Owner of the Ravens Built His Success by Building Relationships

Inside the front door of the Baltimore Ravens’ chateau-with-shoulder-pads training center hangs an enormous portrait of the former owner who still hovers over the franchise and the city as surely as that oil painting over the big stone fireplace.

 You have to look much harder, and down a hallway, to find a picture of the current owner, the one whose dollars financed that lavish building, the one who is quietly accompanying the Ravens to the Super Bowl here this week.

That man, Steve Bisciotti, 52, is as low-profile as the 8x10 picture of him at a news conference that hangs on an out-of-the-way wall at the Ravens’ facility. Bisciotti declined interview requests in the weeks leading to the Super Bowl, and spoke to reporters only after he arrived here Thursday.

So the conversation this week has been much more about whether the man in the oil painting, Art Modell, who took the Browns out of Cleveland and rebranded them the Ravens in Baltimore, will be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday than about Bisciotti’s first trip to the game as the primary owner of the team.

 “I’m O.K. if I’m one of the least-known owners in sports,” Bisciotti was quoted as saying in the Ravens’ biography of him.

The last time the Ravens raised the Lombardi Trophy, it was in Modell’s hands in 2001. Only months before, Bisciotti had become a minority owner — Modell needed the infusion of cash to secure free agents for that team — with the promise that he could take majority ownership of the team in a few years. He stood unobtrusively in the back of a locker room in Oakland, Calif., as Modell beamed on national television about going to his first Super Bowl.

On Jan. 20, when the Ravens beat the Patriots to win the A.F.C. championship, most football fans finally got a glimpse of Bisciotti, the league’s second-youngest owner and perhaps its coolest: tanned; hair slicked back; wearing jeans, an open-collared shirt and a duster coat; gently rubbing the arm of Ray Lewis, who was draped over his back while wearing a Modell T-shirt.

“In a very positive way, he is engaged,” said Brian Billick, who was the Ravens’ coach when they won the Super Bowl in 2001. Billick was retained by Bisciotti when he took over and then was fired by him after the 2007 season. “He built his fortune on relationships and is very much about that. It’s not a ‘I’m in charge, do what I say’ mentality. It’s an ‘I don’t care if you’re the ball boy or the head coach, we’ve got to create partnerships here.’ He hires people he trusts and then keeps a purposefully, painfully low profile. He never wants to make it about him.”

Bisciotti grew up near Annapolis, Md., going to Orioles and Colts games — where he sat on the 10-yard line — with his older brother and sister, and with his father, Bernard. They would sometimes go to the Colts’ training camp, where Bisciotti asked players if he could try on their helmets. In the Ravens’ media guide, there is a picture of a young Bisciotti standing beside Johnny Unitas.

His father died when Bisciotti was 8, but Bisciotti’s mother, Patricia, is a huge fan of Baltimore sports teams and Notre Dame, and she fed her youngest son’s love of sports, although he played football only briefly in high school.

According to a profile in Forbes magazine, Bisciotti spent his high school summers building piers near Baltimore. But at 23, after he graduated from Salisbury State University, he started a staffing company in a basement with his cousin. It provided temporary employees — engineers — to the aerospace and technology industries.

Forbes reported that Bisciotti became obsessed with making enough money by the time he was 35 so his wife and children would not have to work if he, like his father, died young. According to the Ravens, the company he started, now known as the Allegis Group, is the largest privately held staffing concern in the country. Bisciotti is worth about $1.5 billion, according to calculations Forbes made last year.

In 2000, Bisciotti purchased a minority stake in the Ravens, then largely stayed hidden, trying to learn from Modell. That, Billick said, eased the transition for Ravens employees who might have been caught in a tense situation. Even after Bisciotti took full control of the team in 2004, Modell was a frequent presence, watching games from a suite at the stadium and practices from a perch on a golf cart.

“He treated him with dignity, compassion and made him feel he was still part of the organization,” the Giants owner John Mara said. “A lot of owners would not have handled it the same way. They would have loved to push the guy aside.”

Those at the Ravens who have worked with Bisciotti say he has a similar gentle touch with his employees. Billick said Bisciotti would go to the team’s training facility about once a week, but was just as apt to talk with the receptionist as he was with Billick or General Manager Ozzie Newsome. Bisciotti is not active in league matters, sometimes skipping meetings and sending the team president Dick Cass in his place. And he has stepped out of owners’ meetings, shutting the door behind him, to smoke one of his cigars.

The former Ravens kicker Matt Stover said he once heard Bisciotti say, “I know I don’t know football, therefore, I hire people who do,” a sentiment that Stover respected. Still, Bisciotti put his stamp on the Ravens when he made the unorthodox decision to hire John Harbaugh, a special-teams coach, to replace Billick. That reflected his real skill: making connections.

“He’s got a tremendous ability to have a good feel of people,” said the former Maryland men’s basketball coach Gary Williams, who has been a friend of Bisciotti — a passionate Terrapins fan — for 20 years. “That is a big part of his decision-making. One of Steve’s strengths is his ability to read people. I coached a long time, that’s as important as anything I did: getting a feel for people you’re recruiting, coaches you work with. I just watch that, it’s a big part of his organization.”

Bisciotti became a sounding board for Williams when he was coaching, but at basketball games Bisciotti is thoroughly a fan, screaming at officials from courtside. Forbes reported that he shuttles friends to Maryland games on a private jet.

“He’s a man’s man,” Billick said. “He’ll go drink for drink, cigar for cigar. You’re going to lose that battle, I promise you.”

But it is at Ravens games that the full snapshot of Bisciotti appears. He has attended preseason games in shorts and flip-flops, and his closest friends — many of them from his youth — mingle in his box with his mother and an occasional priest, a reflection of his strong Catholic faith and his support of religious charities.

“When you get to Steve’s level of success, he worked really hard, you’re really grateful for how far you’ve come, you’re really grateful for the people who helped you,” said Kevin Plank, a friend of Bisciotti’s and the founder of the Under Armour apparel company, which is based in Baltimore. “There’s that idea of sitting around with four buddies in a treehouse — ‘If you hit the lottery, what would you do? I’d buy a team and bring you guys to games, we’d still hang out on weekends.’ You’d say, ‘Yeah, right, you’d change.’ ”