By STEVE KING

We dropped the ball—in this case, the football.

And in a big, big way – a historic way, in fact.

We. Us. All those, including myself, who were covering the Cleveland Browns on a beat basis two decades ago.

When you’re a journalist serving as a beat writer covering anything – police and fire, the courthouse, city council, township trustees, the statehouse, entertainment and the fine arts, sports teams, etc. – you are responsible for anything and everything involving that entity. If it happens in your realm of responsibility, it’s news – at least to you. There’s no such thing as a meaningless event on the surface. You need to be aware of it and what goes on at the event. It may well end up being something you can eventually, but you have to check it out first.

Also as part of your job, you need to keep your eyes wide open and ears to the ground so as to be able to detect trends, rumors, innuendo, scuttlebutt and things that, for some reason, just don’t make sense and need to be investigated, or at least monitored.

If we had done just part of any of that, history might have been different, or at least it if had turned just the same, which may well have been the case, it would have unfolded differently.

But we’ll never know, so whatever. It doesn’t matter now. At the same time, though, I’ve still thought about it – a lot, in fact – since it happened.

It was exactly 20 years ago today, on Nov. 6, 1995, that then Browns owner Art Modell made the formal announcement in an impromptu press conference in a parking lot in downtown Baltimore, that he was moving the team to Baltimore following the 1995 season.

As an aside, that presser occurred next to where the then still pretty new Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which the Baltimore Orioles call home, is located. That land is now the site of M&T Bank Stadium, home of the transplanted original Browns franchise, the Baltimore Ravens.

Shocking, stunning, unbelievable, incredible news. Very much so then. And still that way now, when you get right down to it.

There was Modell, standing at the podium on a makeshift dais on that bright, sunny cool mid-fall day, with his son, David, who was then vice president/assistant to the president with the club, seated to his dad’s far left and with a very pensive, interested and respectful look on his face, as if he were listening to Beethoven discussing music, Einstein elaborating on the theory of relativity, Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I have a dream” speech or Aristotle breaking down Greek philosophy.

It was sickening for Browns fans, enough to make you cough up your Slyman’s corned beef sandwich lathered with Stadium Mustard.

Everybody in Northeast Ohio – and the country, if not in other countries, really — knows that story now and how it has played out in all those years since then. It is a story that far transcended sports and as such affected a lot of people in a lot of different ways, even to this day in some lingering regards.

But how did it happen that Modell was able to go undetected, even by us media people, who are supposed to be the watchdogs of such things, as he carried out his elaborate plan?

Good question. It was another era, an era in which sports writers, including those on the football beat, thought their job was … well, covering football. And nothing else. If it didn’t happen on the field, in games or practices, or in the locker room, then it wasn’t worth reporting.

We had no idea what was coming down the pike, what with some of the best stories being off the field.

The hard news people had been doing that type of thing for years — looking under every rock, and behind every bush, to smoke out the truth, no matter how long it took. Politics had been that way for years, ever since Watergate.

But we weren’t hard news people. We were in the candy store of life. Everything was fun and games – literally and figuratively.

All of our college professors would have slapped us silly for having been so negligent, lazy, naïve and irresponsibly. They probably would have tried to take our diplomas away from us.

The evidence that something wasn’t quite right with the Browns, not so much on the field but with the angst of the man who owned them, his determination to get what he thought he had coming on and the politicians’ laissez-faire attitude toward him and his interests, was all right there in front of our faces. All we had to do was look. Really, it was prevalent, so obvious, that we practically had to move it our of our way to get to where we were going.

Modell had moaned and groaned for a considerable amount of time that he was in financial trouble, in part because of being a poor businessman – actually, a terrible businessman, one who made decisions way too much with his heart than with his head — but also because he had an extremely bad stadium deal. Cleveland Stadium was old, outdated and crumbling, with none of the modern, high-end luxury suites and virtually no on-site parking from which to derive revenue, and something needed to be done either with a complete refurbishing of the facility or the construction of a whole new stadium. He said that over and over and over again, but no one listened – not the City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and State of Ohio politicians and not the media, even the Browns beat writers. His words fell on deaf ears.

After all, in its 1995 season preview issue, Sports Illustrated had predicted that the Browns, coached by some 44-year-old guy named Bill Belichick (perhaps you’ve heard of him), would to go to the Super Bowl, where they would meet the San Francisco 49ers, whose president was Carmen Policy, and lose 34-13. That was the hot story we were all trailing. Stadium deal? That issue was getting swept under the rug.

