Colts’ owner is new face of old school

Irsay, in his office at team headquarters, is at work on the Colts’ “Golden Era” in Indianapolis, modeled on the success of the Steelers’ and Giants’ old-line ownership families.

“You know, coming from Hunter, what a compliment,” Jim Irsaysaid, returning the manically inscribed, first-edition copy of his famed authorfriend’s “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72” to a cabinet behind hisdesk. “A lot of people would be, like, ‘You sonofabitch.’ But from Hunter, itjust feels like it’s such a compliment.”

That he has the book, signed with such, ummmm, care, speaks tohis wealth and influence. Irsay, the second-generation owner of theIndianapolis Colts, got it from a friend, film director Cameron Crowe, after Irsay and his wife played themselves in Crowe’s footballmovie, “Jerry Maguire.” Irsay found out that Thompson was an NFL fan and usedthat as an icebreaker into a friendship that lasted a decade. Thompson shothimself to death in 2005.

“What a sweet guy,” Irsay said. “Itwas tough losing Hunter.”

Irsay received the book because ofwho he is: the wealthy owner of an NFL team.

But appreciating it; keeping itnear and showing it around, not as a valuable, signed, first edition, but as animportant piece of pop culture and a connection to a departed friend; and thenlaughing about it; laughing about it as a way of mourning that friend, anothermourning, too damned many mournings for a man of 47; laughing at the words thatcould have bitten so hard and close, because at the time the Good Doctor wrotethem the Colts really did stink, on the way to back-to-back 3-13 stink; all ofthat appreciating and showing and laughing and mourning and laughing some more?Irsay appreciates the book, in all those ways for all those reasons, because ofwho he is.

He owns a National Football Leagueteam. He also owns the scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote the Beat classic “Onthe Road,” for which Irsay paid $2.43 million at a Christie’s auction. And heowns one of Elvis’ guitars.

Jim Irsay plays guitar and writessongs, some of which he has recorded at singer John Mellencamp’s studio down inBloomington, backed by whatever members of Mellencamp’s band might be availableand some other friends — Mike Mills from R.E.M. and, sometimes, Stephen Stills— again, perks that come because of who he is, but also because of who heis.

Jim Irsay adores writing and thosewho write well, is excited by songs and songwriters, and particularly by poetryand poets. He quotes Bob Dylan and John Lennon almost to the point ofobsession, although not as often as he used to, and when he describes the workof his favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, he compares it to the way he feels when helistens to Led Zeppelin, “with the drums, bass and Jimmy Page. Oh my God.”

Jim Irsay has much. And he haslost much. His sister, Roberta, was killed in a car accident when he was 12.His brother, Thomas, was born mentally disabled and died recently. They werehis only siblings. He was 37 when his father, Robert, died. He is recoveringfrom a lengthy addiction to prescription painkillers that became embarrassinglypublic because of who he is, but which he now wears, honorably, as part of whohe is.

And that National Football Leagueteam he owns, the magical elixir that takes deep-pocketed, yet relativelyanonymous titans of industry from the inside pages of the business section andmoves them to the front of Sports? Also who he is.

Wait. No. That’s not right. ANational Football league owner is who Jim Irsay is. But who he is?

That’s different.

More a family than a franchise

When Tony Dungy was fired as headcoach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers five years ago after his team went 9-7 andlost in the first round of the playoffs, Irsay left him a voice mail.

“I want you to be my coach,” hesaid. “I just want you to know that. We need to sit down and talk about thisjob.”

When the two met, Irsay explainedhis vision for the Colts, emphasizing the place he believed the franchise couldhold in the community. He explained that he had gotten started in the league asa ballboy, as had second-generation owners Dan Rooney of the PittsburghSteelers and Wellington Mara of the New York Giants, and that he hoped toemulate their philosophies. Dungy, who played for both the Steelers and Giants,was intrigued.

