Written by Jonathan Knight

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If there’s one bizarre thing we’ve learned about both professional politics and sports, it’s that death absolves one of all sin.

The minute a well-known figure dies, he’s honored and celebrated for all the good he brought to his profession. Whatever screw-ups or scandals he may have been guilty of are rinsed away from the public consciousness like holy water on a baby’s forehead at a Saturday-morning christening.

Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it speaks highly of us as a people that we’re able to put aside our generally cynical and skeptical mindset to focus solely on the positive things the deceased accomplished in those first few days when the corpse is still warm and the embalming fluid is still cold.

The problem is, it always goes too far.

We wind up creating a caricature, a partial version of the person that is not only incomplete, but in some cases, dangerously inaccurate. This “legacy-building” can often result in tainted historical portraits, occasionally turning douchebags into deities.

We’ve seen it over the past week in the aftermath of the death of Al Davis.

It’s not that what’s being said about Davis isn’t true: he did a lot of good in his lifetime in football. He was one of the people who was influential in making the bold new American Football League work in the 1960s, ultimately improving professional football in general. Then for three decades, his Raiders were probably the most respected, consistent franchise in the game.

All good things, all worth commemorating and celebrating.

The problem is what’s not being said.

Someone who didn’t know better (i.e. 75% of everybody watching ESPN right now) would get the impression that Al Davis was a true football genius and hero, that everything he did was rational and morally justified and everything he touched turned to gold.

Right.

Amidst the moments of silence and the application of commemorative stickers on the backs of helmets, we haven’t heard much about Al Davis being the putz who moved the respected franchise he built twice in 13 years - and would have moved it many more times if he’d had his druthers and there weren’t so many damned lawyers in California.

Nobody’s celebrating the fact that Al Davis opened the door for the ugliest, most despicable aspect of professional sports. He created the ability for teams to hold cities as financial hostages, demanding the cities provide whatever the teams want or they’ll simply go find another city that will.

And he proved that the league was powerless to stop any owner who wanted to do just that.

Prior to the Raiders moving from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, no NFL team had moved in 22 years. In the 15 years after Al Davis did his “courageous pioneering,” seven NFL franchises would move and nearly a dozen more used the threat of moving to if they didn’t get new stadiums.

Since his death last week, we haven’t been reminded that he was essentially the only guy on the planet who was against the AFL/NFL merger that turned football into the entertainment juggernaut we know today.

Nobody’s pointing out that Al Davis despised Pete Rozelle and everything he stood for, when the reality for the rest of the world is that Rozelle was the greatest commissioner any American sport has ever seen.

When legendary Raider quarterback Ken Stabler tried to renegotiate his contract as he entered the last stage of his career, Al Davis traded him away not out of good business sense or cunningly playing for the future, but simply out of spite. He fully realized - and didn’t particularly care - that he made his team worse and improved the then-title contending Houston Oilers just to prove a point.

A few years later, when Raiders’ Hall of Fame running back Marcus Allen was embroiled in a contract dispute, Davis pulled strings to limit his playing time and out of nowhere suggested that Allen had a bad personality and was a bad influence on the team - a team that had always prided itself on signing bad personalities and bad influences.

When the ill-conceived United States Football League unsuccessfully sued the NFL for antitrust violations in the mid-1980s, Al Davis actually sided with the USFL.

Keep in mind, this is one of the NFL’s “most respected” owners. That’d be like Colin Powell voicing his support for Iraq as the U.S. invaded Baghdad.

Davis almost certainly didn’t believe in the USFL’s case or that the NFL was guilty of anything. He just wanted to piss somebody off. Probably Rozelle.

And of course, there was that time when he moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles because they didn’t spend bags of public money to turn the Oakland Coliseum into a pleasure palace. And then the time he moved the Raiders from Los Angeles to Oakland because they wouldn’t build him a new stadium.

Then, essentially as soon as the moving trucks pulled out of the parking lot, Davis began hinting he wanted to move the team back to L.A.

Your fallen prince, ladies and gentlemen.

The most ironic part of all of this is that in an era of greedy owners moving franchises to make millions on sweetheart stadium deals, Al Davis was the only moron who managed to alienate two entire cities, ostracize millions of fans, spend countless amounts of money launching and defending lawsuits, and conducted two unpopular franchise moves - and somehow never managed to get a new stadium.

And just like the USFL thing, it’s very likely the stadium issue wasn’t really why Davis moved either time. He wanted to piss off rugged, self-conscious Oakland, so he moved to glitzy Los Angeles. And when Los Angeles made him mad, he decided to piss them off by moving back to Oakland as if he were divorcing his second wife to go back and marry his first.

This is the guy we’ve been celebrating all week.

That’s not to say he was a horrible human being or that he deserves to be torn down now that he’s not around anymore to make a fool of himself. But let’s not remember him as something he was not.

Al Davis’ legacy isn’t revolutionizing the game of football or building a successful, colorful franchise, though he did both. His legacy is that of a malcontent, of purposely pissing people off and usually hurting his own franchise and the league in the process.

Understandably, it’s doubtful many Browns fans have given this much thought over the past week. But Al Davis’ death should serve as a good heads-up for what’s coming down the pike in the next year or two.

Art Modell is 86 years old. Odds are good he’ll be dead before the Browns lose another player for the season due to a motorcycle accident.

And as we’ve learned from Al Davis Memorial Week, when it happens, Art Modell will be celebrated as a football pioneer - a kind, decent visionary who never did wrong.

We’ll hear how he was the minister who wedded football to television. We’ll hear how influential he was in cementing the concept of Monday Night Football and the traditional NFL games on Thanksgiving.

Everybody’ll point out how he helped anchor the American Football Conference after the merger by volunteering to move the established Browns to the new conference and how he donated millions to charity and saved baby birds who’d fallen from their nests in his spare time.

Outside of Cleveland, there won’t be much talk about the moving of the Browns. It may be mentioned deep in the bowels of the flowery obits that will run in the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, but only matter-of-factly, the way you’d casually mention any medication you’re taking on a visit to the doctor’s office.

There will be those in Cleveland who will celebrate Modell’s death, and we’ll get some B-roll on all the cable networks of drunken fans cheering and reveling upon hearing the news. Then the rest of the sports world will cluck their thick tongues in disgust at how petulant and horrible Clevelanders are to rejoice in the death of this sweet old man who invented puppies and stopped the Grinch from stealing Christmas.

In Baltimore, he’ll be held up as a hero who boldly returned football to a great sports city and righted a wrong committed when the Colts bolted. The Ravens will put stickers reading “Art” on their helmets, and security will be beefed up in Canton for Modell’s posthumous enshrinement into the Hall of Fame.

Don’t doubt it for a second - it will all happen. By the weekend after he shuffles off this mortal coil, Art Modell will be right up there with Jonas Salk, Mister Rogers, and Puff the Magic Dragon.

I’m not suggesting we speak ill of the dead. But there should be balance, even if it seems like we’re picking on a corpse.

The morning after he dies, nobody’ll want to hear about how Modell was an utterly incompetent owner by the end and completely betrayed the city of Cleveland.

But Art and his family have nothing to worry about, because that’s not going to happen.

Just as he did when he opened up Pandora’s box of franchise mobility, Al Davis has paved the way for his fellow owners.

Troubled with your professional reputation? Want a pristine legacy? Want to be remembered as a visionary and a genius who never did wrong and never deliberately tore the heart out of an entire community to make a few bucks?

Just die, baby.

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