Legacy

One hundred fifty years ago today, two great armies clashed in a titanic struggle that would decide the fate of a nation. "Around a cornfield and a little white Dunker church, around a stone bridge and in a pasture lane worn by cow paths, surged a human tornado," wrote Carl Sandburg many years later. Never before or since has such a deadly concentration of firepower been unleashed on the American continent. The Battle of Antietam, waged across a meandering stream called Antietam Creek in Western Maryland near Hagerstown, was the first great turning point of the American Civil War and the bloodiest single day of combat ever waged on U.S. soil.

Bob Costas, one of the sports world's most eloquent voices, used one of pop culture's biggest stages to argue for Art Modell's place in pro football's Hall of Fame Sunday. Here's what Costas said during halftime of NBC's Sunday Night opener between the Denver Broncos and Pittsburgh Steelers. NBC's Sunday night games are the highest rated series on American prime-time television with as many as 20 million viewers a week. As you've heard, Art Modell, the longtime owner of the Cleveland Browns, and then the Baltimore Ravens, died Thursday at the age of 87. Modell's rich and impactful life began in Brooklyn, where he grew up. With that background, he no doubt understood the lasting enmity toward Walter O'Malley, the owner who moved Brooklyn's beloved Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Matt Wood cannot understand it when Baltimore fans shrug off Cleveland's bitterness toward the late Art Modell . "It's bewildering to me when Baltimore fans say, 'Big deal, he moved the team,'" said Wood, who writes for the Cleveland Browns fan website Dawgs by Nature. "It's like, dude, you're in bed with our Irsay. " There it is right there. If you grew up in Baltimore and want to know how Cleveland fans felt Thursday when Modell died, think back to how you felt about the death of Robert Irsay.

Matt Wood cannot understand it when Baltimore fans shrug off Cleveland's bitterness toward the late Art Modell . "It's bewildering to me when Baltimore fans say, 'Big deal, he moved the team,'" said Wood, who writes for the Cleveland Browns fan web site Dawgs by Nature. "It's like dude, you're in bed with our Irsay. " There it is right there. If you grew up in Baltimore and want to know how Cleveland fans felt on Thursday when Modell died, think back to how you felt about the death of Robert Irsay.

Art Modell forever will be known as the man who took the Browns out of Cleveland, but his legacy as one of the NFL's most influential personalities extends far beyond state lines. As an old-guard owner, he helped pour the foundation for today's game and presided over a host of landmark events. The league's golden era was launched soon after he purchased the Browns franchise for a then-record price of just under $4 million in 1961. Among Modell's cornerstone moments:  ** Because of a television background, he was named chairman of the broadcast committee in only his second year in the league.

YORK, Pa. - Roger Clemens  is scheduled to pitch again for the independent Sugar Land Skeeters on Friday in Texas, but he doesn't expect to return to the majors this season. “I don't see it happening. Everybody is speculating and everybody's got their own opinions, and that's great,” Clemens said during a news conference Tuesday at Sovereign Bank Stadium, the home of the Atlantic League's York Revolution. “But it is still a lot of work. When I started warming up, playing a little lawn catch, I knew it was gonna be a little more work than I wanted.” The 50-year-old Clemens, who last pitched in the majors in 2007 for the New York Yankees, created a stir Aug. 25 when he threw 3 1/3 scoreless innings against the Bridgeport Bluefish before a sold-out crowd of more than 7,000 in suburban Houston.

The melody of the president's voice, the intensity of his movements gripped Jeremy Brickey's attention, cutting through the monotony of freshman orientation at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Honestly though, he thought Freeman A. Hrabowski III had to be "full of it. " Who brings that kind of dynamism to rote encounters with students? Two years later, Brickey asked to meet with Hrabowski, this time to discuss his fraternity's return to campus after a suspension for serving alcohol to minors and pledging academically ineligible members.

The day the United States Anti-Doping Agency announced it was stripping Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France victories and imposing a lifetime competition ban on him was a dramatic one in the world of sports and an even more dramatic one for cancer patients and survivors ("Armstrong backs off fight," Aug. 24). It may be impossible to know whether Mr. Armstrong is innocent or guilty. But the whole "erasure" process seems to be happening a little too quickly. Where have Mr. Armstrong's teammates on the U.S. Postal and Discovery Team who have agreed to testify against him been for the past eight years?

As the 2012 Republican National Convention gathers in Tampa, I find my thoughts going back nearly half a century, to San Francisco in 1964. It was the first political convention I covered as a reporter, and it was the one at which Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona was nominated for president. Then, as now, the air was filled with far-right conservative demands for restraints in the size and reach of government, capsulated in Goldwater's rousing call to the delegates: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

When women complain about men who can't commit, they can thank -- or blame -- two people: Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner and the former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown, who died this week at age 90. Ms. Brown was the flip side of Mr. Hefner, offering women permission, even encouragement, to embrace a female version of Mr. Hefner's freewheeling "Playboy philosophy" of unrestrained sexual pleasure. Ms. Brown and Mr. Hefner offered one-way tickets to fantasyland, a journey supposedly without cost to a destination seemingly without consequences.