“Jim is a lot of things,” Dungysaid. “He’s very eclectic. But he’s also very old school in terms of the way hethinks a football team should be run. And that was music to my ears.”

As the two felt each other out —well, Dungy felt Irsay out; Irsay already knew he wanted to hire Dungy in theworst way — the conversation kept orbiting their mutually high regard for theSteelers franchise, which has succeeded mightily in one of the league’s smallermarkets because it has connected so deeply there, and across the region.

Irsay believes that’s a model thatcould work in Indianapolis.

“We talked a lot about the Rooneyfamily and the Pittsburgh Steelers and the community and players andrelationships,” Dungy said. “We talked about 100 things before we ever talkedabout winning and losing or style of play. That struck me as: This is how itused to be.

“I would not be here if it werenot for Jim Irsay.”

For all his passions and quirks,Jim Irsay, football guy, raised around the game since he was 12, reminds othersin the business of the league’s old-guard families.

“He for sure has a lot ofinterests outside of football, b-ut he also has the unique involvement in thebusiness from a very early age,” said Clark Hunt, CEO of the Kansas City Chiefswho, like Irsay, is both a second-generation owner and an alum of SouthernMethodist University. “I think that’s given him an opportunity to reallyobserve how different franchises are run and shape his perspective on the wayhe wants to run the Colts, which obviously he’s doing a fantastic job of rightnow.”

Irsay wants the franchise to putdown roots in Indianapolis. Though the team has been there for 22 years, it hasdifficulty shaking the image of a guest, in part because Irsay is not fromthere — he was raised in Chicago — but mostly because the Colts arrived in suchspectacularly transitory fashion, leaving Baltimore quietly, on a snowy night,their belongings packed aboard Mayflower vans.

Perhaps the Colts’ new, $500million stadium, scheduled to open in 2008, will help. But Irsay has only somuch control of that.

Irsay with Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson as new stadium plans were revealed in 2004

He can make a direct impact withinthe Colts offices. Soon after taking control of the franchise, he hired BillPolian, arguably the NFL’s premier general manager, as team president.Together, they set to work building toward what Irsay now refers to as a“Golden Era” of Colts football in Indianapolis.

That meant winning, and the Coltshave done that, recording more victories than any NFL team since 1999. But italso meant a commitment to organization as family, a principle Irsay took awayfrom years spent around Mara and Rooney. In today’s NFL, Dungy and Polian said,that makes the Colts unusual, if not unique.

“There are people around here whoare aged or ill, who in another organization would be retired or removed,”Polian said. “But they’re here and they’re going to be here as long as JimIrsay is here. In this day and age, from a business standpoint, that probablyisn’t de rigueur. You’re supposed to be hard and tough and bottom line. We’re awell-run organization, but part of that is because he engenders such loyalty.

“He’s an owner in the truest, old-timesense of the word.”

Dungy thought back to a note thathis mother had gotten from Steelers owner Art Rooney after the team traded himto the San Francisco 49ers. Rooney wrote that he was happy to have had Dungy inPittsburgh for two seasons and that he would miss seeing the family at games,and wished them all luck. When Dungy was cut by the Giants two years later, theSteelers hired him, making him the league’s youngest assistant coach.

It is a story strikingly similarto that of Bill Brooks, the former Colts wide receiver who now works down ahall from Irsay as executive director of administration. Unlike Dungy, Brooksleft of his own accord, signing with the Buffalo Bills as a free agent. Afterhe had made his decision, Irsay phoned him at home. He said he understood thatBrooks was doing what he thought was best for his family. Irsay wished Brookswell and asked him to stop by if he ever was in town.

“In my mind, you’ll always be aColt,” Irsay said.

“I was like, wow, taken aback,”Brooks said.

When Brooks next ran into Irsay,the owner told him there was a front-office job waiting for him in Indianapolisafter he finished playing. All he had to do was call.

When Brooks retired, he phonedPete Ward, who runs the Colts business side.

