Steele has served as the locker room bouncer for all of his twenty years with the franchise dating back to Ray Lewis and acting as a valet for Kyle Boller in the early days.
I have been welcomed since I was a teenager in this city as an accredited media member anywhere that legitimate media members are welcomed. I cover the Baltimore Ravens franchise and team on and off the field with passion, fairness, balance, deeper wisdom and always understanding my role is to ask tougher questions and seek truth. Often, that rankles the feathers of management, but it’s what I’ve done since I was trained to do it at The News American as a 15-year old asking Skipjacks coach Gene Ubriaco questions after a loss to the Hershey Bears in an oft-empty Baltimore Civic Center, where they were trying to sell tickets in the aftermath of the departure of the Baltimore Colts. And forty years later, guys like Ubriaco come back to Baltimore and take me to lunch because they consider it time well spent. That is the honor in my life that I don’t talk about much out loud or post “selfies” when I’m eating in their living room or dining on the road, but truly means the world to me – the highest honor of my life, my relationships with great men like Brian Billick, Marvin Lewis, Terry Truax, Barry Trotz, Mike Nolan, Mike Smith, Jack Del Rio, Mike Tomlin, Ernie Accorsi, John Schuerholz and so many others mean the world to me. I seek and collect great people in my life. And I treasure time spent, laughs shared and wisdom dispensed upon me in their presence.
Baltimore Positive is a testament to all I’ve learned since Bob Pastin, Bob Nusgart, Tom Gibbons, Stan Rappaport, Molly Glassman, Larry Harris and Michael Marlow mentored me to do this work when I was an ambitious 16-year old, teenage parent at The Baltimore News American and The Evening Sun trying to make my way in the world.
My whole life has been spent around people who write, talk and report on sports for a living. And the last few seasons for sportswriters everywhere in our industry have been very murky with COVID protocols and access and safety issues and a bullying NFL machine trying to own the media space and control the message. The media is shrinking – dramatically – and that’s not a good thing. We need 10 reporters traveling with the Ravens on the road, not two.
Meanwhile, Chad Steele is putting a hit on my press credential after 27 years and will get away with it because Steve Bisciotti doesn’t care.
I have often mused during the plague that the NFL would make sure we’d never be allowed in locker rooms again or ever have access to have a normal – meaning non-podium or non-masked or non-Zoomed – meeting with players again. In my case, I wasn’t wrong.
When you’ve covered sports and been in professional sports team locker rooms as long as I have, you really gain a special appreciation for the grind of the modern athlete and the relationships and friendships. I wrote extensively about these in my books. I have built more beautiful friendships than I can count along my pathway to 31 years on local radio – the hallmark of my life’s work. You also watch men give their lives and minds and bodies to the game. Tony Siragusa wasn’t a cult figure to me. He was a friend. Same with David Modell and other players and loved ones lost who span the generations of Ravens alumni.
Of course, I was here in the early 1990s pining away for a team when we didn’t have one and welcomed the Modell family with open arms, and they proceeded to be good, honest people to their graves. They needed to sell tickets and spirit for the Ravens. They cared about the people who supported their new purple team. They hired local people who understood the passion this community always had for NFL football and for a local entity to call their own. That is why David Modell put the ‘B’ on the helmet at a time when the Angelos family refused to say the word “Baltimore” in fear of offending Redskins fans. Every one of those purple lawn flamingos and car flags represented deepest and very, very best of civic pride in a place like Baltimore.
A generation later, the National Football League and Steve Bisciotti don’t need me or any journalist or civic leader or radio host or local advocate to be on their side to print billions of dollars. They didn’t need Colin Kaepernick. They don’t need Jon Gruden. And they can’t seem to get rid of Daniel Snyder. And every time they get in trouble, it’s pretty much the same story: lying filthy rich, white guy gaslights everyone and the high-paid P.R. spokesperson nods his or her head and then it magically goes away until the next drama comes along. And, of course, the games are great and easy to gamble on, and it’s fun to wear jerseys and drink beer and eat wings and root, root, root for the home team.
It’s America’s biggest addiction that doesn’t involve food, sex or drugs. But there seems to be just the right and appropriate amount of tribal violence after church on a Sunday to provide an opiate for the masses in civic battles of epic champions and heroes. And God and The American Flag is baked right into the games every weekend. And those beautiful helmets and logos and colors and uniforms. The National Football League has it all, and it’s about to roll global! I’ve seen it with my own eyes in Europe.
And whatever the next NFL scandal du jour churns out of their media machine, it always seems to make the financial pot grow larger whether it’s guns, violence, domestic abuse, murder, death, CTE, off-the-field, in-the-locker room, or any social media celebrity-driven part of the game that attracts a wider cross section of the population than any American election.
I have attended the last 28 Super Bowl games, and I can assure you that it’s still super!
