I’ve written many times about the miracle of the Baltimore Ravens in my life. In November 1995, a football team landed here and I was in the third year of post-newspaper work doing sports radio and conversation in a town starved of NFL football for a decade in the absence of the once-beloved Colts.
Baltimore was a jilted football metropolis, thrown on the scrapheap by the big money of the NFL in 1984 and local fans had learned to fully adopt the Orioles and newly-minted Camden Yards as the only game in town by the mid 1990s.
It’s no secret how David Modell came into my life or how the Baltimore Ravens were birthed in our city. The Modells never minced words about the deal – it was about money. They were broke in Cleveland. I chronicled all of that and wrote at length about it after the first Super Bowl championship in 2001 here in Purple Reign – Diary of a Raven Maniac.
In Chapter 4, I wrote about the contributions of David Modell in the early years and how he was a major player in helping to build that incredible night in Tampa when his father, Arthur B. Modell, lifted the Lombardi Trophy to the Florida sky in a most-unlikely story.
It’s been 21 years since David Modell walked into my WLG studios for the first time. I unearthed the tape and played it on WNST-AM 1570 this week and you can listen here via our BuyAToyota Audio Vault.
You can also listen to a lengthy chat from two years ago (before his illness) and watch this video from last May at “A Night of Heroes” when he opened our event along with Gov. Larry Hogan.
His death this week was not sudden, but it has suddenly rocked me.
Like the kind of jolt a 48-year old guy would feel when he loses his 55-year old friend with a wife and twin babies, I must say that this one has hit me hard on many levels.
David Modell was a true iconoclast. From afar as a Houston Oilers fan in Dundalk for first quarter century of my life, I’d always seen him as the bespectacled young kid next to Art Modell with the pocket square and a quality tailor. Then he came into my studio – and my life for real – in 1996 with his family’s name being dragged through the mud throughout …
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