My seats aren’t just “fan” seats in Section 513. They were seats that allowed the best view possible for anyone in the building. Anyone who has sat in them would echo this sentiment.
After spending 155 nights at Johns Hopkins fighting for her life, my wife almost died twice wondering whether she’d ever be able to come back and sit in those seats and watch a Ravens game again, and she found incredible spiritual value in being in her seats in 2014 and again in 2016 after she got leukemia the in first week of 2015 and spent another season fighting for her life.
In August 2020, after the long summer of pre-vaccine COVID and a world of masks, empty stadiums and full TV screens, WNST received a missive from Chad Steele that only one press box seat would be made available for the home games for every media entity. (This was less than honest. The Baltimore Sun and others had multiple seats during that season.) We decided that Luke Jones would do the home games, and I would do the road games, which I always did anyway. Luke works all week, and he doesn’t love traveling, and I love traveling and working on the road. In many cases, it was also a chance to visit with colleagues, friends and guests from the football world who appear on my radio show. Keep in mind, being at the games in 2020 provided no special access to the press conferences, which were all on Zoom, all masked and in almost totally empty stadiums. Life during the plague was difficult, and no one was in any position to complain about anything. We all did the best we could waiting for a vaccine and trying to pay our bills. I attempted to attend the Buffalo playoff game in early 2021, but the New York law was a 3-day stay and a COVID test in a hotel there in January, and I abstained. I did attend the empty Houston, Washington and Philadelphia road games in 2020 in our WNST media seat. And I witnessed more post-game Zoom press conferences that felt like hostage videos than I even care to remember.
As a reporter, I thought that era of those Zooms were often worthless. You couldn’t follow up. No one could hear anyone. No player wanted to give any answer worth listening to. I appreciate the effort amidst the special situation, but it was mostly garbage information and/or lousy insights. As a journalist, a lot of it was an utter waste of time. I called them “hostage videos,” because they always looked and felt that way to me.
And there was no football game in an empty stadium truly worth flying around the country at the expense and risk of COVID with an immune-compromised wife, so I covered most of the games on television at the end of 2020 like almost everyone else. I realized after I went to Houston early that season and witnessed “The Big Empty,” that the juice and the squeeze given the stakes and the result for doing my job better from “being there” didn’t equate.
Last year, it became very apparent that “Hanging Chad” Steele was personally coming for my press credential when he sent me a note in the middle of my Maryland Crab Cake Tour demanding that I sit in the press box and stop attending Ravens home games in my seats in Section 513 with my wife, where I had sat (and paid for the right to sit) for the first three quarters of every home game back to Jim Harbaugh leading the Baltimore Ravens out of the tunnel for the Ray Lewis Squirrel dance below me in 1998.
It was already August, so clearly I had already bought the tickets, same as I had for the previous 25 seasons. Same as I had planned to do for the next 25 seasons. And after a year away because of the plague, we were more excited than ever to return to our seats and watch Lamar Jackson try to win a Super Bowl.
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Every media relations executive who works for a worthwhile organization is forced with tough decisions about whom they allow in their press box. For a quarter of a century, I made it easy on Kevin Byrne. I paid to get into the game to sit in my own seat and watched the fourth quarter on a stool or in a seat abandoned by a WBAL guy or one of my former employees at The Fan. I faithfully left my wife and the Mohler family and Don Scott with 8-to-10 minutes left to go in the game, and I rushed down the back access to the press box. I never needed a seat in the Ravens press box, so Byrne appreciated that he got an extra seat every week in the history of the franchise from me. Sometimes my organization would take up three seats without me when we had a different format in a different era. I didn’t care about the seat; I cared about the questions I was going to ask the coach and the players and the radio sound we were getting in the postgame. The more bodies, the more players you can get in the 15-20 minutes you have to chat with guys who aren’t fleeing out the back door before the reporters arrive at the locker room. And again, on the road, this is a completely different situation when there are only three reporters who are glued to the podium and not in the locker room. In that case, you have very little chance to grab a player you might want to discuss a situation or circumstance with after the game. For many years before her illness, my wife Jennifer grabbed the road mult-box sound from the primary podium press conferences, and she sent them back to my staff to get on the radio and into our WNST Audio Vault. John Harbaugh usually shouted her out because he likes her. This allowed me to go into the locker room in places like Cleveland, Denver or Seattle and find 5 or 6 players to talk to and to have a larger catalog of “Monday Morning Purple Sound” as we would call it for WNST-AM 1570. Working a football post-game locker room is an extremely frenetic situation that I’ve become accustomed to because I’ve done it all my life. The relationships you build during the week are how you learn the most at a locker after the game.
