Colts owner is ready to talk even on steroids, By: Ray Ratto
January 31, 2007
Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, declared he has never used steroids.
There. Don't you feel better?
Irsay does. In fact, such an impertinent question not only doesn't offend him, he answers it as though it were, "So, can you put in a thousand words or less how swell you are?"
Except for the 1,000-word limit, he's fine. And given that his father was known basically for being one of the first true mega-bastards in professional sports history, he is downright gabby.
Of course, this being the Super Bowl, he is wont to share himself a bit more than he might normally, but by any stretch, Irsay is cut from a different cloth than, say, Al Davis and John York. Neither of them, merely to take one example, would have consented to being photographed for a feature story wearing only a strategically placed Elvis Presley guitar.
But hey, these are different times. Cadillac runs ads with an Iggy Pop soundtrack, and AARP has one with a Buzzcocks tune in the background. To quote the bard, nothing is as it seems.
Anyway, back to the steroids.
Irsay, a self-admitted child of the 1970s and given to occasional flights of excess, was at one point a college football player at SMU, then got into power lifting. "I weighed as much as 295 in the '80s, squatting 750 pounds and then running 26-mile marathons - always the extremist," he said. "So when you start getting those injuries, the medication (in this case, Vicodin) works really good. I had about three surgeries (back, elbow and wrist), and through the surgeries, you get on the medication and it works really well, but you build up a tolerance and there it starts."
That explained his rehab trip to kick the habit in 2002, another subject on which he is unabashedly free, but the obvious next question, the one with the "S" word, came hard and fast on its heels.
"I never did," he said. "I never chose to. I always felt it would be kind of strange to take something that could change your body. I had about a 20,000-calorie diet when I got up to 295, but I never took steroids my whole life. I wouldn't be afraid to admit if I did, but I never did."
And truth is, he probably wouldn't be afraid to admit it. Irsay is rather attracted to the light of fame, and not just his share. He is an inveterate collector, owning personal letters from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and a guitar from George Harrison during the Beatles years. Irsay paid more than $2.4 million at auction for the scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," and laughs when he includes on his list of acquisitions the glasses Mike Myers wore in an "Austin Powers" movie. His listed influences include Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Peter Townshend, and he admits to being lured by poets and writers.
Not much time for breaking down film, then.
All this matters only because of the opprobrium in which his father Bob is held, not only while he owned the Colts in both cities, but the way he removed them from Baltimore in the middle of the night in 1984. Though the decision came only two years after the Raiders left Oakland, the wound Irsay left still produces a Pavlovian response of hatred in Maryland.
Even Peyton Manning said during Tuesday's media group grope, "I never knew the previous owner. Everything I've read about him and hear about him, I don't think I'd probably have liked him very much."
"I always kind of joke that the apple doesn't fall from the tree unless the tree is on a steep hill," he said. "I don't know who put that hill there."
Irsay, though, is part of the tree as well as the hill. He helped carry boxes out of the Colts' complex that night, became the general manager once the team landed in Indianapolis and held the job until handing it to Bill Polian nine years ago. "You literally don't have the time to do that when you're dealing with the macro issues of ownership. I just think that when you're an owner, you look for a strong general manager, and that's where you move out from."
In other words, he doesn't subscribe to the Raiders' top-only management structure, or whatever type of structure they have in the 49ers' organization. On the other hand, he is getting a new stadium built in Indianapolis, thereby preventing him from being the second Irsay to win a town's eternal hatred.
"You know, my dad passed 10 years ago, and the Ravens are there now," he said, "and it's been what, a quarter-century, so it's probably not felt so intensely. But I don't know the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers or the Minneapolis Lakers or whatever, or how long those things took before it wasn't even brought up."
The answer, so far, is not yet.
He still looks slightly odd in a pinstriped dark suit, but Irsay is the full-on owner now. He likes to think of himself as a mover among a group of second-generation owners (John Mara, Art Rooney III, Clark Hunt) who might turn out to be the future of the league, and he no longer is power lifting anything except the Indianapolis political establishment. And for sure his days of stripping down to the altogether for a magazine story are right out.
In short, Jim Irsay is now a full-fledged adult, albeit with a more whimsical world view than either Smilin' Johnny or Our Al. The man has autographs from Gandhi and Houdini, after all, and most owners would be prouder to say that Gandhi and Houdini have their autographs.
And he's never done steroids. What else could you want from a multimillionaire businessman who hangs with John Cougar Mellencamp and Stephen Stills?
