Dedicated to Arthur B. Modell. Your dream became our reality.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: ARE WE THERE YET?

THE BOSS ARRIVES
A SILVER TROPHY BUT NOT A SILVER SPOON

THE ORIGINAL BIRDS AND THE MEAN MACHINE

SLAPDICKS, QUARTERBACKS AND PRANKS

CANTON COMES TO BALTIMORE

NO FOOLING IN APRIL – THE WAR ROOM BREEDS A CHAMPION

THE GREATEST DEFENSE IN THE HISTORY OF THE GAME

FIRST THINGS FIRST

‘O’ AS IN OFFENSIVE – THE DUST BOWL COMES EAST

MOVING TO THE DARK SIDE

NEVERMORE (TO LOSE) – THE MIRACLE BEGINS

A FESTIVUS FOR THE REST OF US

ANTHONY WHO? – “THE MUSIC CITY MUGGING”

PAINTING THE BLACK HOLE PURPLE

FESTIVUS MAXIMUS

EVERYONE LOVES A PARADE – “RAINING IN BALTIMORE”

In the ensuing 24 hours, I engaged in a marathon interview and negotiation process that resulted in my family and I getting on a private jet to go to Baltimore, to become the next head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. After spending the day visiting with the Modell family, Ozzie Newsome, Kevin Byrne and many of the Ravens associates, I was led into the press conference at PSI Net Stadium to be announced as the second head coach in the short history of the franchise. As I entered the room, the first person I encountered was “Nasty” Nestor. At this point, I was beginning to believe he was a stalker, and I started looking around the room for security. Just about the time I was ready to have this guy thrown out, Kevin Byrne, our Vice President of Media Relations, introduced me to Nestor by saying, “This is Nasty Nestor, and he is going to be your new best friend.” 

Now, I was really scared.

In truth, after actually visiting with the guy, it didn’t take long for me to recognize that he truly would become my new best friend, professionally, in Baltimore. When I took the job, I knew that there were two things I wanted this team to be known for: passion and accountability. Nestor has both.

As a member of the media and as a businessman, Nestor has created his own spot on the national sports radio scene (not an easy thing to do). But what draws you to this little man, above all else, is his passion for Baltimore and for sports. Whether he is praising me or cutting me up, he does so with a genuine affection for sports and the fans’ eye view of the game. He can take a shot as quickly and with as much grace as he will deliver one, and keeps coming back for more. All the while, simply wanting to get the inside story for the common man in Baltimore, who would be there if he could. 

In his own way, Nasty has become the new-millennium conscience of the Baltimore sports scene, like his mentor before him, the late, great John Steadman.

In my book, “Competitive Leadership,” I state that my book is “not a chronology about the incredible sequence of events that culminated in the Baltimore Ravens winning the World Championship following the 2000 season. Frankly, more competent writers exist who could provide a far more entertaining perspective on those circumstances than I could.”

Nasty Nestor is that writer. I can’t think of a better man, who would be more passionate about the subject or more determined to get it right, than Nasty. This book represents the fans’ eye view of the incredible year of the Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens. 

When I am old and gray and have long left the field of battle, when the memories have faded a bit, and I want to remind myself of the incredible sequence of events that led to the Baltimore Ravens’ first-ever Super Bowl Championship, this will be the book I pick up to remember it.

So will you.

Brian Billick

Head Coach

Baltimore Ravens

March 2001

ARE WE THERE YET?

“We didn’t force anybody to get into this process …No one was forced to continue at any point anymore than anyone is forced to bid for the Olympics or forced to bid for a plant in an area. So, that’s a judgment people have to make. Maybe they prefer to have a museum in their town or a plant. It’s their judgment. It’s not for me to make judgments about what communities want to do with their resources and their people.”

 NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue to WMAR-TV, at the Rosemont Hyatt in Chicago, Ill., in October 1993, in a message to Baltimore’s NFL fans about what they could do after the city had just lost its only hope for an expansion team to Charlotte and Jacksonville

Sometimes words just can’t express or convey the true emotion of an event.

For those of you lucky enough to be from Baltimore and have a stake in Charm City’s professional football team – a real stake, an indescribable emotional bond – you know the feeling that I have as I stroke these keys.

To say that any true Baltimore Ravens fan or supporter would be in complete and utter disbelief about the events that transpired between Nov. 6, 1995 and Jan. 30, 2001, would be an understatement.

The Baltimore Ravens, of the National Football League, defeated the New York Football Giants at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., on Jan. 28, 2001 to bring the Vince Lombardi Trophy back to Baltimore for the first time since 1971. Just a little more than five years earlier, the city not only didn’t have a team, but there was truly no hope among the populace of ever getting an NFL team back to the town where the Baltimore Colts were pilfered in the middle of a snowy night in March 1984.

The score that night in Tampa, a decidedly lopsided 34-7 blistering of the NFC champs, will be forever etched in NFL lore. More than 130 million people all around the world watched as Ray Lewis and Brian Billick hoisted the glittery, silver Lombardi Trophy toward the Florida sky on a beautiful evening as confetti flew through the air. The NFL Films video of the accomplishment will play longer than any of us live, for millions more to see and enjoy.

Yet I have the distinct feeling that if you truly care as much as I do, there’s still a resounding feeling of complete disbelief.

I was there. I was there from the very beginning. I fired the first question to then-Cleveland Browns owner Arthur B. Modell when he hit the stage in parking lot D of Baltimore’s Camden Yards complex to announce his intentions to move his team east. I was the first person from Baltimore to shake the massive hand of Jonathan Ogden in New York City on April 20, 1996, when he became the first true member of the Baltimore Ravens. Less than five months later, I brought future Hall of Famer Ray Lewis his first crab cake, during a live radio broadcast after the Ravens’ first victory over the Oakland Raiders. I was the first person from Baltimore to greet future head coach Brian Billick as he walked through a depressing and dismal locker room in Minneapolis on Jan. 17, 1999 after just losing his first chance to go the Super Bowl as the offensive coordinator of the Minnesota Vikings. And there I was again, aloft my adopted 50-yard line seat, just behind the Giants bench in Tampa, where I watched through streaming tears of joy as NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue grudgingly presented Modell and his Baltimore Ravens the league championship trophy.

I was there for just about everything. I’ve watched the tape, over and over again. Brandon Stokley beating Jason Sehorn to the end zone. Duane Starks streaking toward the end zone after picking off a Kerry Collins pass. Jamal Lewis powering into the end zone. I’ve seen them all a thousand times by now.

And you know what?

I still can’t believe it.

Say it out loud with me. The Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl. The Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl. The Baltimore Ravens are the football champs of the world.

For those who subscribe to the theory that revenge is a dish best served chilled, this is a story for you. A story sadly missed by the more than 3,000 media members who covered Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa that night. A story missed by virtually everyone outside of the tiny cluster of fans who truly understand and appreciate the scope and depth of the accomplishment.

In one 60-minute football game, Baltimore and its fans got even with just about everyone who ever got in the way or tried so desperately to keep the NFL and a championship out of Charm City.

The list of people, cities and entities that had it stuck to them – and had it coming in a big way – both living and deceased, would bring a smile to anyone who ever appreciated the high tops of Johnny Unitas or popped open an icy-cold National Bohemian Beer (that’s Natty Boh to the locals) in the land of pleasant living on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

The city of Baltimore had its Old Bay and crab-stained mitts around the Lombardi Trophy and there wasn’t a damned thing anyone could do about it.

Robert Irsay, the original Satan, who stole the beloved Baltimore Colts off to Indianapolis on a snowy night in 1984, might have lined his pockets temporarily with some cash from the move to the Hoosier Dome. However, not only does his franchise seem perpetually cursed since the move, playing in just five playoff games in 17 seasons, but Baltimore now had possession of the trophy he died having never laid a greedy finger on – nor has his offspring, Jimmy.

