Irsay updates family portrait

The Baltimore Sun

In Baltimore, people have spat the name like a curse for 23 years.

Irsay.

When it was slapped on the door of the men's room at John Unitas' old restaurant, the Golden Arm, nobody had to ask why. For Baltimoreans, it meant filth and waste.

Yet Robert Irsay, the man who moved their beloved Colts, passed his name and his team on to his son, Jim. And as Jim Irsay's Indianapolis Colts prepare to play in the Super Bowl tomorrow, the man with the accursed name is credited as a driving force behind the franchise's success and stability.

Instead of imitating his father, who was known as a hard-drinking reactionary, Irsay, 47, has looked to the grand old owners of the NFL - Wellington Mara, Art Rooney, Lamar Hunt - as his models.

He has ceded personnel control to general manager Bill Polian, paid big bonuses to keep his top stars and deferred credit to coach Tony Dungy and the players.

He dealt with potentially embarrassing stories about his addiction to pain medicine in a straightforward way that came out while trying to negotiate a new stadium deal. That deal, reached two years later, would keep his team in small-market Indianapolis and bolster its revenues.

He chartered flights for more than 100 Colts players and employees to attend funerals for Dungy's teenage son and father.

"He knows football," Polian said at Super Bowl media day. "We have meetings that take 20 minutes that might take two hours with someone else. He's usually one step ahead of me when it comes to anticipating what needs to be done, what the issues are, so it's a joy working for him. He's a wonderful, kind, generous person, and he's the reason we're here."

William Hudnut, the former Indianapolis mayor who helped engineer the Colts' move from Baltimore in 1984, said, "I think Jim has, over the last 23 years, matured into not just a fine owner but a fine citizen, a good, caring and God-fearing individual. He's not the swashbuckler his dad was. He's really more quiet and unobtrusive. There's a serenity about him."

Irsay has always maintained a delicate line between paying tribute to his father and distancing himself from his legacy.

"We all have characteristics of our dad," he said Tuesday. "My dad was a brilliant guy in the air-conditioning and ventilation business when he was in his prime. It was difficult for him in terms of coming into this business, and he struggled with it. It was emotional, and there was the drinking. ... The biggest difference is, he didn't grow up in this business like I did from 12 years old."

If Irsay bows to tradition in football, he's far from the standard, buttoned-down billionaire.

He's collected Elvis Presley's guitars and can, on demand, pick tunes by Neil Young or Led Zeppelin. He used to hang with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. The wildly eccentric Thompson, who committed suicide in 2005, told Chicago magazine that he was the voice of the reason when the pair got together. In 2001, Irsay swooped in on his helicopter, bid a record $2.43 million for the original scroll on which Jack Kerouac penned On The Road and flipped off reporters as he departed.

A team in turmoil

Though Irsay has always paid homage to Mara, Rooney and Hunt, theirs were not the legacies he inherited.

He had to steer a franchise whose glory had faded into a haze of on-field failure and off-field bitterness under his father's guidance.

In 25 years as Colts owner, Robert Irsay left a trail of quickly fired coaches and lost seasons. In a scathing Sports Illustrated profile, his mother and brother accused him of trying to run his father out of business. Ex-Colts, from Unitas to Bert Jones, said the elder Irsay was a man of no morals whose word was far from bond.

And, in the image Baltimore fans will never forget, he took away the Colts in a fleet of Mayflower trucks under the cover of darkness.

Jim Irsay was around for most of that journey. He served as a Colts ballboy and worked various jobs in the front office. Even then, the personal touch seemed to come more easily to him than to his father.

"His father was shy. He didn't come down and spend time with the workers very often," said Bob Leffler, who runs a sports marketing agency in Baltimore and worked for the Colts before they departed. "Jim's more gregarious."

Journalist and author Jeffrey Marx was an 11-year-old ballboy for the Colts when he met the younger Irsay in 1974.

"Jimmy always had a big heart," he said. "He enjoyed hanging out with guys on the team. And the players enjoyed having him around. When I think back to young Jimmy, those are the first two things that come to mind - his passion and his relationships."

When defensive lineman Joe Ehrmann's teenage brother was dying of cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Irsay brought a boom box to the room so the Ehrmanns could "crank the Rolling Stones," Marx recalled.

