By Mark Curnutte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

PALM BEACH, Fla. - Art Modell's 43-year tenure as an NFL owner will end Thursday, when he turns over majority ownership of the Ravens to Steve Bisciotti.

Modell, 78, owned the Browns from 1961 through the 1995 season before moving his franchise to Baltimore. His teams had 28 winning seasons and won two championship games.

His fellow NFL owners honored Modell with a proclamation Monday at the annual league meetings.

Q: What are your immediate plans?

A: To have lunch in about a half-hour.

Q: What was your greatest contribution?

A: If I had to single out anything, in addition to chairing for 30, 35 years the television committee, doing billions of dollars in contracts along with Pete Rozelle, my greatest contribution was in revenue-sharing.

Q: Do you think the move from Cleveland will overshadow your contributions?

A: I tell you one thing that I never said. I think this is germane and relevant: If I didn't move my team to Baltimore, my family would have gone into bankruptcy.

Q: Why did you have financial problems in Cleveland?

A: I did something that came back to haunt me. I helped the City of Cleveland. I took over the operations of the (old) stadium. I pledged to maintain it. I spent a lot of money on repair and improvements, and that hastened my problems.

Q: Who is responsible for you leaving Cleveland?

A: I would say I was lied to. Pure and simple, I was lied to by the powers that be, both in the business community and in the political system. I never heard from them. Suddenly, it was, "Art who?" I'm watching all these palaces go up and the revenues that went along with it. Jacobs hit a gold mine when they built that (baseball) stadium. The business and political system failed the Browns, and they failed me.

Q: You fired Hall of Famer Paul Brown as coach. Any regrets?

A: I'm not going to get into too much postmortems about Paul, except that he was a giant in the field. Paul Brown was an icon.