’ve been told to not even bother telling my side of the story by some very concerned and influential people in my personal and professional circle. The story is too ugly, too awful to tell. I should just go silent. After all, why brag about being thrown out?
And nobody really cares about Nestor anyway, right?
I will spend the next 48 hours of my life fighting with the people closest in my life who will be angry that I’ve gone public with something that I just wasn’t going to keep private any longer. It’s greatly affected my mental health in recent months, as my wife and son would attest.
It’s no fun being treated like shit by a billion dollar football franchise that your mission has been to simultaneously worship, and hold accountable.
When I get asked, “What happened and why did the Ravens throw you out?” I’m not going to run from the truth.
Why should I? That’s how bullies win.
I’ve already been thrown out; that’s now public.
8And the first thing anyone will ask is:
“WHY?
Or, even worse: “What did you do to deserve this?”
I believe you deserve to know all the whys and hows and WTFs, because I have nothing to hide, and Chad Steele should be ashamed of himself.
I’ve actually been told that telling the truth might hurt my business. Somehow, someone out there reading this will think that I should’ve just shut up and gone home and never told the truth. And they’re pissed at me for sharing what has kept me awake at night for the past year and seeing my wife cry about it.
Do you really think this is a story I want to write?
Or should I really just walk away like all of the work I did never existed?
8Or submit to the lie of one power-drunk man, and agree that I really don’t care to continue to do this work, which is patently absurd.
This is like taking away a doctor’s license. Or a lawyer’s ability to practice. Or a pilot’s stripes.
I don’t live my life in fear. And my assignment in life has been to report truth.
After being denied entrance to the Owings Mills facility this summer or the ability to cover games from the press box or the locker room afterward and any ability as a professional journalist to ask a question of anyone in the organization is now over after 27 years of covering the Baltimore Ravens for fans and the local community, this is also about what the fans of the franchise can expect in the years ahead regarding information and who gets to ask the questions at “press conferences.”
Who will be there to ask questions the next time a player goes on a murder trial or winds up in handcuffs or punches his wife in a glass elevator and lies to everyone about it so he can play football and make millions? Or even when a cocky front office member is quietly bullying the access of another lifelong journalist in the darkness and expects it to never see the light of day? Or when the owner is making $200 million a year off the franchise, and the state and city will be forking over hundreds of millions of civic welfare to further enrich him – or the next owner of the Baltimore Ravens?
Journalists matter. Truth-tellers matter. I’ve been one all of my life. And that is a threat to men like Chad Steele and Greg Bader. Therefore, they seek to intimidate rather than engage. Because Daddy lets them and likes it.
It’s Chad Steele’s job to make sure no one here ever mentions or asks any questions about how a young, promising linebacker could wind up dead from a drug overdose three days after mandatory mini-camp ended in Owings Mills.
8And the best way to intimidate the rest of the media is to kneecap a guy like me. If Steele can throw me out without a whit of accountability, imagine what he’ll do to the next person who asks a legitimate question that might have a degree of “gotcha” difficulty or an uncomfortable or inconvenient truth?
At this point, I’ve been bullied in darkness long enough by Chad Steele. The microaggressions have gone on for two decades. He has never liked me, and I’ve certainly never enjoyed (or even understood) that but I’ve always accepted it – and never once rattled his cage or bothered him or asked him for anything. Now, upon his arrival as the brand defender of the Baltimore Ravens, I’ve literally been bullied out of the building and my wife and I out of the seats that we’ve always loved (and paid for) in Section 513, Row 1 – Seats 7 & 8.
It’s time to come forward, turn on the lights in The Castle and tell my truth and what I’ve experienced and the lack of good faith, honor and integrity that I’ve witnessed during this process of trying to do my job of reporting on the business of the Baltimore Ravens – on and off the field – for local sports fans.
I’m a journalist and have been thrown out without a legitimate cause – just a highly-aggressive combo of gaslighting and lies from the smallest big man in the National Football League communications world, Chad Steele.
