Success Quote by Art Modell

It is a deliberately modest epitaph from a man who understood that legacies are usually written by the angriest people left behind. Art Modell didn’t say he wanted to be remembered as right, visionary, or even successful. He picked the language of effort and character because “best” is hard to litigate. It’s the rhetoric of pre-emptive defense: you can contest outcomes, but you look petty attacking someone’s attempt.

That subtext matters because Modell’s public memory is inseparable from a single, scalding decision: moving the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in the mid-1990s. For many fans, he isn’t a well-meaning striver; he’s the villain in a civic trauma. So this quote reads less like a feel-good platitude and more like a strategic narrowing of the argument. If people won’t forgive the result, maybe they’ll grant the motive.

The phrasing also reveals a businessman’s sense of how history works. Owners are judged on spreadsheets and championships, but they want the softer verdict: that they were caretakers, not raiders. “Tried” suggests constraints, market realities, bad timing - the whole apparatus of plausible necessity. “Did” asserts competence without inviting specifics.

It’s a tidy, human request from someone who lived at the collision point of private property and public devotion. Fans treat teams like communal inheritance; ownership treats them like assets. Modell’s line tries to bridge that gap with humility, but it also underscores the uncomfortable truth: good intentions don’t relocate a franchise, money and power do.