Jack Kent Cooke, the eccentric longtime owner of the Washington Redskins, who tried so hard to put his NFL team in Laurel, Md., nearly a decade before, would not only have his family cut out of the football business after his death, but his wish to marry the Baltimore and Washington markets to his football team never came to fruition. The Baltimore Ravens were not only birthed against Cooke’s wishes, but they beat his beloved Redskins into the winner’s circle. Even his successor, Daniel Snyder, who tried unsuccessfully to pry Baltimoreans away from the Ravens during the summer of 2000 with a silly advertising campaign, was forced to eat some Raven crow.

Then there were the other owners in the league, who conspired for a dozen years to keep Baltimore out of the NFL, while enjoying big, fat crab cakes during the expansion derby of the early 1990s.

Bill Bidwill flirted with Baltimore for several weeks in 1986, making a brief statement about Charm City’s charms during a Harborplace stop for the media. He then moved his St. Louis Cardinals to Arizona with the promise of a new stadium and a wave of support from the community. Thirteen years later, that stadium is still a blueprint and his family is still searching for its second playoff victory. His team was also one of the Ravens’ late victims in an 11-game winning streak that culminated in the presentation of the Lombardi Trophy.

Malcolm Glazer, an outsider who was very active in the doomed Baltimore expansion bid of 1993, wooing politicians and citizens alike, bought the Tampa Bay Buccaneers two years later and went on to backhand Baltimore during a press conference in Florida by saying that he’d “much rather own a team in Tampa than in Baltimore.” Not only did his team not make it to their hometown Super Bowl at Raymond James Stadium on that night in January 2001 after outbidding the Ravens for wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson in a high-profile preseason trade with the New York Jets, but Glazer and his sons, Joel and Bryan, sat helplessly in the club level as Baltimore was presented with the Lombardi Trophy on the very field that their family had built. As a cruel footnote from the football gods, the Glazer family was also forced to watch as Trent Dilfer, the one-time franchise quarterback and savior whom the Bucs had rudely sent into exile just nine months earlier, waved the Lombardi Trophy toward his former employers and the town that turned on him. 

Charlotte and Jacksonville were the lucky recipients of the expansion derby of 1993. Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who had many ties to Baltimore as a former Colts player, and Jacksonville Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver, the shoe king who rallied a third-world American city into the NFL, surely had made their own football fun with their newfound fortune in the Sun Belt.

Both teams made it to their respective league championship games in just their second season in the league in 1996, both battering the Ravens in their inaugural year in Baltimore. The Jaguars actually knocked on the door again, just three years later hosting the AFC Championship Game, which they lost to the upstart Tennessee Titans.

Both still had beautiful stadiums and strong fan support six years later. Prior to the 2000 season, the Jaguars had been a one-franchise pariah to the Modell family, crushing the Ravens/Browns 10 consecutive times over five years.

Both Richardson and Weaver, universally disliked by Baltimoreans for the cities that they represent and the way that Baltimore was disregarded and disrespected by the league in 1993, might still one day touch the Lombardi Trophy. But it will only be after it has been sitting in Baltimore for 52 weeks.

Abusing the city of New York might be the biggest and storied accomplishment of all. Baltimore had long displayed the “second city” inferiority complex to the Big Apple. I spent my entire childhood hearing my Dad lecture me about the lopsided New York-Baltimore history. The Knicks beat the Baltimore Bullets in the NBA numerous times. The Miracle Mets dispatched of the Baltimore Orioles in “amazing” fashion in 1969. Nine months earlier, Joe Namath followed up his poolside guarantee of a victory as the lowly AFL champion New York Jets embarrassed the Baltimore Colts and the NFL with a 16-7 victory after entering the game an 18-point underdog.

Since then, the Lombardi Trophy had visited the Big Apple twice with the Giants, the Stanley Cup seven times with the Islanders, Devils and Rangers, and the baseball championship seven times with the Mets and Yankees. Any self-respecting Baltimorean can recount the events of Oct. 9, 1996 with amazing precision, the night that Jeffrey Maier grabbed an apparent fly out from the glove of Orioles outfielder Tony Tarasco, leading the Yankees to victory and an eventual world championship that kept Baltimore sports fans at bay once again.

It was only a rivalry in the mind of my Dad and other Baltimoreans. Folks in New York couldn’t find Baltimore with a sports compass. There were other victims of greater significance, like the Red Sox and the Cowboys, in Gotham City.

Year after year, Baltimoreans had to read and see and hear about New York and its great sports teams and great sports fans and great sports traditions. Once Peter Angelos began running the beloved Baltimore Orioles into the ground with an endless series of bumbling transactions, there was almost no hope for Baltimore fans to finally one-up New York.

The Ravens’ victory that night not only brought a championship back to Baltimore for the first time since the Orioles won in 1983, but it in turn denied New York and its arrogant fan base another taste of a championship. No small task, I assure you.

In one 60-minute flurry of vicious defense and pounding offense, Brian Billick’s Baltimore Ravens put the ultimate screws to everyone who had ever stepped in the path of Baltimore’s inevitable resurrection to glory.

And the coup de grace – the eating of the cake or the pounding of sand, if you will -- the one-man Baltimore hate machine himself, commissioner Paul Tagliabue, the Sun King, stood front and center before the entire world on CBS (and a cacophony of rousing boos also heard worldwide from the few thousand Baltimore fans who had seats at Super Bowl XXXV) and presented his Lombardi Trophy to the proud city he so publicly spurned so many times and the owner who embarrassed him by pulling the Browns out of the NFL’s beloved Cleveland.

“Art and David (Modell),” Tagliabue began, “the Ravens defense performed at a superb, record-setting level all season. They continued that performance through the playoffs, culminating with today’s very, very decisive victory over a strong Giants team. We congratulate you and we congratulate all of your players and Coach Billick and his staff and your whole organization for bringing this Super Bowl championship back to Baltimore and to Baltimore’s great fans for the first time in three decades. Congratulations!”

Paybacks, Mr. Commissioner, are a bitch.

“Billick treats us like men. He doesn’t view everything like it’s the Invasion of China when he lets us know what’s going to happen. On the first day of training camp, he gave us the full schedule of camp and it never changed.”

Ravens defensive end Rob Burnett, Summer 2000

“Hi, Coach Billick? My name is Nestor Aparicio. I own the all-sports radio station in Baltimore and I’m about to become your new best friend.”

The first words I ever spoke to Brian Billick.

The timing couldn’t have been much worse to meet a man. Billick’s Minnesota Vikings were about 20 minutes removed from losing a 10-point lead and a Super Bowl berth to the Atlanta Falcons in the NFC Championship Game at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

I’m a pretty big football fan and I go to a league championship game nearly every year, including the Modells’ infamous loss in “The Drive” to John Elway in January 1987, long before the Ravens even existed.

Thinking of the strange twist of fate that brought us together that day, there were really only two reasons I picked Minneapolis over Denver, where Vinny Testaverde and the Jets were playing the Broncos in the AFC Championship Game. First, the weather. I knew it would be 72 degrees at kickoff in Minnesota because of the dome. The thought of an outdoor game at Mile High in January made me afraid of having the flu for the Super Bowl in Miami two weeks later. The other, was a gut suspicion that Brian Billick might be a guy I needed to meet and get to know.

I obviously have no regrets about going and not only seeing a most memorable football game, but also establishing Baltimore’s first relationship with Coach Billick. I never did get to see a football game at Mile High Stadium, though as a bonus, and in some twist of perverse Baltimore Colts and Bob Irsay irony, I missed John Elway’s last home game as an NFL player.

My choice, which was made on the Monday before the game, was justified even more on Thursday, when several sources in the organization and around the league informed me that Billick would be the second head coach of the Baltimore Ravens.

While everyone else around town was either uninformed or tepid, I was breaking news.

I had a phone call on my radio show at WNST-AM on that Thursday morning before the game, and the caller kept making comments like “if Brian Billick becomes the coach” and “if we hire Jim Haslett” and “if we have to take Chris Palmer” and “if we go in another direction.” Finally, I cut him off and stood my ground and made a pronouncement that I haven’t regretted.

I said, “I don’t think that Brian Billick will be the next coach of the Baltimore Ravens, I know he will be the next coach.” I was so sure of myself and my sources that I put a lengthy profile that had been written about Billick in the previous weekend’s St. Paul Pioneer Press on the front of my website and told people to learn about their new coach. The story was fascinating. All Billick talked about was football and family. He bluntly stated that he had no other hobbies.