Now, three weeks before the start of the 2021 season, here was Chad Steele knowingly poking at the heart of my Ravens soul. Telling me to leave my wife and taking the “fun” out of my game day was the first sign that there would be more mandates of personal punishment to come. And, of course, there were … that’s the way gaslighting and bullying work for an employee operating in silence with impunity.
The Section 513 tickets that were once the lowly $500 PSLs and $35 a game last century are now bucking up on $150 per ducat in the new ticketing system for the Baltimore Ravens. My wife was now told that she’d have to find someone else to go to Ravens games with for the remainder of my career (which I consider a lifetime plan) and find someone else to pay for the other ticket. And not attend the games with her husband.
What kind of a person would do this?
Chad Steele is that guy.
By any measure, it was an insane request – and I had no problem telling Steele that it was a knowingly mean-spirited hit on me and my wife and our Ravens experience after paying as fans for 25 years. He knew how mean he was being – and it certainly felt like he enjoyed it. He told me that if he couldn’t sit with his father at games when he’s working, I shouldn’t be sitting with my wife when I’m working.
Steele did, however, along with the encouragement of Dick Cass, offer me a glorious opportunity to sit with my wife in the seats in Section 513 that I had been paying in for full for 25 seasons – but only if I would voluntarily cease considering myself part of the Ravens’ press corps.
8Pretty insulting, no?
Pretty arrogant, yes?
I made it abundantly clear that I was a media member, and that he’d see me in the press box and at the press conferences. I didn’t stutter.
Here was the emeritus President of the team and the current Vice President of the Baltimore Ravens essentially telling me to stop being a Ravens fan for the rest of my life. And to tell my wife to go home, too.
It was jarring.
I also made it very clear that I knew this was a personal attack on my wife and I, and our support and civic fandom of the franchise.
I also made it clear to then-club president Dick Cass, who acted like he had no idea what it was like to be a fan or have sat in a seat for 25 years supporting the hometown franchise. It was amazing to see this brilliant man running a football team play “dumb” at any thought of what makes a lifelong fan, an actual lifelong fan. And why not going to Ravens games with my wife would be a hardship.
8They both couldn’t believe that I would choose to do my job.
I lost all of my two decades of respect for Cass (and I had plenty prior to that point) that day as he watched Steele berate me and make false accusations – and even piled on by suggesting that I should sit with my wife and relinquish doing my lifelong job of asking legitimate questions to the coaches and players after the game. You should’ve seen him trying to “sell” me on this concept. It was disgraceful.
The Steele military mandate was very clear last season with verbiage like, “if you are granted a game day pass” for the 2021 season, and it was pretty clear where this path was headed. My “season credential” was rescinded last season after 25 years, and the club made me apply every week for an individual game pass. I was on speed dial with Ravens PR staffer Tom Valente every week trying to figure out if I could stand up straight and shoot enough Advil into my body to make it four quarters standing in the press box before and after my back procedure on October 20, 2021. And, as I wrote to him then, I appreciated his kindness because I was in a stunning amount of pain many days last fall. Back pain = no joke!
I want to make clear that every action Steele has taken with me over the past two years has always involved some new mandate, false accusation or restriction.
The bully is always gonna bully. That’s how this works when it’s sanctioned and encouraged by the leadership.
The bar kept moving until he finally threw me out this month – allegedly for not attending enough OTAs, which is almost comical considering they couldn’t get their $200 million MVP quarterback to show up, either.
My wife sold every ticket we could last season and then, my back blew out, but we attended the Rams game together in January for a half of a game that we couldn’t even give the tickets away for – knowing it was our last Ravens game together and we were selling our downtown condo. (Chad Steele would later bring up a picture I posted on social media with my wife that day as a “violation” of his media mandate and one of the many ridiculously slippery accusations that warrant my removal. He attempted to present a social media picture of me and my wife at her friend’s tailgate before a game three years ago as evidence that I “drink beer” on game day. I told him if he’s accusing me of being drunk in the press box, he has a whole different level of illicit fiction he’s willing to create. His words: “I’m not going to have you and your wife out at a tailgate before a game and then think you’re going to work in my press box.” I told him that I remember when David Modell got blue laws overturned to make tailgating legal in this city in 1996. Chad Steele wants to tell me where I can spend Sunday morning before a football game that I’ve paid for to attend and simultaneously work. I guess it’s a good thing he never saw me ice down 20 cases of beer at 4 a.m. for four busloads of Ravens fans to represent our city in Pittsburgh or New England?)
8Think about it: after all I’ve done and gone through with the Ravens, my wife and I were forced out of our paid-for seats in the front row after 25 years because the team P.R. guy wants to push me and my family around and conform to a ridiculous request to have me sit in a press box seat that I never wanted to begin with – and then later complains that he doesn’t have room in his press box to seat me (another lie) while he throws me out. Steele told me in April he is “cleaning up” the press box as if my kind were somehow smelly garbage clogging up the air at the 50-yard line. He did this in front of Dick Cass, which opened my eyes to how they all feel about the little that is left of what I would recognize as legitimate, local media.
