Profile
Team Player
Bob Margolis
01/01/2008

The ‘self-made man’ is such a spiritually arrogant term," says Jim Irsay, the sole owner of the 2007 Super Bowl champ Indianapolis Colts, and the guy who dropped $2.4 million for the original scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. He’s also a guitar aficionado who owns "Tiger," the last guitar played by Jerry Garcia; an acoustic Elvis played; and a hollow-body six-string strummed by John Lennon on the White Album. "You might lose a few brain cells when you age," says Irsay, 48, "but hopefully some wisdom comes with it. In life, business and sports, the stars just have to align."

(PHOTOGRAPH BY Kevin Foster, Twenty Twenty Photography.)
The son of legendary team owner Robert Irsay, who died in 1997, Jim found a Zen-like balance between his personal and professional lives, resulting in a love affair with the Hoosier State, a Super Bowl championship, personal wealth and a passion for late-20th-century Americana. Besides turning around a losing franchise playing in the NFL’s smallest stadium and healing the family’s damaged image with football fans, he plays with John Mellencamp’s band, hangs with Stephen Stills and doesn’t keep his prized instruments in a case—he plays them. After buying Kerouac’s scroll, he sent it on a tour that wound up in the writer’s hometown of Lowell, Mass. That artifact’s victory lap is like the one taken by the Colts’ Lombardi trophy, which visited every inch of Indiana.

Fearing that legions of Deadheads would climb his wall, Irsay chose to remain anonymous for a while after forking over almost $1 million in a 2002 auction for Garcia’s axe. "It came untouched since he had played it last in 1995—complete with pot crumblings in the case and with this strap that had seen better days," he says.

"Why label Jim as eccentric? He honestly likes to learn about different things."

Some might call Irsay’s wide-ranging interests unusual, but Billy Brooks, a former Colts wide receiver who is now the team’s executive director of administration, asks, "Why label Jim as eccentric? He honestly likes to learn about different things. He was the youngest general manager in the league at 24, became the youngest owner at 37, and really grew up around it."

Irsay fell in love with football as a kid in Chicago. "By going to Bears games out at Soldier Field with my dad, I found my passion for the game," he says. Robert Irsay bought the Los Angeles Rams in 1972 for $19 million, then, in essence, traded the team for Baltimore’s Colts plus $3 million.

Irsay acquired the Colts through family, and family is the model for his approach to team-building. "I like to see myself as being in that lineage of the Mara and Rooney families, who have run the Giants and Steelers, respectively, in that the team really is a family—made up of genuine people and run with a clear head," Irsay says. "By that I mean hiring the right people, not borrowing against the team—which some owners have done, to unfavorable results—and being there for the macro decisions."

Brooks adds, "He makes himself available to the players and has an ability to relate."

His Own Man
Robert Irsay is said to have had a drinking problem, and the younger Irsay has acknowledged that, at times, life with his father could be "hellish." But he refuses to speak ill of his dad. Considering the animosity felt by Baltimore Colts fans toward the elder Irsay—who, literally in the dark of night, moved the team to Indiana in 1984—he did recognize that there would be little or no grace period to turn things around once the team relocated. "We knew there would be little artificial energy, and this was going to be a leap of faith," Irsay says.

Mark Ganis, a consultant with Sportscorp in Chicago, says, "Jim’s influence has grown markedly over the past three seasons. He never used the small-market situation as an excuse for not winning. His ability to keep talent and bring in a coach like Tony Dungy, to win and lose with grace, ink a solid stadium deal, and come within a few votes of having Indianapolis host the 2011 Super Bowl all contribute to why he commands the respect of each and every owner in the league."

IRSAY'S COLLECTION includes a Gibson guitar signed by coach Tony Dungy and quarterback Peyton Manning. (Photograph by Kevin Foster, Twenty Twenty Photography.)

By all accounts, since taking over in the 1997 season, Irsay has spent money intelligently and hired smart football people, including Bill Polian, the team’s current president. After just one year on the job he replaced the coach and chose quarterback Peyton Manning as the first pick in the 1998 NFL draft, passing up the now-forgotten Ryan Leaf. After going 3–13 in 1998, the Colts turned things around, literally, going 13–3 in 1999.

The Colts’ new $675 million stadium began construction in early 2006, and had a name by March. Lucas Oil Products agreed to a $121.5 million naming-rights deal that is a cornerstone of the team’s strategy to maintain one of the league’s highest payrolls, despite playing in a small market. The Colts will play home games in the newly christened Lucas Oil Stadium for at least the next 20 years.

In working out the construction deal, Irsay exhibited patience with the city’s political structure and kept rumors of a move to Los Angeles from getting out of hand. "At the end of the day, I don’t care how good a negotiator you are," he says, "you need leverage. But after watching what happened in Baltimore, we learned a few lessons."

Under the terms of the agreement that the Colts worked out with state and city officials in 2005, the Colts keep all revenue related to naming rights. The team is also making naming and design rights available for 12 parts of the stadium. Corporate boxes, known as suite-level sponsorships—including one for the inaugural signee, ProLiance Energy—run around $600,000 per season. These side deals are expected to kick in up to $10 million annually for the franchise after the retractable-roof stadium opens in 2008.

Lucas Oil Stadium made Indianapolis competitive in its bid to host the Super Bowl. Despite losing to Dallas in that contest, the forces behind an Indy Super Bowl hope to launch a bid for 2012. The city has already blocked out three weeks in 2012 for the event, and Irsay is hoping for a Colts-Seahawks scrap. "I hear [Seahawks owner] Paul Allen plays a mean version of [Neil Young’s] ‘Cinnamon Girl,’" he says. "We’ll jam."

Bob Margolis is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.