Every once in a while as the 1995 season got ready to begin, we would ask Modell about the stadium situation, especially after there started to be some rumblings that this issue might be a whole lot more serious than anybody was letting on. By that time, he had quit complaining as he continued his cozying-up cover-up with Maryland and Baltimore officials. His answers – the few times he provided any — were vague and rambling, but we never pressed him on the issue.

Come on, it was too much fun to be writing about a trip to the Super Bowl trip for a franchise that had never been there.

Modell finally issued a moratorium on stadium talk so the Browns would be free of distractions and could concentrate on making SI’s prediction come true. Being the sheep that we were, we let it slide right by. Right then and there, Modell had the perfect diversion to do what he wanted to do in terms of greasing the skids for the team’s move to Baltimore, sometimes under the cover of darkness, but sometimes right out in the open for all to see, if only we had taken the time to look.

A few weeks into the season, Jeff Schudel of the Lake County News-Herald in Mentor had talked to some people in Baltimore and pieced together a story suggesting that the Browns could move there if the stadium problem was not resolved. The Browns, with Modell leading the charge, barked long and loudly that there was nothing to the story. They tried to make – and were successful in making – Schudel look foolish, as if he were some kind of irresponsible, shoot-from-the-hip, rumor-mongering, controversy-inspiring crackpot. Anyone who knows Schudel is well aware that he is none of those things. He is a true professional who, if he has a fault, is probably too conservative and doesn’t push the envelope enough. They shamed him into thinking he was … well, trying to do real investigative work and write hard news.

How dare he attempt to do that!

Though he was confident of the reliability of his sources, Schudel, so unfortunately so, backed down. He liked Modell and respected him, and as such had second thought about what he wrote, thinking that maybe he had ventured into uncharted waters without having really reasoned things through.

Darn it! Double-darn it! He was so close to exposing Modell’s plan that he could taste it, but he didn’t take those last few steps in his careful, responsible probe.

A few days later, as we walked through the side gate to the practice field. I assured Schudel that there was no way the Browns would move to Baltimore, or anywhere.

“Come on, Jeff,” I said with a laugh – no, make that a chortle, a self-absorbed, condescending, ignorant chortle.

I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I had absolutely no evidence to back any of that up. I just said it because … well, because it was conventional wisdom, at least conventional wisdom as far as a sports writer was concerned.

I was not alone. He heard the same from other media members. We were all duped. Instead of encouraging Schudel to push onward with every fiber of his being, and that he was on to the biggest story of his life, and then getting our own acts in gear to begin pursuing that story with every fiber of our being, knowing that we, too, were on our way to the biggest story our lives, we got another free soda pop out of the self-serve dispenser in the back of the media room and went on our merry way.

We were not just irresponsible. Rather, we were the poster children for irresponsible.

But the rumors would not stop. Slowly but surely – but too slowly to draw much attention – the bread crumbs kept being dropped along the trail, making the ground look like the floor of the production facility at the old Wonder Bread facility located next to the University of Akron. If only we had followed those piles of crumbs.

A little later, in the days leading up to their Oct. 22 home game against the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars, I called Modell in his office in Browns Headquarters, which was located directly above the media room – actually, as best as I was able to later ascertain, his desk was situated directly above my chair in the front row, and asked him about the need for the team, which had started 3-1 but was now struggling with two straight disappointing losses and was setting at 3-3, to get back on track against a beatable opponent.

Modell always liked to be quoted, so I was sure he’d give me plenty of good stuff for my story. Some of the greatest quotes – actually, as I think about it now, the greatest quotes – I’ve ever gotten in this business came from Modell. But when he picked up the phone, I could tell immediately that I had bothered him, that I had gotten him right in the middle of something important. For the first time ever, he couldn’t get me off the phone fast enough.

It seemed quite odd – very, very odd, in fact — but I didn’t act on my instincts and follow up on it. Heck, nobody’s perfect, and perhaps I had simply gotten Modell, a guy that I, too, liked and respected a lot, at the wrong time because he was conducting major business at the time that required his full attention.

Yeah, monkey business. He probably had people from Baltimore in his office at that moment.

Again, a missed opportunity to pull back the curtain on The Great Oz and expose him as something he had never been perceived to be.

On Thursday, Nov. 2, when the rumors of something fishy going on in Baltimore were really heating up, drawing the full attention of even the most naïve of us, all the beat writers conducted our own little roundtable discussion right there in the media room. As I think back, it was one of the most fascinating things I had ever been a part of, and, as it turned out, one of the most historic.

