Dear Steve:
I know you’re hiding out there somewhere, with all the answers, and you’ve got Sashi Brown and Chad Steele clutching the crisis management manual and working feverishly behind the scenes with legal on “brand messaging” in this unfolding Justin Tucker salacious saga.
And I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of who knew what and when because you really need to know who in your organization might be willing to suppress information about a potential predator – and, eventually, in a tiny town we affectionately call “Smalltimore” – a potential embarrassment of this kind smoldering in the same locker room a decade after the Ray Rice scandal that changed your soul about owning an NFL team and made you ban and then run from the local people like me who seek to ask legitimate questions about your $5 billion operation and its people?
Or, if you’re like some in the public who haven’t actually read the work in The Baltimore Banner and still fiercely believe the future-Hall-of-Something kicker – and that 16 different women who clearly never wanted to be heard from out of utter fear and a couple of lifer Pulitzer-quality journalists are somehow maliciously targeting the 35-year old Royal Farms chicken spokesman – you’ll stand by your man like Art Modell did with Ray Lewis after a Baltimore Ravens’ player headed to the Hall of Fame was accused of being involved in a double homicide.
But methinks we’re kinda getting to the point where we’ll soon hear from “your people” in a two-sentence press release on the team website about the future of the kicking department of the Baltimore Ravens. Probably after lunch on Friday, the way all the cowards in your industry drop the ugliest news they want to bury that they can’t catch and kill.
Not-so-bold prediction: Justin Tucker has kicked his last kick for your franchise.
Chad Steele will tell Eric DeCosta and John Harbaugh to tell the world via “real journalists” Jamison Hensley and Jeff Zrebiec in frigid Indianapolis next week that it’s “strictly a football decision” pointing to Tucker’s many 2024 yips – and all of you will try to never say another word about it or anything about the rumors that have clearly been swirling on the streets of Baltimore for a decade about your once-going-to-the-Hall of Fame kicker. And no one in the media will ever investigate your “in-house massage protocols” over the last decade the same way no one wanted any part of COVID protocols being busted that cost you football games.
Just like that videotape from The Revel in Atlantic City that no one ever wanted to see or know about in your building back in 2014. Or the disgraceful press conference you sanctioned that Ray Rice lorded over on his cellphone with his wife next to him taking the fall in front of your logo within your Castle walls.
After all, you’re now a “zero tolerance” organization. John Harbaugh said it, so it must be true.
Or is that just another lie in a sea of chronic dishonesty that I’ve witnessed and chronicled with you and the humans who make up your “best organization in the NFL” that so many sycophants parrot without ever dealing with you on a professional level?
Steve, it was six accusations, and that was bad enough. Then three more and now seven more, according to the epic and fearless journalism being done by The Baltimore Banner. I have wondered aloud what it would take for a $125 an hour male customer to be thrown out of one legitimate spa in this town, let alone most of the reputable ones.
I could testify right now that I never heard a word about Justin Tucker and massages before last month. Maybe I’m dumb, old or uncool – or all three. But I’m wondering if you and everyone in your building could stand before their creator and make that claim when I had dozens of people in my orbit hit me in the hours after the news broke telling me they’ve heard whispers for years.
So far, the sounds of silence in Owings Mills have been deafening with each news dump of more accusations.
The current public message is that Justin Tucker is still under contract for three more seasons and you’re “aware of the allegations.”
Of course, your guy Tuck did what every proud member of your franchise would do in the circumstances of now 16 women in Baltimore accusing him of massage improprieties: he immediately smeared the journalists and pointed at the “newspaper” and called my kind the crooked cops.
“Desperate tabloid fodder…”
“Journalistic failures at every turn…”
“They gave me next to no time to provide a response. It is clear why -they had no interest in what I (or anyone else) had to say.”
“Deliberately misconstruing events”
“Preconceived narrative”
“False, salacious profile”
His words, all in a response that came within minutes of the first report three weeks ago.
I know from first-hand experience that this is how they’re coached up – the media is here to intentionally harm us and they are to be treated as the mortal enemy at all times. Rat poison!
“Tuck,” always the doorman of the Ravens’ clubhouse when he wasn’t hosting Wolfpack cornhole games, hazed the local media most weeks at the 59th minute of the hour-long open locker room with a plastic vuvuzela “announcing” that it was time to go as we marched out the door. One of my last memories of being mistreated in your Owings Mills facility was telling Tucker that I didn’t appreciate that every week and I thought it was disrespectful, if not unprofessional.
Of course, he was just kidding, riiiiiiiiight???
Every week.
Ha.
Ha.
