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| Profile |
Team Player
Bob Margolis
01/01/2008
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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.
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