We brought up each of the rumors, discussed them at length and then, when we got right to the part when it was starting to become obvious that Modell was up to something, we stopped dead in our tracks, dismissing the evidence by claiming, “Art would never want on his tombstone that he was the guy who moved the Browns out of Cleveland.”

We all liked Modell and trusted him. Here was a guy who was, apart of this heinous deed he ended up committing, a really good guy, someone who had Cleveland and Northeast Ohio running through his veins. He was on the boards of a number of big-time organizations and foundations in the community. He was generous to a fault. He kept on several employees, who shall remain nameless, because he liked them and knew they needed the money, not because they were necessarily providing some service for him that he could absolutely do without.

Modell used his considerable influence – and, make no mistake about it, he definitely had considerable influence throughout Northeast Ohio – to pull strings and open doors for people that otherwise would not, and could not, be pulled and opened. He did exactly that for a Cleveland media member, helping that person’s father, who really needed it, to get medical treatment at Cleveland Clinic, where Modell’s influence might have been the strongest.

That’s why well liked Modell and trusted him. Actually, we liked him a lot and trusted him a lot. He made us laugh. He had a wit and a sense of humor that was truly special. He would tell us funny stories, most of which we can’t repeat here. But trust us. They were funny. And they were made more so because he was about as good of a storyteller as you’ll ever meet.

OK, one story – but just one: Modell had hip replacement surgery. To most people, they would tell you they had the surgery and that would be it. But not Modell. No, definitely not Modell. He had a funny story to tell about his surgery.

“The doctors told me that to do the operation, they had to to numb me from the waist down,” Modell explained. “My wife (Pat) said, ‘Art, you’ve been numb from the waist down for years.’ ”

We all laughed – uproariously so.

Then he turned around to the only two women beat writers in the crowd, Mary Kay Cabot, then – and now – from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Marla Ridenour, then of the Columbus Dispatch and now of the Akron Beacon Journal, and said with a wry but somewhat embarrassed smile (if there is such a combination), “Sorry, dearies.”

That was Modell. He was an old-fashioned gentleman. He believed women should be treated not like women, but rather as ladies. He liked to tell those funny stories, but perhaps not always in earshot of ladies.

To that end, a Browns player who shall remain nameless took a cutting utensil used to strip off tape around ankles and used it to lift the skirt of a female reporter as she walked by. That was back in the day when the players were pushing back against women media members in the locker room. Now, the players embrace them. It’s street cred for players when a female reporter interviews them.

Modell exploded when he heard the story and blistered the ears of the player and also of head coach Bill Belichick. He apologized to the woman profusely, both face-to-face and through a formal letter, and, more importantly, he made the player do the same.

Modell was about the age of our fathers. He was almost like a father-figure to us, always open to our needs, professionally and personally. Heck, you could call the guy at home – I still remember the number – at his home in the fashionable upscale community of Waite Hill in the eastern Cleveland suburbs, and he would pick up on the first ring. He sat right next to the phone, as did his wife. If he didn’t answer, then she did.

So, on the surface at least – and at least from a sports writer’s perspective – there was no need to distrust him, suspect him of anything dastardly.

Little did we know that there were people from Baltimore, and even some in his own inner circle, including family members, who were pressing him to make the move and stick it to Cleveland for the politicians not meeting his needs..

David Modell, what are you doing now?

Jim Bailey, executive vice president, legal and administration, what are you doing now?

Later that afternoon following the roundtable discussion in the media room, we saw Modell drive past the building in his golf cart – the Art Cart, as we laughingly tagged it — on his way to watch practice. We ran out to meet him. Everybody gathered around and, for whatever reason, he picked me out of the crowd to sit next to him in the cart. I felt privileged, like I was a school kid who had been picked to come to the board and explain a math problem. And my media brethren threw sophomoric barbs at me. But it was all in good fun.

In his usual dramatic fashion, Modell denied all the rumors.

“Those rumors are completely and utterly false,” he said. “I assure you that the Cleveland Browns are going nowhere.”

Not right at that moment, at least.

Modell was a wordsmith. He was technically correct. To lay all his cards on the table at that moment would have been premature. It would have spoiled – foiled – everything. So he twisted the truth just a bit – so he could shortly thereafter twist a knife into the hearts of everybody in Northeast Ohio, and transplanted Northeast Ohioans and Browns farms wherever they were around the world (there are 40,000 Browns Backers members in 300 clubs spread over eight different countries).

It was 36 hours later, at about 10 p.m. Friday, when, in an interview with a group of reporters in the media room who called him at his home, he said in essence that he was indeed moving the Browns to Baltimore.

The jig was up.

“I had no choice,” Modell said.