So off to Minneapolis I went, with one sole purpose: meeting Brian Billick. Of course, I thought it was going to be to shake his hand and tell him I’d see him in Miami at the Super Bowl. The Vikings were a heavy favorite, the home team and a team that had set virtually every record in the book for offensive production that year. They scored 556 points in 16 games (a 34.75 average!) and were 15-1 during the regular season. There was no reason to think that Billick would be the head coach of the Ravens by Tuesday.

It’s easy to learn about people when they win. Everyone’s a helluva winner. I think I learn the most about people when they lose.

Needless to say, I learned a lot about Brian Billick that day at the Metrodome.

Before I even left my seat in the upper deck, I wondered what the future head coach of the Baltimore Ravens might be like. Friendly? Stern? Spirited? Ambitious? With the admission of having no hobbies, I wondered aloud what kind of nerd he must be. I think “football jarhead” was the term I used with my friends to describe anti-social behavior by coaches. But, as always, I kept an open mind.

When I finally left my seat, with seven minutes remaining and the Vikings holding a seven-point lead and the ball, I stopped off in the main press box to watch the remainder of the game. I was just passing time, really.

The Vikings marched down the field to the Falcons’ 21-yard line, chewing up the clock until turning the ball over to their kicker, Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a field-goal attempt all year. With just 2:07 left in regulation and a 27-20 lead, Anderson was wide-left with the icing field goal that would have sent the Vikings back to the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years.

Six plays and 1:18 later, Falcons QB Chris Chandler hit Terence Mathis with a 16-yard TD strike to tie the game. With 49 seconds remaining in regulation, Vikings head coach Dennis Green and Billick, his offensive coordinator, chose to sit on the ball and let the clock expire while heading the greatest offense in NFL history.

From nearly the identical spot that Anderson missed his field-goal attempt in regulation, his counterpart, Morten Andersen of the Falcons, nailed a 38-yarder through the uprights 11:52 into overtime to send the Falcons to their first-ever Super Bowl.

I was nervously watching history unfold from the press box as Billick inched closer to Baltimore, but there’s just one little story I need to fit in here – a story of joy that I didn’t understand until that night in Tampa at Super Bowl XXXV.

The second that the ball went through the uprights, the man sitting next to me started shrieking and hyperventilating in a way I’d never seen before. I thought he was having a heart attack. He jerked up out of his seat and just started hysterically crying and screaming and hugging anyone and everyone he could get his arms around. That man, I would later deduce, was Falcons president Taylor Smith, who was reacting to what would be the greatest single moment of his professional life. After 33 years in football and countless heartaches, losses and failures, I saw a man’s reaction to the greatest accomplishment in his profession and it moved me. I got teary-eyed seeing his utter, child-like joy next to me.

He quickly disappeared down the stairwell in the back of the press box and it was back to the business of finding Billick for me.

Of course my mind was racing on that walk down to the Vikings locker room. Not only was Billick coming to Baltimore, he was coming now. The Vikings lost. How in the world did they lose that game? Why did they sit on the ball? The media’s gonna torch him and Green. What a great time to meet the new coach of the Ravens. Could this guy possibly be in a worse mood? Then it got crazy. What if he doesn’t take the job? I saw a guy in the hallway who looked like Dwight Clark, who was the personnel director of the Browns. Would he be reporting back to Browns president Carmen Policy with a Billick update? What if he goes to Cleveland instead? I’ll look like a fool! My sources guaranteed me he was taking the Ravens job!

Inside the Vikings locker room, it was like a morgue. Guys were crying, bleeding, screaming, frustrated, moaning, yelling at each other. Not a pleasant place to be. Out on the field, the video crews were capturing the infamous footage of Falcons head coach Dan Reeves doing “The Dirty Bird” with running back Jamal Anderson and company.

I waited off to the side of the locker room and inquired as to where the coaches’ office was located. A couple of ball boys told me they saw Billick inside of that room, so I knew he was in there. But time was crawling. It seemed like the game had been over for at least 30 minutes and the media was beginning to clamor for Billick because of the decision to sit on the ball in regulation. Apparently, Green didn’t give them the answers they wanted because they were flooding back into the locker room from the media cattle call press conference down the hall. I kept wondering if Billick hadn’t slipped out the back but an assistant coach swore to me he was still in that room.

Moments later, with a towel draped around his neck like a prizefighter and a can of soda in his right hand, Billick strolled down the hallway. I darted toward him to cut him off from the other media who were waiting so I could have a private word with him.

And then the immortal statement:

“Hi, Coach Billick? My name is Nestor Aparicio. I own the all-sports station in Baltimore and I’m about to become your new best friend.”

At that point, I realized how tall this man is. He didn’t look that tall on TV.

I started blathering on and on about Charm City and crab cakes and fans and tradition and how the city would love him, handing him business cards and extolling the virtues of my hometown.

Billick would later recount the story thusly:

“There I come out of the coaches office having lost the biggest game of my career and I look down that hallway and there is you and Vito Stellino (of The Baltimore Sun), and the only thing I could think was, ‘Carmen, start the plane! I’m coming to Cleveland.’ ”

Asked point blank by some smarmy kid from East Baltimore he’d never met before about the possibility that Cleveland would sweep him off his feet and he’d leave Baltimore at the altar, Billick said it three times privately to me.

“Young man, you can go back to Baltimore and tell everyone there that they will be my first stop,” he said. “You can tell Art Modell, anyone you want, that I’m coming to Baltimore first. You have my word.”

In spite of the awful timing, he was good humored, very sincere and thoughtful in his answers. I believed him.

I listened to the 20-minute sermon he gave to the media that day about losing the game, sitting on the ball and his prospective job search. When he was finished, he shook my hand again and said he’d see me later in the week.

Two hours later I left snowy Minneapolis and had to change planes in Pittsburgh. I called Kevin Byrne, the Ravens Vice President of Public Relations, from my cell phone in the airport.

“Well, what do you know?” Kevin asked me.

“The timing could have been a helluva lot better,” I said. “He seems like a great guy, very friendly, media friendly anyway, and he swore to me he’s coming to Baltimore first.”

On Monday, I spun the stories on the air all day at WNST, about Billick’s demeanor, his height, the fact that he was coming to Baltimore. He promised me he was coming.

That night as I watched the 11 o’clock news, WBAL-TV – dirtmongers that they are, God love ’em – had footage of Billick and his family along with Art Modell and his family leaving Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse downtown.

The next morning would be the big day.

I arrived at the station around 7 a.m. and was preparing to do my 9 a.m. to noon shift. Around 8:45 it hit me. Billick’s in Baltimore and I can find him. Where would the Modells put Billick and his family up to impress and hide them. Then, a stroke of genius. When the Modells first fled Cleveland, they lived at the Harbor Court Hotel until they found a home. It was logical.

“Good morning, Harbor Court Hotel,” the operator said.

“Can you ring, Billick, Brian Billick please?” I said.

“Connecting!” she said.

“Hello, Brian,” I started. “It’s Nestor. Remember me?”

“You know, I had a feeling you’d be the first guy I’d hear from this morning,” he said.

He said he was happy to be in Baltimore and that my name had been a topic of conversation over dinner with the Modells the night before.

“Yeah, I asked who this crazy kid was and what was he doing in Minneapolis,” Billick said. “You got the Modell seal of approval.”

Ten minutes later, WNST-AM had the exclusive first interview with soon-to-be head coach Brian Billick. He spoke of his intentions and football philosophy, mostly the same stock stuff you always hear, but he was so obviously impressive and intelligent that most fans knew it was just a matter of time and money.

He was a cool dude, with a knack for saying the right things. He wasn’t the typical stiff jarhead coach. He even joked about switching from Vikings purple to Ravens purple.

“It’s an obvious ploy to keep my wife from having to change her wardrobe,” Billick ribbed.

It didn’t take much imagination to realize what was happening – pass the pen, sign the contract.

At 6 p.m. that evening, there was a press conference at PSI Net Stadium to announce his hiring.

Over the next few weeks, Billick went on an all-out mission to get to know his team, his staff, his new city and his new fans.