Ward’s response: “We’ve beenwaiting.”

As he speaks of Irsay, and all thethings that attracted him to the Colts, Dungy frequently connects the dots backto the Rooneys and Maras.

“You’re an extension of the citythat you live in,” Dungy said. “And that’s the way owners used to feel. Ownersgrew up in the cities where they owned teams and they were part of thoseplaces. Jim thinks that way.”

Of course, Irsay did not grow upin Indianapolis. He grew up in Chicago, raised by a father who bought afootball team in Los Angeles, traded it for one in Baltimore, then moved it toIndianapolis.

Growing up in football

Jim Irsay’s father made himgeneral manager of the Colts in 1984, after the previous GM, Ernie Accorsi,quit because the owner traded away the rights to John Elway without telling him.Accorsi learned about it when the news broke during an NBA game he was watchingon TV.

Jim Irsay was 24.

“Let Jimmy do it; sonofabitch cando it,” was the recommendation that the Colts coach at the time, Frank Kush,gave on Jim Irsay’s behalf.

Irsay did his first big deal with Bill Polian, then later brought him to the Colts.

Jim Irsay — or Jimmy, as everyoneattached to the team called him then — had been around the Colts since 1972,when he went to training camp in Golden, Colo., as a ballboy, long a standardrole for an owner’s son. Wellington Mara started as a ballboy with his father’sGiants; Dan Rooney with his father’s Steelers. Irsay, who was 12 when he gotthe gig, remembers players treating him like a little brother.

“Look, you little fat kid withglasses, you’ve got to start working out,” Irsay remembers them telling him. “Ifyou want respect, you better show up at 6 a.m. and be the last to leave. Andyou better pick up every jock strap.”

Players mentored him, and as hereached his late teens and crossed into his 20s they pulled him even closer.“In the tightest of inner circles, I was there,” Irsay said. “They didn’t careif I was the owner’s son. It was beyond that.” He became a buffer between thoseplayers and his father, a powder keg of a man whose fuse could be found halfwaydown a bottle of vodka.

Irsay went to work for thefranchise formally at the start of the 1982 season, as business manager. Ward,who now runs the Colts business side as senior executive vice president, wasalready on staff as an administrative assistant. That first year, the twoshared an office.

“I remember he had an ElvisCostello tape,” Ward said. “That kind of reassured me he was a decent guy.”

Irsay asked Ward a lot ofquestions, most of which went well beyond anything for which either of themwere responsible. Ward wasn’t sure what to make of Irsay, especially when Irsaytried to make points by quoting songs.

Ward got used to it. He learned alot of lyrics that he hadn’t known. And, when Bob Irsay moved the team toIndianapolis, Ward was one of a handful of employees who went along. He wasn’talways enamored with working for Bob Irsay, who had a Steinbrenner-esque way offiring you and then acting like he’d never done it. But Bob Irsay was onlyaround one day a week. The rest of the time, the ranking Irsay on the premiseswas Jim.

“He’s not his dad,” Ward said.

Jim Irsay had ideas. He wanted toinvest in the franchise. He was willing to try things other organizationshadn’t. Ward liked that.

“Because he has an interest inDylan and Kerouac, people may think that football is not his priority,” Ward said.“And that’s not correct. He’s not the stereotype of somebody who runs amultimillion-dollar corporation. He’s different and he knows he’s different. Heknows that people underestimate him, and he loves that.”

The Colts first days in Indycould’ve been written by Kafka. The team set up headquarters in an abandonedelementary school. Irsay’s office was the old library. He spent days arrangingfurniture and nights offering barmaids jobs as secretaries.

Irsay was only a few weeks intohis new job when he made his first massive mistake. Since the team was nolonger in Baltimore, Kush wanted to bring the jersey numbers of the team’s oldheroes — such as Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore and Gino Marchetti — out ofretirement. Irsay thought that sounded fine.