I remember way back when he thought stopping by to chat with Baltimore media people would help his Royal Farms and Dr. Pepper gigs. We actually had a rather candid chat about whether or not he liked the media, and this was a decade ago (back when I was in my 31st year in the “real” media):
So, Steve…it’s been a helluva month, huh?
The horrific loss to the Bills and Mark Andrews showing zero professionalism or accountability in the aftermath of the game. Lamar got jobbed out of the MVP. Your backup offensive lineman, who will also never play for the Ravens again, got a DUI the other night in Georgia.
And this Justin Tucker saga is such a big story that three of the four local television stations who allegedly call themselves “news organizations” don’t even have the story on their pathetic websites. (Much like Ravens dot com, two of the four don’t even mention Ben Cleveland’s arrest. I’m so old that I remember when WBAL did “all” of the news, not just the stuff that bowed down to their flagship billion-dollar sports partners as co-workers. Note to “out-of-town, corporately-owned” Hearst: Chad Steele > Dan Joerres.)
And after all of the transgressions and the many open lies of your organization, some of these good and hard-working Baltimore Ravens fans on the streets of this city somehow still think all of you possess the innate integrity to self-police and do the “right” thing because you’re rich and famous and look good in purple on Sundays.
I know better…
I’m reminded of this with every press conference I watch on my video screen that I previously attended as a working professional – home and away, domestic and international – for the first 26 seasons of your existence. I’m reminded every week when the fans who sat with me in Section 513 and bought your PSLs last century send me pictures of the fans in colorful visiting jerseys sitting in my seats every week.
You reminded me of your integrity with the comical “we’ll have to agree to disagree” text on whether I’m a legitimate media member after 40 years of doing this work in full public view.
“Because Chad Steele said so…”
This is the modern line of absolute integrity within the gated grounds and moated walls of the bloated Baltimore Ravens, where playoff caliber football comes with Super Bowl-level arrogance and Hall of Fame profits.
You’ll put your worst people on it right away…
Gaslighting is standard operating procedure. The big bad bully in John Harbaugh loves it that way.
No one saw it.
It never happened.
Fight me…
I know better than anyone on earth how this works. So does everyone with a brain reading this.
You don’t want real questions from legitimate journalists like me. That’s why you threw me out. That’s why Chad Steele had a bullied local executive tell me that I was “uninvited” last spring as the only non-media “media” member who wasn’t allowed to pay $100 for a publicly advertised CEO Club lunch meeting (that I have attended several times in the past) lorded over by your team president Sashi Brown, whose only words to me in 2022 were: “I won’t be talking to you too much.”
You have an out-of-town team president who can’t have me in a room full of executives to hear his plans and motives for the Baltimore Ravens or breathe the same air. Like a country club meeting or something?
You have a notoriously arrogant spokesman with a fancy title who never speaks, including when your franchise took $600 million of our citizens’ money in Annapolis to abscond the previous stadium press box and turn it into The Blackwing game day country club to print you more money. And a football coach whose eyes move left to right every time he’s lying about a “football” question. And when your “Ring of Honor” tight end drops the ball on the biggest play of the year, it’s perfectly OK to slip out the side door and not answer any questions.
8Kind of like his owner and general manager did to me on the veranda last spring in Orlando when I privately and quietly approached you to professionally discuss my press credentials.
You’re too big to fail, too wealthy to give a damn and too exasperated to speak.
Accountability isn’t even expected of you anymore, and that is the way you demand it.
As long as Lamar wins the Super Bowl next year!
And 16 women and a might-be-washed-up kicker are too small to matter. Just like getting Ray Rice to the football field to win games was more important than his wife’s jaw in a glass elevator with cameras rolling. To anyone and everyone who knew, including them. The whole world saw the integrity of the Baltimore Ravens that summer. Only Ray Rice lost his job and was shamed while the line formed to trade in his tattered No. 27 jerseys. No one saw anything or knew anything – but in the end, everyone knew everything.
Just like my press credential.
What you’ve done to me, personally and professionally, is disgraceful. Your fans and former players and executives around your league approach me every day and tell me that because I have a lot more friends and fans and credibility in this city than Chad Steele does.
(Here’s my scoreboard:)
But, Steve, you own and manufacture your own integrity – all in the name of winning football games, of course. Because that’s all that matters in your business. The profit of hundreds of millions of dollars annually that personally go on your bank ledger make none of any of these dramas or nonsense resonate with anyone around Owings Mills that resembles your favorite word: humility.
Because it just doesn’t matter.
Oh, this too shall pass.
I saw that the Houston Texans are still packing ‘em in after their MassageGate. And the Cleveland Browns will one day even get to a Super Bowl and the Dawg Pound will be saying “DeShaun Who.” In the same way that Irsay and Schlichter and Angelos and Ray Rice become yesterday’s forgotten Baltimore sports sins.