The honeymoon period would not be brief. Here was a bright, articulate, funny personality who had chosen to come to Baltimore over other places.

It cannot be said enough, the inferiority complex that Baltimore sports fans have felt through the years. Having an NBA team taken away to Washington in 1973. Seeing the Colts stolen in the middle of the night in 1984. Even during the 1970s and early 80s, there were rumors that the Orioles could be headed to the nation’s capital. And, watching other cities finish first and bitching about it seemed to be a provincial pastime.

While the original Modell job search looked strongly at former UCLA coach Terry Donahue in December 1998, the Ravens were also hopeful of at least garnering a visit from two former Super Bowl-winning coaches during January 1999. George Seifert, who won two titles with the San Francisco 49ers, and Mike Holmgren, who had been 1-1 in Super Bowls in recent years with the Green Bay Packers, were both on the hunt for head coaching positions and big money. Both talked of coming to Baltimore as a second or third option, but neither found their way into BWI Airport or Owings Mills. Holmgren, who wound up in Seattle, wanted more control and a lot more money than the Modells were offering. Seifert, out of football for a year, wanted to come back from his television analyst stint and have a job where he could fish to clear his mind. Both snubbed the Modells, and in no small way, snubbed Baltimore as well.

Billick, however, had a chance to go to a variety of different places. He was the hottest assistant in the league and was being given chase in several places, including Cleveland.

By and large, the fans of Baltimore and Maryland (except for gloating Gov. Parris Glendening) were extremely sympathetic to the Cleveland situation at first. Everyone understood the hypocrisy, and the fans certainly didn’t need Bob Costas standing on the 50-yard of Memorial Stadium on NBC prior to the Ravens’ inaugural game in September 1996 – which he did – pointing it out to the masses.

Cleveland had its team stripped away. Baltimore had its team taken in the middle of the night.

We were kindred spirits, similar cities but with different stories to tell.

Baltimore fought, begged, cajoled, bought crab cakes for fat cat owners, was lied to repeatedly, was used as a modern-day civic prostitute for the NFL and, finally, covertly and almost grudgingly, stole a team. It just happened to be at Cleveland’s expense.

Cleveland had its team taken away and in a little more than 30 days after the end of the 1995 season, they had an iron-clad guarantee to get their team, colors, name and heritage back within 36 months. The way Baltimore folks saw it, they got a sweetheart deal of their own and they didn’t have to buy one crab cake to get it done. Especially considering how much they hated Art Modell before the move. They were finally rid of the guy who had never taken them to a Super Bowl.

But the Clevelanders and their fans wouldn’t let it rest and the rivalry heated up. Using the Internet, plane banners at Ravens games (both home and away) and the press, Browns fans made Baltimore and Modell the ultimate bad guys of the NFL.

Stoking the fire even more was the baseball venom, where the Orioles eliminated a heavily favored Indians’ team from the American League playoffs in 1996. The next year, the Tribe evened the score by beating a similarly favored Orioles squad in the ALCS to go the World Series.

Fifteen months later, the two cities would again compete, this time for the services of Brian Billick, the hottest offensive mind in the NFL.

Realistically, by the time the Vikings were eliminated on that Sunday night of the NFC Championship Game in Minneapolis, Cleveland and Baltimore were the only two places left for Billick to really consider. San Diego was a very lukewarm third option.

With Cleveland, there was a staff in place that Billick knew intimately. Team president Carmen Policy and personnel henchman Dwight Clark were from the same family that spawned Billick – the San Francisco 49ers umbrella of Eddie DeBartolo and Bill Walsh.

He knew them perhaps too well. Policy’s feud with one of Billick’s best pals and mentor, Walsh, was legendary. That didn’t help the Browns case an iota.

In Cleveland he would inherit an expansion team with very little chance of winning out of the gate but with a honeymoon period that might see it through. Jacksonville and Carolina won relatively quickly, so it could be done. But how much control over decisions and personnel would he really have with two strong personalities already in the pipeline to owner Al Lerner? And, realistically, how much time would he be given to get the team over the hump?

Baltimore had its own set of inherent problems, but nothing that Billick deemed to be unsolvable. Unlike many who had bought into the “Art can’t win” theory, Billick had done his homework. He knew the Modell franchise had historically been one of the most successful in the league. Art had just never been to the Super Bowl. He also was keenly aware of the financial limitations of the Modell family at the time – very similar to the circumstances he endured in Minnesota until Red McCombs bought the team in 1998 – and that scared him a bit. He knew Modell’s passion for the game and for winning and saw firsthand the enthusiasm of Baltimore’s fans six weeks earlier on Dec. 13, when the Vikings came into PSI Net Stadium a two-touchdown favorite for a freezing 4 p.m. game and 69,074 came out to watch a 12-1 team beat a 5-8 team, 38-28. At least in Baltimore he had Ray Lewis and Peter Boulware and Jonathan Ogden – first-round stud building blocks that Cleveland wouldn’t be able to offer.

Despite insisting that he was coming to Baltimore on Tuesday to interview first, fulfilling a promise made by his agent Ray Anderson, Billick was stalked that Sunday night by the Browns contingent.

When David Modell talked with Anderson, the message was clear: take all the time you need. Modell, of course, had been on the losing end of three AFC Championship Games and had compassion and understanding about grieving a loss of that significance.

When Policy spoke to Anderson, Anderson told him not to bother coming to Minneapolis right away, that Billick would come to Cleveland after he had visited Baltimore on Tuesday. Playing the heavy, Policy sent Clark ahead to Minneapolis anyway, and Clark showed up at Anderson’s hotel room just hours after the heartbreaking loss, trying to pirate Billick back to Cleveland.

Billick and Anderson were offended, and the aggressive plan backfired. When Billick refused to go, Policy called a morning news conference on Monday to announce the hiring of then-Jaguars offensive coordinator Chris Palmer, basically taking Billick’s negotiating leverage away in Baltimore. For Billick, it was Baltimore or bust at that point.

Just 24 months later, as Billick hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in Tampa, Chris Palmer was looking for work after being fired as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.

Billick’s first public radio appearance was on Feb. 10 at The Barn, a crab house and bar that had hosted my live radio show for more than three years, before a packed house of rabid Ravens fans ready to give a hero’s welcome to their new football savior.

Six days later, Billick orchestrated a covert meeting with one member of every Baltimore media organization at an extremely informal luncheon for 15 in the back room of an Owings Mills restaurant. There would be no pens or paper. No cameras. No tape recorders or notes taken. And only one member from each outlet was invited. There would be no evidence or report on the six o’clock news that this rendezvous had occurred.

It was there, The Boss laid down the law. There was a new sheriff in town and his name was Brian Billick.

“I wanted to let everyone know that it was going to be different with me,” Billick said. “I know that in the past most media members were used to it being very confrontational, very difficult. I told them that I would be accessible, helpful, user friendly. I’ve seen it done the other way. I saw it in Minnesota with Denny (Green) and it just didn’t look like fun. It didn’t have to be that way.”

Billick said that he was absolutely going to use the media for his own purposes. He said if you wrote something incorrect, he was going to challenge you. He was going to call you out, but never hold it against you. But you were always going to be able to get what you needed to do your job.

Billick cut his teeth in the NFL as an assistant director of media relations with the upstart San Francisco 49ers in Joe Montana’s rookie year. He was the guy who set up interviews and dealt as a liaison between players and the media. 

Being in the media as I’ve been for 16 years – more than half of my life – you can’t begin to appreciate the bizarre nature of this luncheon. First, most coaches could care less what the media says or does, but one of two things was happening. Either this guy was so unbelievably arrogant that he thought he could control what was said and done with a free lunch or he was just a pretty damned good guy who wanted the relationship to be casual and friendly and not confrontational and combative. Maybe it was both.

Either way, the usually dour and skeptical media was impressed, and during the first two years of his tenure, Billick backed up his words. And the media, for better or worse, presented him to the public as a future king, the genius who would bring respectability, if not a championship, to Baltimore.