Back in Baltimore, they weren’t sokeen on the idea. Already reviled for leaving, the Irsays got another round ofhate mail and death threats. Amid that firestorm came a call from the NFLcommissioner, Pete Rozelle.

“Tell him my dad’s not here,”Irsay told his secretary. But Rozelle wasn’t calling for Bob Irsay. He wascalling for Jimmy.

Irsay’s voice rose an octave as heanswered, “Hello?” Rozelle started off by complimenting him, explaining that heknew how difficult it was to hold such responsibility at so young an age.Rozelle, after all, was named commissioner at 33. Then, through the back door,he got to his point.

“By the way, I wanted to let youknow what a wise decision you made, re-retiring the jerseys amid all thatpublic furor,” Rozelle said.

“Really?” Irsay asked, confused.

Irsay, introducing coach Ted Marchibroda in 1992, became the Colts’ GM in 1984 at age 24.

“Yeah, you did the right thing,re-retiring them. You did the right thing, Jimmy.”

“Ummm. Thank you, Commissioner.”

When Irsay hung up, his assistantGM asked what the call was about. Irsay told them it appeared that the team hadre-retired the jerseys that it had just unretired.

“I was complete putty in hishands,” Irsay said.

In the beginning, Irsay got thesame treatment from his father that his predecessors had. Bob Irsay made mostof the big decisions himself, and often kept them to himself. But four yearsin, Jimmy made his mark. In a league where teams rarely swap stars, he pulledoff a gutsy deal involving four players and six draft picks that brought EricDickerson to Indianapolis and sent Cornelius Bennett to Buffalo.

The GM on the other end of thephone: Polian, whom Irsay would later hire.

“It took the better part of 48hours of constant negotiating to get it done, and Jim was the catalyst,” saidPolian, who has been named the NFL’s executive of the year five times withthree franchises. “When you negotiate a deal like that with somebody, you learnhow bright he is. You see he can grasp concepts and understand ramifications.Vision. Jim Irsay has incredible vision.

“Jim understands instantly that ifblock A is in place, that will cause blocks B and C to fall into place andblocks D and E to fall out. He understands that instantly, and deals with itinstantly. That’s rare.”

That vision came into play againas Irsay navigated the Colts into a deal for a new stadium. His quest began in1997, soon after his father died. He emerged from a messy estate fight withownership of the team, but with it came a stadium lease that was to run through2014, a ball-and-chain that his father left him when he extended the lease by10 years in order to get the city to pay for a $7.5 million training facility.

In 1998, Irsay renegotiated thelease to include an opt out in 2007, a move that eventually would give the teamthe leverage to advance the debate over public funding for a new stadium.Still, he waged that debate carefully. He showed he was committed to winning bybringing in Polian and Dungy. Then, when it came time to talk about a stadium,he was careful never to threaten to leave. There were no tours of othermarkets, even with the big kahuna of all markets, Los Angeles, very much inplay.

“What I had a chance to do isobserve what happened back in Baltimore,” Irsay said. “It was something to see,because there were a lot of missteps on all sides. You quickly saw how youcould get momentum going in the wrong direction, and if that happened, whetherit was the owner, governor or mayor, no one could stop it.”

The ultimate test of Irsay’scommitment to that course came when Peyton Manning’s contract came up in 2004,just as the Colts were getting close on a stadium deal. Polian knew he’d haveto make Manning the highest paid quarterback in the league, but thought theplayer’s demands, which went beyond that, were out of whack with the market.

Donovan McNabb had gotten a record$20 million signing bonus. Manning wanted $34.5 million.

“I don’t think it’s wise to gothere and I don’t think we really need to go there,” Polian told Irsay.

“Believe me,” Irsay replied, “weneed to go there.”

Irsay knew the Colts could getManning for less, but to do so would mean waiting him out. The negotiationcould turn contentious. The perception that the Colts wanted public money for astadium, but weren’t willing to pay to keep the top quarterback in the game,could have queered the stadium deal.

