THEIR OWN WAY

TAMPA, Fla. —  Pals of the happiest two guys in Tampa today, Wellington T. Mara, 84, president of the New York Giants, and Arthur B. Modell, 75, chief executive of the Baltimore Ravens, say both men have always been known as NFL owners, not club owners.

“That is because they put the interests of the league over what might seem best for their clubs,” Tex Schramm, the former president of the Dallas Cowboys, said the other day.

Modell, for instance, whose players are slightly favored over old buddy Mara’s in Sunday’s little disturbance, has been an active NFL team player since the early 1960s, when, as the youngest owner in the league, he was national-television guide and counselor to Pete Rozelle, the powerful commissioner.

So, one spring, Rozelle organized a 10-day TV business-vacation trip to the Bahamas for himself, Modell, Schramm, and three business confederates and their wives, who moved into six luxurious cabins overlooking the island waters.

Rozelle and the others chose cabins 1 through 5.

As the only bachelor, Modell asked for Cabin 6, and said he’d reserve Cabin 7 for a girlfriend.

A few days later, when one of the business-side husbands was suddenly called home early, his wife went looking for Modell’s girlfriend to say goodbye, and returned on the run.

“There isn’t any Cabin 7,” she said, aghast.

Said Schramm, “Today that wouldn’t shock an Iowa baby-sitter, but 40 years ago, it was a different world.”

It was a different world indeed, noticeably in the NFL, and particularly for the owners of the teams, none of whom, at the time, had ever heard of the most divisive instrument in the history of sports, the luxury box.

In those leisurely pre-Super Bowl years, Mara was making a comfortable living off the Giants at the old Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, and Modell was doing nicely at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, where the ballclub he then owned, the Cleveland Browns, usually contended for the championship.

On autumn Sundays, from his pew, Mara waved languidly at old New York friends, as, in Cleveland, Modell smiled down from on high at his new friends.

The spell was broken for both of them and for the league’s other old-guard owners when a cadre of new owners, committed to pro football as a money maker, began installing high-priced luxury boxes wherever they would fit.

Then the new people had a better idea, building new stadiums with more and more luxury boxes that brought them more and more revenue.

At the time, NFL gate receipts were being divided 60-40. At a specially called league meeting, however, a resolution to share luxury-box income like all other income, 60-40, was shouted down.

And in time, there were three consequences:

* Rozelle resigned prematurely in protest.

* NFL ticket prices rose from around $3.25 to $325--the price of a Super Bowl seat here Sunday.

* Mara and Modell had to leave the family pews.

Both said that, financially, they could no longer compete for good football players in their old stadiums with the proprietors of the money-coining new palaces.

Forced out of New York, Mara took his team to New Jersey, where with public assistance he put up what has been called the greatest amphitheater ever built for football, Giants Stadium.

For Modell, the road was rockier, longer, and meaner.

Denied what he considered adequate public help in Ohio for a competitive new stadium on Lake Erie, he suddenly departed for Baltimore, where, enraging Cleveland sports fans, he got the required financial assistance as well as the stadium.

As Schramm said, “Art has been vilified--crucified--by the Cleveland people who don’t seem to understand that if the businessman next door puts up a shiny new store, you’ve got to meet the competition.”

There’s some evidence in Cleveland that they’re beginning to understand.

Since Modell left, they have raised a new stadium for the expansion team that would be Modell’s Super Bowl team now if they’d built it earlier.

Meantime, the public anger there at Modell has abated only partially.

By no means have all the suits against him in Cleveland courts been settled.

The anger is reminiscent of the abuse New Yorkers directed at the late Walter O’Malley long after 1958, when O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles for the same reason, lack of public help to build a new Brooklyn stadium.

“You might not like it,” Schramm said. “But don’t blame the owners of the teams. You compete and live or you don’t and die.”

This season, Mara and Modell, the NFL’s two oldest owners, have competed and won, making their way to Tampa for what, despite a landslide of adverse media publicity, is still the hottest annual ticket in America.

Said Mara, who at his age has 45 direct descendants, “I’m hearing from relatives I didn’t know I had.”

Modell, who said he’s having the same scarce-seat problem, added, “The ticket thing was bad enough when we weren’t even in it. Now it’s impossible.”

To their friends in the league, the joint Super Bowl arrival of two such legendary owners is one of life’s happy coincidences.

Joe Browne, the NFL’s senior vice president of communications and government affairs, credits them for much of the league’s success.

“The NFL couldn’t have had revenue sharing without Mara’s leadership,” Browne said. “The Mara family is in the nation’s No. 1 market. They made the biggest sacrifice.”

Schramm, agreeing, added, “The Maras, George Halas in Chicago and Dan Reeves in Los Angeles were instrumental in the most selfless and most essential sports decision ever made--the decision to share the NFL’s TV revenue equally among all owners. Look at baseball. Nobody can win but the New York Yankees.”