He was always honest, very infrequently evasive, but always accessible. Of course, some called him “Compu Coach,” because of his frequent computer-like references to statistics, and some called him an egomaniac because he obviously loved being the center of attention. The word “arrogant” even popped up from time to time, because – like E.F. Hutton – when he spoke, people listened. And, unlike Ted Marchibroda, whom he replaced as head coach, he was always sure of himself. Nowhere was that better evidenced than at the Super Bowl when he got the focus off of Ray Lewis and onto himself upon landing at the Tampa Airport the Monday before the game with an eight-minute monologue about responsible journalism and ambulance chasing for a crowd of more than 1,000.

Billick wasted no time laying down the law with the players either. He was an equal opportunity opportunist. You would have the chance to do things right, and if you didn’t, you were gone.

If the media and players had a dead pool for the first victim, it would have easily been safety Ralph Staten. Staten, an Alabama guy and a woebegone project of Vice President of Player Personnel Ozzie Newsome and Director of College Scouting Phil Savage – both Crimson Tide sympathizers – had been the beneficiary of being a rare stellar athlete and playmaker in the Marchibroda system. He got away with driving with a handgun and not being cut. He was frequently late and inattentive for meetings. He basically was a bigger accident waiting to happen.

Billick knew of the legend and pulled him aside. “You’re gonna get one chance in my system,” Billick said. Staten missed a meeting days later and was gone on Monday morning.

Billick meant business. No more Bam Morris. No more Ralph Staten. No more Michael Jackson bitching day after day in the clubhouse. If you weren’t part of the solution, you weren’t going to be around long enough to be part of the problem.

Billick didn’t just go on the offensive inside the clubhouse. He took on the role of team spokesman – a role that Art Modell relished for more than 35 years -- and played hard ball publicly with players who didn’t fall into line with the team’s contract philosophies.

When defensive lineman Michael McCrary walked out of Billick’s first training camp in a contract dispute, Billick said that the team wouldn’t be held hostage. No one in the organization would speak to McCrary or his agent until he got his ass back into camp. The following summer, after a protracted negotiation with defensive tackle Tony Siragusa, Billick again played the public heavy. Siragusa claimed a public victory and the team, despite truly winning the private dispute in a knockout, allowed the big guy his pride.

The team even built its marketing around its new coach, slapping billboards throughout Baltimore that simply said, “BILLICK.” Here was a guy who hadn’t won a game in the NFL and had never been a head coach of a Pop Warner team, yet a legend was being made for his first training camp in 1999.

Billick made his way onto the banquet circuit the first year of his coaching tenure in Baltimore and had a polite way of handling his celebrity and the expectations put upon him as the spiritual leader of the football community. But he knew very early how important football was to Baltimore and of his own significance in the town.

One of Billick’s favorite roles upon coming to Baltimore was sitting in on the monthly board of a group of corporate leaders in a CEO interaction group, which included the newly elected Mayor of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley.

O’Malley, an engaging and energetic sort who knows more about music than he does about football, once told the gathering of about 50 people – all the movers and shakers in the Baltimore business community – that he thought that by becoming mayor he would get to call at least one play for the Baltimore Ravens during Billick’s first season.

Billick, upon taking to the podium later in the session, said, “Marty, if I win the Super Bowl here, they’ll elect me Mayor.”

And this was before Billick ever called one play as head coach of the Ravens.

Perhaps the most important decisions Billick made at the beginning of his tenure were about staffing. He was going to call the plays initially but he needed the right offensive coordinator. He was inheriting a young defense that was improving, but who was the right guy to take the team to the next level?

“You always have relationships around the league that you form through the years,” Billick said. “You always think, ‘If I got that job who would I take with me?’ Then, in the real world, when you get the job it becomes more like, ‘Who’s available?’ and ‘Who’s realistic?’ ”

Many pieces fell quickly into place:

* Matt Cavanaugh had just left the Bears and was a former 49ers guy and a respected, longtime backup quarterback in the league. He would be the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.

* Wade Harmon was an offensive assistant in Minnesota and longtime confidant of Billick from his days at Utah State in the 1980s who would follow him east. He would coach tight ends and be an offensive line assistant.

* Milt Jackson had 21 years of experience in the NFL in 10 organizations and Billick had known him nearly as long. He would control the wide receivers.

* Matt Simon had a history of head coaching at the collegiate level at I-AA North Texas but was an NFL neophyte who needed a break. Billick named him the running backs coach.

* Jim Colletto was a long-time collegiate coach taking his first NFL assignment after working at Arizona State, Ohio State, Purdue and Notre Dame. He was a brilliant offensive mind.

The biggest questions for Billick came on defense, where he would not be personally spending a lot of time out of the gate molding the unit.

He had two names at the top of his defensive coordinator wish list. They were – in order – Kansas City’s Gunther Cunningham, who was up for a promotion to the head coaching job there after Marty Schottenheimer had stepped down, and Marvin Lewis, who was not officially retained during the Marchibroda purge of the previous month.

Not only was Cunningham waiting around in Kansas City, he was also being contacted by George Seifert in Carolina about working as a defensive coordinator there. Marvin Lewis had two firm offers: Carolina, as well as Andy Reid’s new staff in Philadelphia, if Baltimore didn’t work out.

Lewis made it no secret that he didn’t want to clean his desk out in Owings Mills. But Billick didn’t even know Marvin Lewis.

“I had heard a lot of good things about Marvin,” Billick said. “I knew he was competent. I had just played his defense a few weeks earlier in Baltimore. But we had no history.”

Instead, Billick sought input from the people he trusted in football who knew Lewis. He also sought the opinion of Vice President of Player Personnel Ozzie Newsome, even though he had it clearly written in his contract that he had full control over the staff he would hire.

“I liked Marvin from the minute I met him,” Billick said. “I saw his intelligence immediately and I thought the continuity would be important. Even having the same terminology with the young guys would benefit us.”

When Cunningham was hired as head coach in Kansas City, Billick found a nice compromise: Hire Lewis and surround him with other Billick guys.

“When I hired Marvin I knew the staff I could put around him would challenge him,” Billick said. “Why are we doing this? Why will this work like this? It would help him to keep refining his system. They could all bring something to the table, challenge each other, MF each other and then, eventually, fall in line.”

Billick, trying to blend the predominant defensive philosophies of NFL football from guys who had worked in the systems of the legends, assembled his staff:

* Rex Ryan was named the defensive line coach, bringing his father Buddy’s schematics and philosophies with him. “No one knows the 46 (defense) better than Rex,” Billick said.

* Jack Del Rio would handle the team’s youthful linebacking corps. Del Rio came from the Tony Dungy-Monte Kiffin school of defense and had a player’s mentality because he had been in the league himself as recently as 1994.

* Steve Shafer was named Billick’s assistant head coach and leader of the secondary, which would be where the team needed the most help initially. He had been coaching NFL defensive backs for nearly 20 years. Shafer had coached with Billick at San Diego State in 1981, so there was a lot of history there. Shafer brought the philosophies of Fritz Shurmur and Dom Capers, having worked in their systems over the years.

* Donnie Henderson, a Baltimore native, came home to work with Shafer in the secondary unit and Billick knew him from Utah State in the mid-1980s.

* Mike Smith was a paperwork guy, named defensive assistant for the defensive line. Smith would coordinate game plans, playbooks, scouting reports and work with the statistics that would analyze opponent’s tendencies. He worked with Billick at San Diego State in the mid 1980s.

* Russ Purnell came from the Tennessee Titans after working a decade with the Seattle Seahawks. He would be the special teams guru on the new staff.

With a staff in place, fans and media in tow, Billick set out to work with Newsome in bringing in the proper personnel to the Ravens so he could win.

His first charge: finding a quarterback.

This was the right man for this task, the conventional wisdom said. Billick was the “quarterback guru,” having either started or resurrected the careers of Jim McMahon, Warren Moon, Brad Johnson, Randall Cunningham, Sean Salisbury and Jay Fiedler.

He immediately spotted Brad Johnson as a prospect, having just left Minnesota where Johnson played a well-paid second string and knowing the Vikings were not cap-equipped to keep Johnson and the league’s resuscitated MVP in Randall Cunningham.