It was then that we all sat there, our mouths wide open, and looked at one another for a brief moment before we hurriedly began to write the most important story of our careers – the one that he could have started long ago, when we would have been way ahead of the curve and it would have really meant something. Now we were writing about a story from behind, as we chased it. It meant nothing now.

We had a choice, too, to do the whole thing so much differently, but we chose not to.

And with it, we learned a hard lesson.

As part of that, we can look back at all that with these four summations:

First, Modell, as we said, always made decisions as much – or more – with his heart as he did with his brain. He was a good public relations man who was adept at reading people and the mood of the community. He knew Northeast Ohio – and Northeast Ohioans – like the back of his hand.

As such, to this day, I can’t for the life of me understand why he let himself be talked into doing the move in a secretive, back-alley way instead of being up-front and truthful. The people who talked Modell into that, weren’t people who would be lambasted if the team moved. Their reputations weren’t on the line. Yet he believed them. Why?

If he had just come out and said to the public in a very pronounced public way, “Look, you and I both know that our stadium, while it has a great history, needs to be either completely renovated, or a new stadium needs to be built. One of the two has to happen. As a businessman, to survive financially and be able to compete, I have to have the revenue streams that the other owners in the league have from their nice, new modern stadiums. So let’s work together and get something done so we don’t have to consider some alternative that I don’t even want to mention here. I’m a Clevelander. This is my home. I desperately want to stay here.”

If he had done that and the people had told him they didn’t want to support him or his stadium situation, then he had every right altogether to take his team and move it elsewhere. He really did.

Instead, we got lies, half-truths, a moratorium on stadium talk, and secret meetings with Maryland and Baltimore movers and shakers on a remote portion of Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

Secondly, as much as you can hate what Modell did – he deserved that – he can’t hate him as a person. That’s just not right. And with that, you had to feel sorry for him when all the dust had settled and Cleveland had been guaranteed to get a new Browns team.

Here was Modell, a native New Yorker who had spent the first 35 years of his life there, and then spent the next 35 years of his life in Cleveland. After the move, he was like a man without a country – in his case, a man without a place he could home. He had been gone from New York for so long that he really couldn’t call that home anymore. To the people in Cleveland, he was Public Enemy No. 1. For his own safety, he had to leave town just after the announcement, and the few times he did return, he had to come and leave in secret.

And as far as Baltimore, he had no special connection – no real history — with the city or the people there. He was just some guy who brought a football team back to town. A hero? Not really.

That bothered him to the day he died. He desperately wanted to be liked – that was his biggest desire – and that he was forever not liked in Cleveland, where he had made his mark both professionally and personally, tore at him.

No. 3, Modell’s second-biggest desire was to someday be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame just down the road in Canton as a contributor, like good friends Wellington Mara of the New York Giants and Art Rooney Sr. of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And that probably would have happened based on what he did for the NFL, if just from his impact on the TV contracts and the way that changed the game. But then The Move happened, and that process was stopped dead in its tracks by those who lost respect for the way he handled the situation in Cleveland. He died on the outside looking in, which also greatly saddened him. If he ever gets in now, he won’t be around to enjoy it.

And lastly, Modell always wanted to leave a great legacy in pro football. We all so, personally as well as professionally, in whatever line of work we’re in. Modell did that – but not in the way he intentioned. Instead of being remembered as one of the men who helped take the NFL from a second-class citizen to baseball on the national sports landscape, to being light years ahead of baseball, basketball and all the others as the most dominant sport – and maybe the most dominant business, entity, whatever – in the country if not also the world, a distinction which he otherwise would have deserved, he is the poster child for something entirely different. It is not something of which he – or anyone else, for that matter – could be proud.

Modell ensconced himself as the man who pushed pro football into an entirely new level financially – a level that the owners and players love for the money it has made them all, but one that the fans, who pay the freight, detest for the way it costs them so much more to attend a game, if it hasn’t priced them out of doing so altogether.

That is, if communities don’t acquiesce and give these NFL owners what they want in terms of new or completely remodeled stadiums with all the modern bells and whistles, especially with the luxury seating and accommodations, then they pull a “Modell” and move their team out of town. “Modell” is a not-so-veiled threat. It is a demand.

For if the Cleveland Browns, one of the foundation franchises of the NFL, can be uprooted like a weed and carted out of town in a moving fan as if they were furniture and other household items, then any team, anywhere and anytime can be carpetbagged elsewhere, too.

Just ask us Browns beat writers, who know that all too well, and should have – and could have – known all that long before anyone else did, if only we would have realized that what we were covering was not a game, but rather a big-time business.