Post by mexicanjunior on Sept 6, 2012 15:58:16 GMT -6
www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/sports/football/art-modell-nfl-owner-of-browns-then-ravens-is-dead-at-87.html?pagewanted=all
He is sorry for screwing over the Browns but I knew the name and he seemed to have been a big part of NFL history...IN
Art Modell, who helped make professional football more popular than baseball and rich beyond its wildest dreams but who broke Cleveland’s heart by killing his geriatric team, the Browns, to give birth to the Baltimore Ravens, died on Thursday in Baltimore. He was 87.
The death, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was announced on the Ravens’ Web site. Mr. Modell, who lived in Cockeysville, Md., had a history of coronary problems. In a postwar era when pro football was extending its franchises across America and its reach into the fantasies of millions of armchair quarterbacks, Mr. Modell was the hands-on owner of the Browns from 1961 to 1995 and of the Ravens from 1996 to 2003. He was also a behind-the-scenes visionary.
For 31 years, from 1962 to 1993, he represented National Football League owners in negotiations with television networks that generated $8.4 billion for the league and gave fans at home a coast-to-coast succession of games, turning Sunday afternoons, Monday nights and eventually Sunday nights into lost weekends for the most ardent fans. An innovative, relentless promoter, Mr. Modell even toyed with Friday night football.
“We made the announcement,” he recalled, referring to the league, “and within 72 hours Congress passed a law prohibiting Friday night games until the high school and college seasons ended.”
But Mr. Modell supported a succession of winning ideas — the expansion of the N.F.L. into many cities; the 1970 merger of the American Football League and the National Football League into competing N.F.L. conferences; preseason games that whet fans’ appetites and brought in more television money; and revenue-sharing plans that balanced risks among the owners, whom he called partners. They elected him president in 1967-69, and he negotiated the league’s first collective bargaining agreement with the players in 1968.
He is sorry for screwing over the Browns but I knew the name and he seemed to have been a big part of NFL history...IN
