PUSKAS: Civility becoming lost art

One of the taglines for a cable-TV sports channel shout-fest is “Embrace debate.”

I’m all for it, even if you couldn’t pay me to sit in a room and listen to Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith.

Dick Cheney would call that an enhanced interrogation technique.

But for every person who embraces debate today, 10 others embrace stupidity.

Exhibit A: Cleveland Browns fan Paul Serbu, who hails from Franklin, in southwest Ohio.

The 61-year-old Serbu allegedly uploaded a video of himself urinating on the grave of former Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell last month.

Yes, you read that correctly. A 61-year-old man, perhaps motivated by his devotion to a football team and the injustice done to its fans by the owner who moved the franchise almost 20 years ago, traveled from his home near Dayton to Baltimore County, Md., for the sole purpose of urinating on a man’s grave.

If you assume Serbu drove from Franklin to the Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Md., that’s a round trip of roughly 16 hours covering nearly 1,000 miles. But it was likely a whiz for a guy as motivated as Serbu.

It’s one thing to park yourself in front of a TV for three hours on Sundays in support of the Browns. But to dedicate that much time and effort to defending the honor of Browns fans everywhere? Serbu is undoubtedly special.

But when you factor in the time, effort and investment involved — gasoline is well over three bucks a gallon and there is no telling how many Monster energy drinks Serbu guzzled to fuel his assault on the final resting place of Modell and his wife Pat — you realize something …

Art Modell won.

Serbu wasted a significant amount of time, effort and money on the endeavor, has been charged with disorderly conduct in a cemetery and has unfairly maligned Browns fans by association.

I can’t name a single Browns fan who defends Modell. He systematically dismantled one of the NFL’s flagship franchises beginning with his purchase of the team in 1961. Yes, Modell won a title in 1964 with many of the players left over from before he fired Paul Brown. But aside from fleeting glory in the 1980s, the rest of his stewardship of the Browns was an abysmal failure right up until he moved the team to Baltimore.

But, hey, an idiot urinating on Modell’s grave almost two decades later makes us all feel better, right?

No, it doesn’t. But it is another example of our increasingly lack of civility.

Far worse things happen in Baltimore — and everywhere else — every day than Serbu “watering” Modell’s grave. But he deserves whatever punishment he gets.

But in an ironic example of a dog chasing its tail, many of the same Ravens fans who call for the book to be thrown at Serbu are doubtlessly cheering running back Ray Rice, who knocked his fiancee unconscious.

Noted social philosopher Rodney King once asked, “Can’t we all just get along?”

The answer, sadly, is no. There is no debating that.

Write Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas at epuskas@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @EdPuskas_Vindy.