Of the Baltimore owner, Browne said Modell combined with Rozelle to make the NFL’s network TV policy what it is.

“That has been vital in two ways,” he said. “The revenue is important--and so is keeping the game free.”

Thus, as free Americans, pro football’s TV fans have the best of two free worlds.

They can beef about the quality, but they can’t beat the price.

The $500 Franchise

Wellington Mara, called Well or Duke by some, and Pop or Grandpa by many others, is known as the grandfather of the league, NFL friends said.

He has been working for or running the Giants for three quarters of a century--practically since his dad took him to the first Giant game ever played in New York, when Well was 9.

His dad, Tim, owned the team.

Establishing an NFL presence in New York, Tim had paid $500 for the Giant franchise in 1925, using pocket change from his income as a bookmaker.

Good-hearted, he did it as a favor to a friend.

“I really suffered through that first game,” said Well, who sat on the Giant bench. “We lost.”

The score was 5-3.

The coach was Navy veteran Bob Folwell, who at one point that day, in an era of infrequent substitution, shouted down the bench at reserve lineman Paul Jappe, “Get in there, Jappe, and give ‘em hell!”

That confused Well, then a student at a Catholic elementary school.

As he said, “I remember thinking, ‘Boy, is this a tough game.’ ”

In an era when bookmaking was not only legal but almost respectable, the well-off Maras lived on the Upper West Side. Old Tim departed every morning for the track, where he spent most of his life.

When he bought into football, he couldn’t have told you whether it was a 10- or 11-man game.

In contrast, football enthralled his son instantly and forever.

A lifetime Giant fan who still watches practice two or three times a week, he rose through the ranks from ballboy and training-camp intern to president, hardly needing a push from the old man.

“Well is a typical New Yorker,” a friend said. “He was born here, went to school here and graduated from Fordham in four or five years. I doubt if he’s ever drawn a breath outside New York City except when the Giants were on the road.”

That isn’t, of course, literally true, for in World War II Mara joined the Navy and served in the Pacific Ocean as well as the Atlantic, rising again, this time to lieutenant commander.

With peace, he rejoined the Giants and was assigned to the scouting department.

“We didn’t have real scouts then,” he said. “We just sat around and clipped the newspapers.”

And, shortly, he married the former Ann Mumm.

Half a century later, Schramm warns, “Don’t bet with Well on the number of grandchildren he has.”

Well and Ann, parents of 11, can count 34 grandchildren, but that was last week. There could be a few more today.

One controversy--a family feud, so-called--has dogged Mara for much of his life.

Friends said that along with the rest of the Mara family, he disapproved of the unconventional lifestyle of his late nephew, Tim Mara, who, for his part, thought Well was unnecessarily stiff and formal.

Sometimes, sources said, Well and young Tim went years without speaking a friendly word.

It wouldn’t have mattered all that much except that Tim, the son of Well’s late brother Jack, owned half the team.

Worse, Well and Tim differed on who should coach the Giants, and even worse than that, Tim’s judgment was at times better than Well’s.

It all blew over in 1991 when another native New Yorker, Preston Robert Tisch, a 1980s U.S. postmaster general, bought Tim’s half of the team.

Coincidentally, old Tim, the 1925 buyer, and Tisch both got in with their spare change, Tisch coming up with the several million he’d saved from his earnings as co-chairman at Loews Corp., where the revenues from theaters, tobacco, Bulova watches and whatnot exceed $20 billion a year.

And so here they are at the Super Bowl, Mara for the third time in 15 years.

He won the other two games, one by one point; but if he thought that was tough, wait till he sees Ray Lewis.

Modell’s $4-Million Buy-In

Modell, the old Ohio booster who now swears that Baltimore is the planet’s most beautiful city, has his team at the Super Bowl for the first time.

Even the best of his old Cleveland Browns always stumbled somewhere along the line, although they were often very good.

But if this is Modell’s first Super Bowl, it isn’t his first NFL championship appearance.

Before the Super Bowl was invented, there was always, after 1933, an NFL championship game, and in 1964 Modell’s team was the upset winner of one of the most memorable of those games.

It was played in Cleveland just before Christmas, the Browns against the old Baltimore Colts, and with Johnny Unitas at quarterback the Colts were heavily favored.

But on the morning of the game, a big wind came up along with a bright sun.

“What a wind,” Modell said. “I’ll never forget it.”

His quarterback was a Yale PhD, Frank Ryan, later a mathematics professor there. And each time Ryan had the wind, which was half the time, he knew he had to throw the ball.

If he hadn’t learned that at Yale, he got the word in Los Angeles, where he was one of the best quarterbacks the Rams ever had, though they didn’t understand that until after Modell had traded for him.

In the other two quarters of that 1964 game, Ryan, heading into the wind, resorted to ball control, usually handing off to Jim Brown.

Unitas, playing his usual game, took the opposite tack, passing against the wind and running with it because, as usual, field position, not the wind, dictated his decisions.