Or tomorrow’s junior varsity football coach at Milford Mill Academy.
Time and testament heal things and life moves forward.
No one is cancelling what’s left of their season tickets or cashing in any PSLs because of Justin Tucker. One way or another.
No. One. Cares.
It was just a few women and a few back rubs, right? When you sit with “Tuck” on his exit, you can point to Ray Rice and let him know that after 10 years in the penalty box, you’ll welcome him back as the “Legend Of The Game” and show his big kicks and Super Bowl XLVII ring on the immersive video boards. In 15 years, you’ll be able to slide him into the Ring Of Honor, brought to you by Jeweler Paying The Most That Year.
Meanwhile, Tucker will be kicking for some other team long before Thanksgiving next season and paid handsomely for his unique work that few other men have ever done so well. Some other billionaire owner, general manager desperate to keep his job, and head coach who believes in “second chances” will welcome Tuck in to shoot game-winners for the next 3-to-5 seasons and he’ll be an urban whispers legend in Baltimore. Untouchable, like Eliot Ness.
Which brings me back to forgiveness, something your Christianity teaches you and your pulpit leader, John Harbaugh, preaches in the sermons that earn him car dealer sponsorships and Fellowship of Christian Athletes speeches.
The fans on barstools all over this city and on my social media timeline somehow erroneously think these women are going to get a pay day from these allegations. I haven’t found a lawyer who thinks they have a case – yet.
If a truly guilt-ridden Tucker would’ve quickly feigned forgiveness and admitted to this, it would’ve probably blown over a lot more quickly than he allegedly did when various 20-something women have told The Baltimore Banner reporters stories of his many massage resistances and erections. This city, en masse, voted for Sheila Dixon. And watching this unfolding and far more significant daily disgrace of the insurrectionist Felon-in-Chief shows that even “guilt” and video evidence means nothing in modern America.
But, of course, if Justin Tucker is as innocent as he claims and all of these humans and dastardly bastards in the media and these awful women massage therapists on the prowl for attention (and all of their families, bosses and their lawyers) are truly conspiring and lying with no apparent “cash in” motives, you’ll want to support your Hall of Fame kicker who helped you win a Super Bowl. And maybe a few more with Lamar at the helm in the coming years.
As Harbs says: “We stick together! No matter what!!! We always have each others’ backs, right! We’re Ravens!!!”
Just like you and Dick Cass and Harbaugh and DeCosta had your “family” Chad Steele’s back when you know damn-right-well everything he did to me was wrong and unprofessional – and you were in on it the whole time.
(The hundreds of texts in my phone don’t lie, Steve. Nor do the 40 years of press credentials on my walls…)
You have a lot of dishonest people in your building, and a slew of people who will lie to keep their jobs. I know this because I’ve gone cubicle to cubicle to see who thinks I’m still a “real” Baltimore media member.
Steve, you’re actively lying to every Baltimore Ravens fan who has ever met me or knows my name. You do that every day you lock me out.
And I suppose everyone has potential to become an evidence suppressor and massage parlor denier when you’re the only human on the planet who can routinely make 60-yard kicks in Detroit with the game on the line for 15 years.
I asked my wife what she thought you scoundrels would do and Jenn said: “Well, he is a really good kicker! And they’re hard to find…”
(So are good men.)
Plus, no one will ever know what really happened. It’s his word against theirs. And yours against The Baltimore Banner, whom I’m sure will have a nice professional “rough ride” experience the rest of the way covering your billion-dollar franchise.
It feels like nobody is coming to take away anyone’s money just yet. The kicker can be cut; a new Baltimore Ravens kicker will be signed or drafted. And everyone you employ in Owings Mills will do what they did all along – pretend none of it ever happened and say the team cut him because he was old and not as good as he used to be on the field.
Or, whatever Chad Steele tells them to say – the “brand message.”
Alas, methinks there will be no happy ending for Justin Tucker in Baltimore.
But he did make about $70 million and he’ll get a different kind of “job” in the league in 2025. And he’ll stand tall and firm and erect in his defense and probably earn millions more shooting off that big, strong right leg.
In the end, this is as, Peyton Manning once noted “the freaking idiot kicker” – a replaceable part in a $5 billion NFL machine. Well, until there’s three seconds on the clock and you need someone to drill a 52-yarder in Kansas City on a frozen January night.
Even Royal Farms can move on and quickly find a new spokesman to help them sell their delicious World Famous “real fresh, real fast” RoFo fried chicken and Western fries.
All of you presently have “plausible deniability.” You have an easy walk away, Steve.
I guess.
And no one will ever ask you about it, anyway…
“Chad will handle it…”
