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Dying doesn't make man honest
(by Dave Lange - September 27, 2012)
Dying doesn't make man honest
Of course, Arthur Modell, the back-stabbing former owner of the Cleveland Browns, was a liar. Dying doesn't make a man honest. And it shouldn't land his bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame either, no matter what the talking-head apologists would have us believe.
Just a week after Mr. Modell was laid to rest, the daily newspaper, in a front-page "exclusive," laid one of his biggest lies out on the table for the world to see. Contrary to what he claimed repeatedly after taking Baltimore's multimillion-dollar bribe and cutting the hearts out of the best football fans in the land, he was indeed offered a brand new stadium in Cleveland. So said former Cleveland City Council President George Forbes and then-Cuyahoga County Commissioner Timothy Hagan, according to the report.
Well, who woulda thunk? Nobody in his right mind would have believed Mr. Modell's lies back in the mid-1990s, when he made ridiculous claims about being cut out of the plans to build the new Gateway sports complex for the basketball Cavaliers and baseball Indians. The only thing shocking about this revelation is that the likes of Mr. Forbes and Mr. Hagan would keep it a secret for all these years.
Everybody knew at the time that the Browns — despite their cheapskate owner who wouldn't even keep the toilets flushing at the old but gigantically profitable Municipal Stadium — were the best game in town. Of course, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County leaders would put their taxpayers' money on keeping the beloved football team ahead of the habitually losing baseball team and the mediocre basketball franchise. Even a young weekly newspaper editor out in Chagrin Falls knew that.
As early as 1985, some young movers and shakers proposed a new stadium with a retractable roof on the Cleveland lakefront, but Mr. Modell and his power-broker cohorts weren't moving and shaking for any innovative ideas.
However, 10 years later, after he politely passed on the sin-tax-financed Gateway deal, the Browns owner and then-Mayor Michael White were all atwitter about adding a parking tax to finance a football-stadium renovation. Unless the downtown parkers would cough up $85 million, which quickly grew to $154 million and then $172 million, I wrote in the spring of 1995, "some other city will grab Mr. Modell's football team away from Cleveland."
Not quite prescient, I added, "I'm not much of a sin taxpayer for Gund Arena and Jacobs Field, but I'll probably pay a few parking taxes for the new and improved ... well, can Modell Stadium be far behind?"
Six months later, the you-know-what hit the fans. With Maryland taxpayers waving $30 million a year under Mr. Modell's Pinocchio, we were about to lose the team we had loved and supported for decades.
So on a dismal November day, I wrote: "He's the sleaze who promised us he'd never pull the Browns out of Cleveland. He's the fat cat who said he wouldn't take the money and run. He's the toad who told us to refurbish Municipal Stadium to keep the Browns in town. And he's the snake who said he didn't want to talk about the future of the franchise until after this season."
Now that I've grown much older, now that I've had 17 years to rethink those intemperate words, now that Art Modell is dead and buried, I think I agree with Gov. Mitt Romney. Something should be done about the socialists who think they're entitled to live off of taxes collected by the government.
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