Ravens Revamp Identity

Football fans here always will have a place in their hearts for the Baltimore Colts, who owned this city for 30 years until Bob Irsay whisked the franchise to Indianapolis one snowy night in March of 1984.

Johnny Unitas, Art Donovan and dozens of their former teammates still enjoy celebrity status in Baltimore. The team’s marching band has kept right on playing the Colts’ fight song to loud cheers at dozens of parades.

Now there’s a new NFL team in town.

The Baltimore Ravens were born in much the same way the Baltimore Colts died - through the whim of an owner seeking more money who moved his franchise out of a city rich in football tradition.

Many Baltimore fans who still remember the anguish of losing an NFL franchise are a bit sheepish about rooting for the team formerly known as the Cleveland Browns. But that hasn’t stopped them from buying enough personal seat licenses to assure owner Art Modell a lucrative stay in his new home.

Modell appreciates Baltimore’s football tradition. In fact, he’s banking on it. Aside from agreeing to let the Baltimore Colts’ Band play at Ravens games for two seasons, however, Modell is not trying to revive the glory days of that other NFL team that played in Memorial Stadium.

His team has a new name, new colors and new uniforms.

“I made a conscious decision to establish a new identity here, because the 16-year-old boy going to a game today was only 3 when the Colts left,” Modell said.

Former Colts linebacker Stan White doesn’t see anything wrong with that.

“The fans here deserve a team, and the Ravens won’t take away anything from what the Colts did. That’s history, something that will not change,” White said. “There’s another team here now. There will be a lot of the old fans, but a lot of new ones, including our children and their friends.”

For the past 12 years, kids in Baltimore grew up without knowing what it was like to root for the home team in an NFL game. Sure, the Washington Redskins were only a 45-minute drive away, but it was virtually impossible to get a ticket to a game.

Besides, most Baltimore folk never could get used to the idea of cheering for the Redskins, who were viewed as the enemy during the three decades the Colts were in town.

“The Redskins? No way. I’ll always root for them to lose,” said Walter Michaels, a real estate broker from Baltimore and part of the record crowd of 63,804 at the Ravens’ exhibition opener Aug. 3.

Jim Speros tried to fill the void left by the Colts by bringing a Canadian Football League franchise to Baltimore. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to get permission to call the team the Colts, and honored Unitas, John Mackey and dozens of other former Baltimore stars at home games in 1994 and 1995.

“Sure, we were just a marketing tool, but we were just trying to promote football in Baltimore - even though it was football that we did not understand or enjoy,” White said of the CFL experiment.

The fans apparently felt the same way, because Speros couldn’t sell enough tickets to keep his championship team in town after Modell announced his plans to move to Baltimore. The franchise wound up in Montreal.

White, who grew up in Cleveland and played at Ohio State, can understand the bitterness Browns fans feel. But he also is aware of the heartache of Baltimore fans after the NFL snubbed the city in 1993 by granting Jacksonville, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., expansion franchises.

“Baltimore has been passed over too many times,” White said. “We were ready to get football back, and if Art Modell was going to leave Cleveland, I wanted him to come here.

“It’s just great to have football back.”