I’ve been told this is a greater extension of Steve Bisciotti’s personal disdain for “THE MEDIA” in the aftermath of the Ray Rice fiasco, one that was brought on by violence, denial and a cover up in his organization. Self-inflicted trauma for all of them. The Baltimore Ravens sanctioned and botched a very, very bad episode in local sports history. They got caught in more lies than they could cover up. And apparently, it really rocked Bisciotti, personally. Maybe his people shouldn’t have lied and covered up and sent Ray Rice and his wife out in front of cameras to further embarrass all of them? Maybe they should stop “covering up” things and just be a transparent organization? Is it that difficult?
Some of these people are the same ones lying right now about me and others are willing to cover up the obvious injustice to “protect a teammate” even when they know it’s patently and fundamentally wrong. Steve Bisciotti knows it’s wrong to take my press credential. He’s doing it anyway to not get in the way of Steele’s will because that is his management style. And Harbaugh and DeCosta can say: “It’s not my department.” And Sashi Brown can say, “What’s a Nestor and why do we need one of those around?”
Before the Rice scandal, Bisciotti was mostly cordial and kind to me and my wife and engaging whenever we would cross paths. That all changed after 2015. One day I’ll write at length about the night he came to my condo and strummed my guitar after a Journey concert and another time we walked for an hour with Jim Irsay at The Biltmore in Arizona discussing how to get the Colts records back to Baltimore. Those experiences hold great meaning in my life, and Bisciotti knows this, which is why I’m stunned that he wants my wife and I thrown out of our Ravens seats and me thrown out of the building.
I’m not sure what happened to being your brother’s keeper or “when you see something, say something” but I have palpable, personal disappointment in these human beings for not practicing what they, literally in some cases, preach. I always knew Chad Steele would throw me out if he could. He’s always been that way, less than professional or hospitable. I just never thought three much-more credible people like Bisciotti, DeCosta and Harbaugh would be a part of whacking legitimate media members.
And for what? To embarrass me? To allow Chad Steele to settle some personal score in a game I’m not playing anymore or play some power game to soothe his large ego and tiny soul? To show he’s in charge?
“Nestor doesn’t have a press pass because he’s chosen to not cover the Ravens anymore,” is what he expects me to tell you because that’s what he told me to tell you. And that’s what he’s going to tell you (but don’t expect anyone in the media to actually ask him about my press credential).
8Chad Steele is embarrassing the Baltimore Ravens franchise, not me.
I know what I stand for and also what I won’t fall for because I’m from Dundalk.
I’ve always had tremendous respect for Steve Bisciotti. At one time, he respected me and treated me and my family with dignity. It was once said: “Once a billionaire puts his foot down, it stays!” Peter Angelos is on his death bed, and his kids still have their foot on my neck after 16 years. And, now, I suppose I will feel the wrath of Steve Bisciotti.
As if kicking me out of my seats and taking away my press credentials isn’t already punishing me and pushing me around enough?
This involves my business, my family and how good people should treat each other in a community that’s not gated.
And, I want to make this clear: much like with Chad Steele, I’ve never had a cross word with Steve Bisciotti that was brought on by me. He even told me he liked my hair when he saw me in Florida in March. He has said a few “aggressive” things to me over the years, but nothing I felt was particularly personal or that a Miller Lite between the two of us wouldn’t repair. He’s one of the smartest and truly fascinating people I’ve ever met. He’s said some insanely wise things to me privately over the two decades of me knowing him. He’s a brilliant man. Too brilliant and far too decent for this, I believed.
This feels very out of character and “off brand” for him to sanction this behavior and aggression toward me and my family. But, yet, here we are.
All I’ve ever needed on a gameday is access to ask the coach questions and work the locker room after the game with questions for information to better tell the fans what is happening. And access during the week to have honest, legitimate interactions with players. I hosted many shows with many players over many years based on relationships and mutual respect. You might’ve attended any of the hundreds over the years from The Barn to Greenmount Station, from Costas to Harryman House. Those shows inspired what you see now at Baltimore Positive and longer-form, getting-to-know-someone chats that I have hundreds of hours with from players starting with Ray Lewis the day after the Raiders win on September 1, 1996 and ending with Sam Koch on a snowy night at Greenmount Station in January 2020, before the plague almost three years ago.
And it should go without saying that better access allows for better relationships and more honest information and better analysis for the fan base. That’s our job. That’s what I have always done for Baltimore sports fans.