Instead, the Colts went into thestretch of the stadium run with Manning signed through 2010.

“Giving a player a $35 millionsigning bonus when we’ve already paid enormous amounts of cash over cap andwe’re in an antiquated stadium in a small market, that’s a leap of faith,”Irsay said. “All the dots have to connect. If the overall game plan doesn’tcome into play, there can be a big problem. But the vision that I saw was thatif we could produce a golden era and be tough but fair at the negotiating tablewith the city and state, all these things could come together.”

Irsay, golfing last year and at training camp in 1993, kept stadium plans on track by giving Peyton Manning big money.

Dealing with the pain

When the phone rings at four inthe morning, you hope it’s a wrong number.All but the worst news waitsfor dawn.

So it was with a mix of urgencyand trepidation that Irsay picked up the phone in the predawn hours of aThursday morning last December, when Dungy called with the news that his18-year-old son, James Dungy, had been found dead in his Tampa apartment.

“As a parent, anyone’s mentalityis: Do what you want to me but leave my kids alone,” Irsay said. “It’s just thetoughest thing. So I wanted to be there in any way, shape or form … to supportTony and his family.”

Irsay started by providing hisprivate jet so that the Dungys could speed to Tampa. He stressed to Dungy thathe wanted him to tend to his family and let the rest of his staff worry aboutthe Colts’ next game. Then, the following week, Irsay chartered a plane so thatas many people in the organization as wanted to — players, coaches, executivesand staff — could attend the funeral.

More than 100 did.

“His whole thing was: Footballdoesn’t mean anything,” Dungy said. “It’s a nice thing to say when the pedal isnot to the metal. But, with him, he could care less about the season, at thatpoint. That really makes you feel like the person that you work for cares aboutyou as an individual.”

The Colts’ response madeheadlines. But there have been more instances that went by quietly. WhenDungy’s father died, Irsay sent a charter with 75 players and staff. He hassent smaller groups in support of players, including wide receiver ReggieWayne, whose brother was killed in a car accident last year, and Gary Brackett,who lost both parents and a brother in a 16-month span.

“He does it as a matter ofcourse,” Dungy said, “whether it’s for the head coach, the first-team widereceiver or the equipment man.”

Perhaps Irsay has shown suchcompassion because he has seen the state troopers come to the door with thenews that his sister was killed. He watched his only brother die. He came togrips with the fragile nature of life earlier than most, because either youfind a way to, or you turn bitter and withdraw.

“I just think that, from myperspective, I definitely put myself in other people’s shoes,” Irsay said. “Iknow what it’s like to be in those periods of suffering. It’s not about how areyou going to be perceived. It’s not about a close-knit organization wins moregames. It’s about saying: I know how someone feels, to a degree, and I can’thelp but try to make a difference.”

That has become more of a priorityfor Irsay in the last few years. While he still writes poems and songs, hefinds he spends less time with them, choosing instead to put his energy intowhat he calls his “footsteps in life.” It’s one of those phrases that soundslike it came off a plaque you’d buy at the Hallmark store.

Or out of a 12-step program.

While Irsay doesn’t like to speakpublicly about the details, he went on record in 2002 to confirm an addictionto prescription painkillers, news of which surfaced when the doctor whodispensed medication to him was investigated by DEA agents.

Irsay says he was treated and hasremained clean for five years.

“There is not a greater momentthan being able to deal in that moment of being addicted and being in thatplace and knowing how tough it is, and what a potentially fatal disease thatcan be, and coming out of it,” Irsay said. “I wouldn’t give that up foranything. It’s one of those things that is so much a part of who you are.”

One, among many, of those things.

Sift through them, sort them intoplace, put those of style over here and those of substance over there, andmaybe — not for sure, but maybe — you will start to get a feel for Jim Irsay.

Or, you can consider hisinfluences.

“I take from John Lennon,” Irsaysaid. “And I take from Wellington Mara.”

And that is who Jim Irsay is.