I love the NFL as much as you do. Probably even more, if you really analyze the time in my life spent chasing it and reporting on it and immersed in it especially covering Super Bowls, combines, drafts and various practices and events over the years. It is the centerpiece of my life’s work.
Covering the NFL as an insider and expert since 1996 has defined my professional life until Ravens executive Chad Steele decided this year to declare a personal war on my credentials and access and look to plant reasons on me to create a way to extricate me from my legitimate media credentials.
And with all of this, your football team goes on the road to Las Vegas, and the head coach quietly manages to avoid two of the three reporters who might actually ask him a dangerous question about the health of his injured left tackle or why the team went for it on 4th down or how the ball went over the head of the secondary in overtime. And Steele clearly now feels like he can dictate to a media organization who they can allow to cover his football brand. Some might even call that discrimination?
With me thrown out, all I keep thinking is that if Hensley misses a flight, and Zrebiec stays home with his family one weekend, John Harbaugh might soon walk into a press conference in New Orleans and be staring at the bright lights in an empty room monologing like Howard Beale. Of course, he did that during the plague and liked it that way. They all did. Now, they have to be human again and allow reporters to touch their players and ask real questions about what they consider to be tough issues.
Or, do they? Hmmmm…
You’d think with as many ads as I’m served on social media to buy individual Ravens game tickets (just like the ones they threw me out of after 26 seasons) that they’d wanna local hustler and football aficionado like me promoting their football team but that’s soooooo last century, isn’t it?
Chad Steele’s job is to make sure as little of that as possible happens. He is paid and sanctioned to intimidate me and people like me. When Kevin Byrne got to Baltimore in 1996 with Art Modell kicking the Dawgs and purple Barney uniforms, that job of Vice President of Communications was to assist me in doing my job. By the end, and certainly after the self-inflicted Ray Rice scandal, Byrne took on a more militant tone but he never, ever, EVER would have looked or thought to throw me out of the media contingent.
Kevin Byrne was a professional.
I didn’t always agree with Kevin Byrne. He would tell you that we disagreed regularly, and sometimes even exchanged our differences in louder tones. But the respect that I have for Kevin Byrne should never be questioned. And certainly, his integrity, professionalism and good judgment would never sanction what the “Boy Wonder” to his longtime Batman is pulling with my press pass two decades later. I told Kevin that Chad Steele is an embarrassment.
He is what’s wrong with the Baltimore Ravens; not what’s good about the franchise. His actions toward me have been deplorable and so thinly veiled.
And Chad Steele wouldn’t be pulling this kind of stunt in a city with a legitimate media contingent. The old-school swarm of local media wouldn’t allow it. Here, in Baltimore and given the big media financial partnerships, they will all be intimidated enough to never discuss it out loud and certainly would never approach Steele to say, “Hey dude, you’re throwing Nestor out of here after 27 years? What are you? The Orioles? You do know this wrong?“
They should now all be looking over their shoulders and asking: “Who’s next?”
Here is what I know as a lifelong journalist:
Good reporting matters. Good questions matter. Seasoned, veteran reporters asking questions of coaches, players, leadership and ownership about signing their $50 million-a-year quarterback is the only accountability these cash-soaked sports franchises have left that isn’t an act of Congress. (And that might be coming soon in the case of that scumbag Snyder in D.C.)
The more journalists, the better.
It shouldn’t be that hard for Bisciotti on down the chain of command to be “front facing” in regard to answering questions about the state of the franchise before it asks the state of Maryland for (more) free money and the public for its support.
And instead of banishing people like me in Florida because he’s afraid of me asking about the direction of the franchise or public money or his scumbag partners in the NFL doing shady and dodgy things to each other and everyone else, his exit strategy, etc. Bisciotti should rightfully be holding an annual press conference in Owings Mills and answering ALL questions from any media member that has them in Baltimore, the hometown of the football team.
And do it smiling.
Dude is making $200 million a year off the football team. An hour a year isn’t too much to ask. He can, literally, afford it.
And, he’s really, really good at it. Probably the best I’ve ever seen when he puts his mind and heart into it.
Even if he hates it and mostly dislikes “us” – the media.
The fans deserve it. The customers deserve it. The community deserves it.
The empty seats mean it’s time to do more, locally. The empty seats all over the stadium should piss someone off. It always pissed me off.
Instead, if you know Steve or knows someone who knows him, please let the owner of the Baltimore Ravens know that his Vice President of Communications is communicating and “protecting the brand” and “cleaning up the press box” by kicking out a lifelong fan and a guy who helped the franchise sell three sections worth of PSLs a quarter of a century ago and remained loyal through everything, including shoddy personal treatment of me, my reporter and my colleagues (who often are too intimidated to speak up because they love their families and want to keep their jobs) that literally has degenerated daily over the last decade just like the fade of these empty seats dotting the stadium over the last five years that no one seems to talk about.