Despite an honest effort – Billick offered the Vikings first- and third-round draft choices – Johnson went to the Redskins in a trade for first-, second- and third-round draft picks. A nice player was Johnson, but not worthy of an entire draft.

Instead, Billick opted to deal a 1999 third-round pick and 2000 fifth-round pick to the Detroit Lions for veteran southpaw Scott Mitchell.

Let’s just say Billick’s first move – a move he sold to the skeptical media and fans as “a leap of faith” – didn’t work out so well. Mitchell showed up for camp in poor condition and threw all of 56 passes in two starts before being pulled for lifetime third-stringer Stoney Case, who was acquired at the beginning of training camp from Indianapolis.

St. Louis defensive lineman DeMarco Farr called Mitchell a “water buffalo” after the Rams defeated the Ravens in Week 1 in what would eventually be their first step to a Super Bowl title of their own in 1999. Mitchell was the biggest bust in franchise history, an expensive quarterback who was counted on to be a leader, and proceeded to go 0-2 before finding the pine only to be found the next season in Cincinnati.

Like Lucy Ricardo, the “quarterback guru” had a lot of  “ ’splaining to do.”

Billick went with Case as a starter for four weeks – and the team went a respectable 2-2 – but an embarrassing coming out party on a Thursday night nationally televised game, a 35-8 pasting at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs, forced Billick to his third-stringer, former St. Louis Rams bust Tony Banks.  

Banks, who started the regular season in Billick’s doghouse because of poor work habits, rallied the troops and finished the season 6-4 as a starter, earning Billick’s confidence along the way.

The team finished Billick’s first season at 8-8, and he clearly wasn’t satisfied.

“We’ve raised the bar,” Billick said at the time. “We can’t go back. We are at a new level, and we will move forward. Our fans, the media, the organization – all have new expectations for us. They’re justified in wanting more success. Eight and eight is not going to get it anymore. We need to take the next steps to become a playoff team.”

The players would take his words to heart and come back in the summer of 2000 ready to win a World Championship.

My relationship with Billick is not only special because I was there to greet him at the clubhouse door in Minneapolis on that snowy day in January 1999. It’s special because of what I think he represents. An unrelenting, positive, brilliant, hard-charging and entirely competent personality who publicly is known for his egotistical and arrogant approach, but who privately welcomes in his friends and associates to laugh about his public persona.

“From the minute he arrived, we saw that he was different,” said Vice President of Public Relations Kevin Byrne, who manufactured a press release the day Billick was hired, quoting the new coach. “The press release was all ready to go, and when he looked at it, he saw himself quoted and it was a word or two off. He said, ‘That’s not how I want to say it.’ He was very specific right away. We were nuts with people calling and a press conference about to start, but he wanted it corrected. He had already shown his independence and his attention to detail was greater than anything we were accustomed to.”

Billick was hired after the organization, led by President David Modell, found 27 people to give character references on the then-offensive coordinator of the Vikings.

“We only found one person who had anything bad to say about him and we found out that guy wasn’t a very credible source,” Byrne said. “He was just an angry ex-employee of the Vikings. Brian is just a good guy. He’s got a sense of humor, he’s fun to be around. From the organization’s perspective, he was the anti-Belichick.”

The Modells, still stinging from the national lambasting due to the move to Baltimore, were also feeling the effects of former head coach Bill Belichick’s rocky tenure in Cleveland. After hiring Marchibroda, who was clearly a nice man but no longer completely competent, they needed a better leader. The organization had won with a jerk, who completely alienated everyone in the organization, and then had lost with a nice guy.

“It was very clear that we were never going to work with an ass who can win again after Belichick,” one insider said. “We decided that it didn’t have to be unpleasant to win. Belichick won games in Cleveland but it was not any fun at all going to the playoffs in 1994.”

Belichick was salty with the media. He was frigid to the front office staff. The fans sensed his difficult nature. He reflected poorly on the team when he did anything publicly in the community. Everyone in the office and on the team walked on eggshells all day, every day.

“It was a relief when he went somewhere else in the building,” a longtime Modell employee told me. “Just as long as he wasn’t near you, you were OK. It was hard to even root for our own team on game days because he had treated you like shit all week and you almost wanted him to lose on Sunday. Then when he did lose, he was hell again all week. Winning didn’t even make him happy.”

This time, the Ravens wanted a good football coach and a good guy. Led by the younger Modell, they reasoned that this person existed and it was up to the organization to find him.

“Under the terms we had set up in that coaching search, Bill Parcells would be unhirable by the Ravens,” said another organization insider.

“A month into his time with the team, Billick was like a dream,” Byrne said. “Ozzie (Newsome) and David (Modell) stuck their head in my office and were saying to me, ‘When is this guy going to be a jerk?’ We just couldn’t believe he could be so perfect for that job.”

In addition to the fact that the Modells were strapped financially when Billick was signed to a six-year, $9 million contract in January 1999, Billick had another small concern about the structure of the front office.

Usually when teams lose – they were 16-31-1 under Marchibroda – it reflects poorly on everything about the team.

“The first thing I had to do was cut through the preconceptions myself,” Billick said. “The record (16-31-1) and everyone on the outside (of the organization) said that it was all screwed up here. When I got here, I was pleasantly surprised by how this organization was full of incredibly competent, good people. At every turn, really good people.  I realized quickly that the Modells attracted good people across the board. From the scouts to the front office people to public relations to the secretaries to the way we did business and the feeling everyone here had about each other. They were good people who also were very good at what they did. The Modells only associated with and welcomed certain people into the party…I just happened to fit.”

The mandate to hire those people came directly from David Modell when the team moved to Baltimore in 1996. In a front office of more than 70 in Cleveland, there were more than 50 people who didn’t make the trip east for a variety of different reasons.

“David cleaned house,” said one who did make the move. “I think he decided after all of the negative press they’d been getting, ‘What the hell, we’re already the scum of the earth, we might as well only take the people who are good with us.’ He only invited the people who were competent and loyal and good with the team when they moved to Baltimore.”

“When we moved we went from being a family-run business to a business that was run by a family,” Byrne said. “A lot of things changed when we got to Baltimore and I think Brian was the biggest reflection of that.”

Billick really has a lot of fun in just about everything he does so, at a personal level, we share a common ideology. It’s the American Dream of the new millennium: He works hard and he plays hard. Everyone who works for or with him loves coming to work, and he rallies the troops toward a common goal with a sensible and logical approach. Everyone who knows him in any other way is treated with respect and class. Billick loves to be a wise guy and he loves competition even more.

Most folks who know me know of my self-deprecating sense of humor and “kick me and I’ll laugh” philosophy. Anything for a smile, you know me.

When Billick came out to my live radio show from The Barn for his second public appearance, in April after the draft, it became very apparent that he was going to not only bust my balls privately but also publicly.

In a discussion that included Director of College Scouting Phil Savage, we were discussing 40-yard dash times in correlation to the selection process on Draft Day. An offensive lineman named Yusef Scott, a teammate of Raven Edwin Mulitalo at Arizona, ran a 5.7, 40 time, and I quipped that I could run a 5.7. Billick immediately stopped the proceedings and laid down the gauntlet.

“I’ve got a hundred bucks in my pocket right now that says you can’t run a 40 in 5.7 out on Harford Road right now,” Billick said.

After some laughter and debate – and a few more sips from a frosty, cold beverage – we decided to have the run during training camp in Westminster later in the summer. Billick decided to make it a thousand bucks and we’d do the race for my favorite charity, the Ed Block Courage Awards Foundation.

Billick just destroyed me on the air for three months, shamelessly talking about my weight, my diet, my technique and any variety of excuses that I would use in defeat.

The day of reckoning was August 7, 1999 at Bair Stadium’s track in Westminster. It was a Saturday and the team had practiced on the field in the center of the track, which serves as the home for Western Maryland College.

I had been practicing extremely hard, working on my diet and my technique, but had never truly timed myself. I didn’t want to kill the mystery. I didn’t want to know ahead of time if I was going to win or lose. As my coach Tom Kapp said, “You can only run as fast as you can. Knowing your time isn’t going to make you any faster.”