The Browns won, 27-0, or more points than this Sunday’s Super Bowl teams, combined, are apt to accumulate.

For Modell and the rest of the league, that 1964 game was the Super Bowl of its day.

Yet even when you add it in, since 1964 Mara is still ahead of Modell in title-game victories, 2-1.

In lifetime NFL controversies, however, Modell is ahead of Mara, 2-1.

No NFL owner has ever been involved in two bigger messes:

* In the 1960s, after buying the Browns, Modell fired Paul Brown, the coach for whom the team had been named, and the one still widely considered the best football coach of all time, if Vince Lombardi wasn’t.

* In the 1990s, staving off bankruptcy, Modell abandoned Cleveland and moved the franchise to Baltimore, leaving the name of his old team, Cleveland Browns, hanging in the air until it was reclaimed, along with the Browns’ famous old colors, by others.

Modell was called a traitor after both rhubarbs, first by Brown’s family and friends and most of Brown’s fans, and then by the whole Ohio gang again when he shoved off for Baltimore.

On a typical day in Cleveland, however, traitor was never the worst thing he was called.

In 2001, he’s learning that a week at the Super Bowl makes up for a lot.

Looking back, the contrasts between him and the more conventional Mara are stark.

Whereas Mara was born with a silver spoon in New York, Modell was born the son of a day laborer in Brooklyn.

Where Mara was a college graduate, Modell was a high school dropout who went to work at 15 the year his father died.

At 16, when Mara was shagging training-camp footballs for his dad’s football team, Modell also went into the family business, cleaning out ships’ hulls as an electrician’s helper in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

And in World War II, when his Super Bowl rival was a young naval officer rating salutes on aircraft carriers as Commander Mara, Modell was an enlisted man in the Army Air Corps.

Like Mara, Modell has a wife named Ann, but there are only two Modell children, both young men now, and only six grandchildren.

Modell said he got his big break when, after the war, the U.S. government-sponsored GI Bill abled him to enroll in a New York television school.

Thereafter, he concentrated on television and advertising, and swiftly rose to partner in a national advertising firm, the L.H. Hartman Co.

At 35, with the nest egg he’d accumulated there, he bought the Cleveland Browns for the largest sum ever, until then, invested in a football team, $4 million, and the rest, he said, is history.

But not quite.

Whereas the Maras, old Tim and his boy Wellington, set a record as the first father-son members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Modell is still on the outside looking in.

Friends say he has clearly earned Hall of Fame recognition, and in the years after the rage over his controversial firing of Paul Brown died down, he seemed to be getting close.

Then the rage over his controversial move to Baltimore took over, and he fell back again.

A lot of people, some of them Hall of Fame voters, think one of the worst things about the NFL is the way the teams jump around from city to city, like free agents.

It’s a rap Modell can’t seem to beat.

Mara didn’t have to.

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VETERAN LEADERSHIP

NFL team owners, ranked in order of tenure

*--*

Franchise Owner Tenure/Year Age N.Y. Giants Wellington Mara/Robert Tisch 64/1937-10/1991 84/75 Tennessee Bud Adams Jr. 41/1960 81 Kansas City Lamar Hunt 41/1960 68 Buffalo Ralph Wilson 41/1960 82 Baltimore Art Modell 40/1961 75 Detroit William Clay Ford 38/1963 75 Arizona Bill Bidwill 29/1972 69 Oakland Al Davis 25/1966 71 St. Louis Georgia Frontiere 22/1979 73 Chicago Virginia McCaskey 18/1983 78 Denver Pat Bowlen 17/1984 57 San Diego Alex Spanos 17/1984 76 New Orleans Tom Benson 16/1985 73 Pittsburgh Dan Rooney 13/1988 65 Green Bay Bob Harlan* 12/1989 64 Dallas Jerry Jones 12/1989 58 Cincinnati Mike Brown 10/1991 65 San Francisco Denise DeBartolo-York 7/1994 51 Miami Wayne Huizenga 7/1994 63 New England Robert Kraft 7/1994 59 Philadelphia Jeffrey Lurie 7/1994 49 Tampa Bay Malcolm Glazer 6/1995 71 Carolina Jerry Richardson 6/1995 64 Jacksonville Wayne Weaver 6/1995 65 Seattle Paul Allen 4/1997 47 Indianapolis Jim Irsay 4/1997 41 Atlanta Taylor Smith 4/1997 47 Minnesota Red McCombs 3/1998 78 Cleveland Alfred Lerner 2/1999 61 Washington Daniel Snyder 2/1999 35 N.Y. Jets Woody Johnson 1/2000 48 Houston Robert McNair 1/2000 64

*--*

* The Packers are a community-owned franchise, Harlan is the team’s president and CEO.

*

COVERAGE

T.J. SIMERS

Looking for a prediction on the big game, he goes right to the top . . . and finds some fuzzy math at the White House. D2

NFL NOTES: D11