He also remembered an evening at Irsay's apartment with retired Colts Toni Linhart and Marty Domres. They got to reminiscing about Linhart's game-winning kick in a 1975 game against Miami.

"The only guy now missing was the center, Ken Mendenhall, who had snapped the ball to Domres," Marx said. "Next thing I knew, Jimmy convinced me to play the Mendenhall role, and there we were, long after dark, re-enacting the big kick on the pavement of the parking lot outside Jimmy's house. Man, how he was laughing and loving it. Jimmy absolutely loved the old Baltimore Colts of his childhood."

GM at age 24

Shortly after the move to Indianapolis, Irsay, then 24, became the league's youngest general manager.

He distinguished himself early on for the close relationships he maintained with players. He had walked onto on to the football team at Southern Methodist University and pumped iron with the Colts linemen. He even dabbled in competitive powerlifting.

But Irsay earned the wider respect of the football world in 1987, when he engineered a three-team, eight-player deal that brought Hall of Fame tailback Eric Dickerson to Indianapolis. Dickerson ran the Colts to the playoffs for the first time since 1977. They would only return twice in the years before Robert Irsay's death in 1997.

Jim Irsay received control of the team after a battle with his stepmother. In his first astute business move, he negotiated a new lease with the city that included an opt-out clause should Indianapolis not keep the Colts in a first-class stadium. That wording would help give Irsay leverage as he pushed the city and state to build a new stadium.

He resolved not to be the sort of meddlesome owner who'd be vilified in the media. Instead, he hired Polian as his head football man and handed him control.

In 1998, Polian drafted Peyton Manning to be the on-field leader. Four years after that, he and Irsay found the calm hand they wanted in Dungy. (Irsay wooed the coach with a phone call the day after he was fired in Tampa Bay in which they agreed that the old-school Pittsburgh Steelers should be their model.)

Coming clean

Irsay hasn't avoided dark times. A 2002 profile in the Chicago Tribune portrayed him as unable to hold a focused conversation as he chain-smoked and flicked ashes into a wine glass only inches from the precious Kerouac scroll. A few months later, an Indianapolis television station reported that he had battled a long addiction to pain pills and was a figure of interest in an investigation of local pharmacies.

That was in the middle of stadium negotiations and prompted some local columnists to write that the city shouldn't sign a big deal until Irsay proved himself personally reliable.

He issued a simple admission of his addiction and said he'd sought treatment. He recently said he's been sober for more than five years.

"I power-lifted and I was up to about 295 in the '80s, squatting 750 pounds and then ran 26-mile marathons. Always an extremist," Irsay said Tuesday. "So then when you start getting those injuries, the medication works really good. ... But you build up a tolerance and that's where the problems start. And before you know it, you really become dependent on it and addicted to it."

The drug story did not seem to do long-term damage to Irsay.

"That's where I saw that serenity," Hudnut said. "He can pass things off without roiling, or at least without doing it publicly, as his father apparently did in Baltimore."

Irsay resumed stadium negotiations that were not always easy or pleasant because of the perception that he was flirting with a move to Los Angeles. In late 2004, Indianapolis officials announced they would build a 63,000-seat, retractable-roof stadium for $500 million. The Colts agreed to kick in about $100 million for the facility, scheduled to open in 2008, but analysts called it one of the more team-friendly stadium deals in the NFL.

Model franchise

The Colts, once an example of all that could go wrong with an NFL franchise, have become one of the most stable sports organizations in the country. But that didn't stop bad feelings about the Irsay name from bubbling up when the Colts came to Baltimore three weeks ago. Those who deal with the son hasten to say the father's legacy shouldn't haunt him.

"Certainly, the move from Baltimore was a huge event for him and for everybody involved with the Colts, and to some degree, it was something he had to overcome," Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said. "I admire him for his steadfastness in doing that. He's certainly very beloved in Indianapolis and I think even in Baltimore, he's slowly been able to change some of the feelings."

Even if others see it, Irsay has never claimed to be a great redeemer.

"He is very different from his father," Hudnut said. "But I give him a lot of credit for being very loyal to his father. I think he feels a debt and he realizes that even though his father could be an irascible guy, he wasn't always treated kindly in Baltimore. I think Jimmy winced for his father."

childs.walker@baltsun.com

Information in this article includes comments made at Super Bowl news conferences.

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