After warming up for more than an hour – way too long in retrospect because I left my best times on the practice turf – Billick summoned me down to the track in front of not just the entire team and the entire organization right down to the cheerleaders, but there were several thousand fans who had turned out to see the practice as well as what had become known in Baltimore football circles as “The 5.7 Challenge.”

With all of the speed merchants on the squad – Pat Johnson, Duane Starks, Rod Woodson, et. al – it was Tony Siragusa, all 350 pounds of him, who was appointed as my spiritual and speed advisor. Not really what I had in mind. More than anything, I thought “The Goose” was a Billick plant to try to get me laughing too hard to run the race properly. Instead, towering over me, Goose gave me solid, worldly advice: “Screw the three-point stance. Just use your arms and run like hell.”

I had three chances to beat the clock, which Billick held in the palm of his hand. The fix was obviously in from the beginning.

After much commotion and a stirring set of nerves, I took off for the finish line.

“Five point nine one,” Billick said over the public address system. “That’s not a bad start but it’s not good enough.”

Upon reviewing the videotape, I ran the damned thing in 5.4 flat, but hindsight and video is 20-20.

Either way, I was still not a winner.

For the second race, with my nerves more calm, I ran with fluidity and in a perfectly straight line. That advice came from Starks.

“Five point seven two,” Billick cackled into the microphone.

At this point, knowing I’d been had, I started backtalking the guy with the watch. “You’re screwing me, Billick! Give Savage the watch!”

Finally, David Modell dispatched an unbelievably beautiful and fit cheerleader named Michele Walker to be my “pace” girl. Modell and Billick consorted and figured I could use some motivation.

Not only was I distracted by how beautiful she was, not only did I think I was now going to lose the race to Billick, but I was going to be further humiliated by losing to a gorgeous girl.

The clock was to start at my first movement, not a gun.

So, I just took off and ran like hell.

“Five point four eight,” Billick shouted. “You’re a winner!”

Along with the congratulations came a check for $1,000 made out to the Ed Block Courage Awards.

Obviously, a friendship was born.

Two months later when I first lost my radio station, WNST-AM – my lease was up and the station was being sold to another operator – Billick pulled me aside after practice later in the week and offered me some big brotherly advice and consolation, but also some firm challenges as well.

Are you OK? Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. Is your son OK? You’re going to be alright and things are going to work out for you. What is your next step? What did you learn from this experience?

Needless to say, ours is not a traditional media-coach relationship. Sometimes – at my worst times – he’s been a coach to me as well.

The relationship between Billick and Ozzie Newsome is also not a traditional one either, in terms of NFL leadership, personnel and control.

As much as winning and glory go hand in hand in today’s NFL, the Ravens’ Super Bowl championship is a testament to all parties involved truly working for a common goal and finding their roles and maximizing the strengths.

Newsome is the unadopted godson of Art Modell. Newsome is a Hall of Famer. Newsome loves watching film, working with the salary cap and talking with scouts about players. Newsome doesn’t like talking much about himself or his team with the media or even other front office types.

“Ozzie Newsome is egoless,” Billick said.

When Billick took the head coaching position he talked with Newsome about never having a consensus, never compromising.

“I have to convince you I’m right or you have to convince me you’re right,” Billick would say. “There’s no halfway, no giving in. At first, that scared him. But then he understood what I meant. If we have a consensus then there’s no accountability.”

And inevitably, neither man would get what he wants.

“We can’t just run down the hallway and have the Modells settle it every time we disagree,” Billick said.

Before Billick took the job he did all of his homework on all parties involved. Only one thing scared him, and it was minimal: the Modells’ financial situation and their ability to sign big-name players with limited resources. The one thing Billick was completely sure of was Ozzie Newsome and his ability to work with him and win with him.

“Denny Green knows both of us,” Billick said. “He knew we could work together. I have so much respect for Ozzie.

“We may not be together forever because that’s the state of the NFL today, with money and such, but I will never leave this job because of control. There will never be a power struggle between Ozzie Newsome and me.”

“I can’t go back and explain it to everybody. But I did not move to Baltimore after 35 years (in Cleveland) for the crab cakes.”

Arthur B. Modell, Jan. 14, 2001, as told to the Cleveland Plain Dealer

OK, let’s go back to the beginning. The simple fact that the NFL ever returned to Baltimore is a miracle.

And, certainly, a miracle worth revisiting.

Forget about the snowy night in March 1984 when Robert Irsay pulled the Colts out of Baltimore in Mayflower trucks. Perish the thought that Bill Bidwill or Al Davis or Mike Brown or Georgia Frontiere or Bud Adams were ever honestly considering moving their NFL franchises to Baltimore. And expansion, as anyone who had any dealing with it at all will tell, was fixed from the beginning. The teams were going to go to the city that NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue liked the best.

Let’s make this very clear. From Tagliabue to Jack Kent Cooke to virtually every owner in the NFL, Baltimore was not a welcomed hamlet in the league’s lexicon. Because of its small TV market, because of its proximity to Washington and Philadelphia, because it was viewed as a “failed” football community with tiny crowds when it lost the Colts, it was a player simply because it possessed an internal will to keep fighting. There was money on the table in Baltimore, and owners could threaten to move from their existing base to Charm City because it was there and willing to be treated like a $20 hooker. The original Maryland Stadium Authority chairman Herb Belgrad was a wonderfully kind gentleman, following the mandate of Governor William Donald Schaefer (who was the crushed mayor of Baltimore at the time of Irsay’s departure) to pursue an NFL team without breaking hearts. Belgrad was only to chase teams that were already set on moving, so as to not set up another broken-hearted situation like the one Baltimore endured in 1983.

Just like Mom told you, nice guys finish last.

Baltimore’s final hope for a run at an NFL franchise was put in the capable hands of John Moag, appointed by new Maryland governor Parris Glendening in February 1995. Moag wasted no time in utilizing his small window of opportunity to find a team before the money that Schaefer had left in the state coffers was redirected toward other projects in the budget. By the summer of 1995, Moag had identified several teams that were interested in moving their NFL teams to Baltimore, knowing full well that if the move wasn’t set by the end of the year, Baltimore might never be a player again. The money allocated for stadium funding in Baltimore could very well be used by the Washington Redskins to erect a stadium in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs. Houston was already committed and marching down the aisle with Tennessee. Arizona had already moved once but it was an obvious mistake. Cincinnati had indicated some interest.  Tampa Bay and new owner Malcolm Glazer were getting antsy, wondering whether a lethargic NFL community would build them a palace. And, finally, the longest of all long shots, the venerable Cleveland Browns and Art Modell were having some cash problems on the shores of Lake Erie.

Many insiders would tell you the true catalysts in the move of the Browns to Baltimore were Jim Bailey, Modell’s Executive Vice President of Administration and Legal matters, and Al Lerner, a banker, entrepreneur and Modell’s best friend and part-owner of the Browns. Bailey had the most intimate knowledge of the debt that Modell had created in Cleveland. Lerner and Bailey knew of the inherent cash flow problems surrounding the Browns, Cleveland Stadium and its parent holder, the Cleveland Stadium Corporation, which Modell had taken on in the early 1970s, ironically, to try to save baseball and the Indians in Cleveland.

By 1995, the Cleveland Indians had departed Cleveland Stadium for swank new digs 10 blocks away at Jacobs Field. The NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers were playing next door to Jacobs at Gund Arena, another state of the art facility that was leading a renaissance in Northern Ohio. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened its doors in early October 1995, just four weeks prior to Modell signing the deal to move the Browns to Baltimore.

Modell had a huge financial stake in an aging, decrepit Cleveland Stadium that had just lost its largest tenant – 81 home baseball games per year – to a publicly financed, luxury-box laden Taj Mahal. To make matters worse, the Indians were riding the wave of newfound enthusiasm in the community in a march to the World Series, their first in more than 40 years.

Modell had tried privately for years to get relief in the way of a new stadium. Despite the Browns enormous popularity and success during the 1980s (three AFC Championship Game appearances in four years), he was last in line to be satiated because Cleveland Mayor Michael White and Governor George Voinovich never believed he’d move.