When I spent every day on Baltimore radio at WITH-AM 1230 now more than thirty years ago trying to drum up support for us to “Give Baltimore The Ball” and bring the NFL back to my hometown, I never had it on my weekend pool card that I’d live to have a billionaire Baltimore NFL owner ducking me three decades later on a veranda of a billion-dollar resort in Florida and then sanctioning my removal from the media.
This isn’t at all what I expected from Steve Bisciotti. But, it happened. It really happened.
And I’m appalled, too.
But I’m not truly convinced he has any idea how I’ve really been treated because he refused to speak to me about it. But, I’ve tried. Repeatedly.
Willful ignorance.
He just doesn’t care how I’ve been treated. He doesn’t even want to know.
That much is very clear to me and my wife.
“We’re just going to have to agree to disagree,” is his thesis.
Chad Steele is his guy.
Now, he’s about to know what you’re about to find out.
This story I would’ve told him if he sat with me. Or if Dick Cass weren’t checked out. Or if Sashi Brown were doing his job diligently.
+ + +
I was an original Personal Seat License holder of 8 tickets in Section Upper 6, Row 16 at Memorial Stadium that translated into four PSLs at the new stadium in 1998 in Section 513 Row 6. I sold four of them to nice listeners who I sat with at the games for years until they died. A few years into the experience, after the lower “non-PSL” rows became the target of visiting fans and a security issue for SAFE Management with fights and nonsense, Ravens executives Roy Sommerhof and Baker Koppelman asked that I try to fill them with Ravens fans so our sometimes-less-than-hospitable fans weren’t throwing peanuts and other projectiles at the many Steelers and angry Browns fans every season. (By the way, our “Nasty Section” promotion in 1996 and ’97 filled three sections in the former PSI Net Stadium upper deck in 1998 in Sections 512-513-514. You probably know someone that “moved the chains” with us or danced the Squirrel with Ray Lewis. I led a LOT of R-A-V-E-N-S cheers in the early days but “Real Fan” Dan is the modern king, and I love it! So does everyone else!)
We moved into the front row of Section 513 a few years after my 2003 marriage. Honestly, it was more about not having drinks dumped on me and being distracted by mostly-jubliant-but-often-inebriated fans during the games in the sixth row when I was trying to figure out substitutions and game strategy without doing in-game sports radio. My seats were on the center aisle. People drank a lot. People peed a lot. I saw the game a lot better where that didn’t happen down below, off the aisle. I took along a pack of dedicated friends to the seats every week that included my Baltimore Positive and lifelong friend Don Mohler, the late, great Bobby Nyk and longtime Channel 13 newsman Don Scott. When social media came online in 2008, the seats were perfect, because I could tweet or “report” in real time on my phone once the wi-fi improved and it made it even better from a reporting aspect. Plus, Luke always had the replays in the press box that the Ravens would never show the fans in the stadium for competitive gamesmanship in regard to challenges and penalties.
I never balked at buying my tickets. We never missed a game.
After years of flipping the Row 6 PSLs as a season package to a friend and after the 2017 Wembley knee emptied the stadium (and years of selling the tickets at face value to friends and whoever wanted them), we relinquished those Poor Sucker Licenses because my wife and I got tired of eating tickets and losing money in 2017 and 2018 – but we kept our primary seats and bought every ticket to every game in Row 1 with our community. These are non-PSL seats but seats we’ve been buying since last century with our (ever-shrinking) group.
If you know anything about me and my relationship with the Ravens and love of football, you know how much those seats meant to me and my wife and how sacred our Sunday gamedays were living downtown.
If you have a lifelong set of season tickets to a team – any team – and you sit in those seats and you pay for those seats and you love those seats and support your squad with your heart, lungs and soul and hands cheering for that team on third down for two decades, well, that’s just a very sacred and special thing. For crissakes, I watched Ray Lewis do “The Squirrel” over that railing below me dozens of times from those seats – and you never forget that!
Sacred.
Special.
Priceless.
That premise should need no explanation after sitting there every Sunday in the fall for half of my lifetime and paying for the privilege. It’s what any franchise (or franchise employee, in the case of every Chad Steele) should strive for in every seat – a dedicated, lifelong stakeholder and happy fan providing a credit card renewal each spring – even when the price goes up, and it does and will.
Don’t tell anyone, but they were (and still are) the best seats in the stadium, splitting the middle of the goal posts at a beautiful level to watch holes open and close and see the game from a perspective that makes my reporting on the action better in real time. I never, ever see the game as well as I do from my Ravens seats in 513, and it makes all the sense in the world because Marvin Lewis and Jim Schwartz are the ones who told me to get seats next to the camera well where the coaches get the game footage. I literally see the game like a coach from my seats.