Modell had always been a hustler who played games with money, leveraging one company against the other. Despite playing with the big boys in the back rooms of the NFL in the early days, he was truly not a rich man. He bought the Browns in March 1961 for $4 million dollars and only put a fraction of that into the down payment. Many of his business interests over the next 35 years were followed with his heart and not his accountant.

He was the king of leverage and had been for nearly all of his adulthood. “Of course I can pay you back,” was the thinking. “I own the Cleveland Browns of the NFL.”

During 1994-95, more than five million people had seen Jacobs Field and its opulence. Modell was having a hard time selling tickets to his dump, let alone skyboxes that barely had running water. And as for perks, the valet service and champagne lifestyle that big business was getting down the street 81 times per year for baseball and 40 more times for the NBA on the club level was unmatchable. He needed a new stadium and needed it fast or he couldn’t compete.

Things got so bad for him financially that during the free agency period, in the spring of 1995, he had to borrow and personally guarantee a loan for $5 million so he could pay free agent wide receiver Andre Rison his signing bonus. The Browns had come 60 minutes away from playing in yet another AFC Championship Game three months prior and Modell felt as though he was one player away from going to the Super Bowl. His coach at the time, Bill Belichick, lobbied profusely to acquire Rison. Modell realized he could never get to a Super Bowl like this.

Enter Jim Bailey.

Bailey, a former football player at Florida State and longtime confidant of Modell from the 1970s, began planting two seeds: sell or move. The Browns could no longer compete in the NFL playing at Cleveland Stadium. Modell had always held out hope that he would be “taken care of” by Cleveland and Ohio politicians, but tension was beginning to rise as debt piled up.

The last straw came in mid-1995 when, instead of passing bonds to build a new stadium for Modell, the city and state enacted a referendum to be voted on by the public to renovate the “Mistake on the Lake.” Renovating a century old stadium was hardly feasible, and not intrinsically fair for a man who helped keep the baseball team in the city in the first place. Modell wanted at least equal treatment after two years of watching baseball become royalty in Cleveland under an unforeseeable stream of revenue.

Enter John Moag.

Moag’s mandate as an appointee of Glendening was to get a team and get one quickly or the money that was allocated for stadium funding would be pulled off the books. Glendening, for all of his posturing and embarrassing fake “homer-ism” in regard to the Ravens, was constantly trying to prove himself to Baltimore, where his popularity was extremely low for a Maryland governor. Glendening was and still is perceived as a Washingtonian with interests that lie more toward the Washington beltway than the Baltimore beltway. That said, he could always rest his hat in Baltimore if he were a key player in bringing the NFL back to the city. And Moag was his man.

Moag made initial contact with Bailey in February 1995 and was immediately rebuffed. “My first phone call was flatly rejected,” Moag said.

By late July, Moag was sizing up all of his options, including suing the NFL for antitrust in the expansion process. That certainly got him attention at the league’s offices on Park Avenue in New York.

Moag enlisted Frank Bramble, a banker with Baltimore ties, to get the ear of Al Lerner. Moag brought forth the facts and figures about the Baltimore stadium situation and made it very clear to everyone that he was going to get a team. The deal was too sweet, much better than any of the existing teams were ever going to get in their current cities. Someone would snap it up.

The days of Herb Belgrad bringing crab cakes and sunshine to the NFL and its owners were over. “We had tried the carrot and it didn’t work,” Moag said. “This time we were bringing the stick.”

Ironically, it was at an Orioles game, the night of Cal Ripken’s famous 2,131^st consecutive game on Sept. 6, 1995, that Moag and Lerner got serious. Less than two weeks later, on Sept. 18, Moag was in New York City with the Modells, Lerner, Bailey and initial contract ideas.

In early October 1995, here were the options of Arthur B. Modell:

• Stay in Cleveland in a renovated, antiquated stadium with the current debt service and very little financial wherewithal to compete for a Super Bowl.
• Sell the team to another interest completely, perhaps Lerner. Even in selling the team, with the current stadium situation and the debt, the team was nearly worthless because of its arid revenue stream.
• Move to Baltimore for a sweetheart deal, a new stadium and new revenue streams, keeping the team in his family for the foreseeable future. At the very least, it would make the franchise infinitely more valuable as a saleable product down the line.

Just to make everyone in the process a little nervous and to maximize his leverage, Moag flew to Arizona in early October and began paging key personnel with the Browns, the Bucs and the Bengals to a number in the 602 area code to prove he was chatting with Bill Bidwill.

Moag, no stranger to leverage and lobbying, pulled it off.

On Oct. 27, 1995, on Lerner’s private jet on the tarmac at BWI Airport, Glendening and Moag met with the Modells, Lerner and Bailey to seal the deal.

Despite the best intentions on both sides – and some binding language in the contracts – the desire to keep the Modells’ intentions to move to Baltimore private was unsuccessful as word leaked quickly. A press conference was called in parking lot D of the Camden Yards complex to announce Art Modell’s intentions to move the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore.

I asked the first question to Art Modell.

“When the team comes to Baltimore, will you call the team the Baltimore Browns?” I asked.

“Yes,” Modell said. “They will be the Baltimore Browns.”

Modell, in the aftermath of the unbelievably messy media circus created by the move, had already decided to give the name and colors back to Cleveland long before he had ever arrived in that parking lot. The NFL wouldn’t allow him to make that announcement. He had to hold the Browns name for leverage down the line. It was solid advice from Park Avenue because he would eventually need it.

In the ensuing mess that followed the Nov. 6 announcement (the Cleveland and national media, Browns fans around the world and the crafty use of the Internet created a firestorm) came the realization that he would need league approval. And it almost didn’t happen.

There was a tremendous movement afoot to keep the Browns in Cleveland and grant Modell an expansion franchise in Baltimore that wouldn’t begin play until 1999.

It took the league, Cleveland politicians and the Maryland government more than three months to clear the way for the Modells to set up shop in Baltimore and begin doing business. Even in clearing the way for the new stadium in Baltimore, there were many opponents of using state money to fund the facility. “Brains not Browns” signs and pins (some wanted the money spent on schools and education instead of football) were scattered throughout Baltimore by those who didn’t understand the economic and civic impact of the NFL.

My friends and I certainly understood the impact of having a team in town. We just couldn’t follow a solid lead when we had one.

As much as WBAL’s Mark Viviano is credited with breaking the story of the Browns moving to Baltimore, I was the first one who stumbled upon the story. Or more, accurately, it was my best pal Kevin Eck, who worked as a copy editor at The Baltimore Sun.

In late October 1995, while covering the World Series in Cleveland, I brought Eck along to have a traveling and peanut-eating companion.

In anticipation of Game Four, held on Wednesday, Oct. 25, 1995, I left for the ballpark early to do my radio show. Eck stayed behind, said he was going to drop by the then-new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and meet me at the ballpark closer to game time.

When he arrived that evening, he spun a wild story to me during the early innings of the game.

He arrived at the Hall around 4 p.m. only to be told it was closed due to a private party for the World Series. Not knowing how far Jacobs Field was, he hailed a cab to the ballpark. In that six-block ride, the cabbie engaged him in conversation.

“Where are you from?” said the hack.

“Baltimore,” Eck replied.

“Hey, you guys have a football team!” the cabbie said.

Eck, startled, said, “Yeah, we have the CFL now. The Colts left a long time ago.”

“No, not the CFL,” the cabbie continued. “You’re getting the Browns.”

Eck said the cabbie turned to him and got a wicked look in his eye.

“You may think I’m outta my mind right now and that I’m just some stupid cab driver,” he said. “But the Browns are moving to Baltimore and Art Modell has already signed the deal. My neighbor is on the Browns’ Board of Trustees and the deal is already signed. I know, I know. Right now you think I’m crazy, but you’ll see. The Browns are coming to Baltimore. Just remember where you heard it.”

For a $2.85 fare, Eck got a million-dollar news lead and a ride to Jacobs Field.

Later that night, while at a club in Cleveland’s suburbs, my best pal and I laughed like hell over a beer about the Browns coming to Baltimore and what a silly notion it was. And, under our breath, we also joked about the possibility that the cabbie was really in the know.

I came back from Cleveland and told the