Sins of the father: What Jim Irsay learned watching his dad cripple the Colts

June 16, 2024

Start with the father. Start with the stories they still tell, stories about the fear that bubbled up inside the building when staffers knew the White Tornado was flying in, probably half a dozen drinks down, bound to end up storming through the halls and looking for someone, anyone, who was foolish enough to give him the wrong look or the wrong answer or, worse yet, fail to convince him that his fledgling football team was going to do the unthinkable come Sunday afternoon — and actually win a game.

Anyone who clocked in at the Indianapolis Colts’ West 56th Street practice facility back then knew: If it was a Friday, be out of the office by noon, no questions asked. Because after that, no one was safe.

“Somebody was getting fired,” says former coach Rick Venturi. “Might be a coach. Might be someone in marketing. Might be a maintenance guy. You just didn’t want it to be you.”

Firing was like breathing for Robert Irsay, the Colts’ volatile owner; the man never grew tired of it. In 1972, after just his fifth game as owner, he canned head coach Don McCafferty, who was 22-10 in three seasons and 21 months removed from leading the team to a win in Super Bowl V. Two years later, Irsay stormed out of his seat during a loss to the Eagles so he could stalk the sideline and demand his new coach, Howard Schnellenberger, swap out quarterbacks. After Schnellenberger refused, the White Tornado blew into the locker room and told the players their coach was out of a job. Schnellenberger found out from the PR guy.

Having failed to think things through, Irsay promptly named Joe Thomas his interim coach, no matter Thomas was the team’s general manager and didn’t even know the playbook. The Colts lost nine of their next 11.

Two years after that, Thomas’ replacement, Ted Marchibroda, resigned just before the season opener after Irsay threw a tirade in the locker room following a preseason loss. Again: a preseason loss.

“I can’t have locker room scenes like this every week,” Marchibroda said.

“I don’t know if Irsay was speaking or letting the whiskey have a chance,” added quarterback Bert Jones.

Sitting silently in the locker room that night, keeping his mouth shut amid the melee, was the owner’s 16-year-old son. Jimmy Irsay was used to scenes like this, his father’s fury boiling over, the coaches incensed, the players appalled. But this one grew especially heated. At one point veteran tight end Ray Chester rose to his feet and began to speak, trying to keep his cool while the owner lost his.

“Hit him, Ray!” his teammates shouted. “Hit him!”

Chester didn’t. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t want to.

Eventually, the boss stormed out. The players boarded the bus. Marchibroda quit. A few assistants refused to return. And Jimmy sat there alone, slumped on a bench in the locker room, sobbing.

“It was like your older brothers getting in a fight with your dad,” he remembers.

Ten minutes later he climbed aboard the bus, shaking with nerves, and wiped away the tears. He looked the players in the eye and apologized for his dad’s outburst.

“We’re a football team,” Jimmy told them. “And emotions got in the way of that tonight.”

It was, a coach would say years later, “a tremendous thing for a teenager to do.”

Robert Irsay addresses players along with head coach Frank Kush in 1982. (Al Messerschmidt / Associated Press)

Before he was Peyton Manning’s boss, Hunter S. Thompson’s late-hour confidant and the billionaire collector of guitars once owned by rock royalty, Jim Irsay was a boxer. As a high schooler, he’d leave his home in the swanky Chicago suburb of Winnetka and drive into the city to train. The ratty old gym sat in a rough area of town, near Clarendon Park, and for Irsay, that was part of the charm.

“We’d always joke,” he says, “that it was more frightening going from the car to the gym than actually being in the ring.”

It was the era of Ali and Frazier. The stench of sweat was baked into the punching bags. The workouts dragged on for hours. The fighters would slip on eight-ounce gloves and spar, never wearing headgear. Jimmy grew to love it. He even gave up football for a few years.

His bouts were often staged in the middle of a bar, a scene that’s almost impossible to envision today: the privileged son of the Baltimore Colts’ millionaire owner fighting in Golden Gloves matches at the local tavern while drunks wagered on the outcome. A win paid $35.

Irsay’s trainer didn’t want him lifting too much — he wanted Jimmy to stay quick in the ring — but as the years wore on, the kid couldn’t help it. He became consumed by the weight room. Irsay spent the summers hanging around his dad’s team at training camp, lifting with NFL defensive linemen, and by the time he was a high school senior he’d bulked up to 245 pounds. At his peak, Irsay says, he could squat 725, deadlift 660 and bench press 485.

But as he beefed up, boxing began to fade, and Irsay felt his first love pulling him back. He started to wonder if he could play college football. He started to wonder what it’d be like. After one year at a prep school on the east coast, he looked into smaller schools but ultimately decided against it. He wanted a taste, however brief, of a big-time program, so he enrolled at Southern Methodist and walked on.

He spent two years riding the bench. He was the linebacker who never played.

“Just happy to be a part of things,” he says now.

And after he tore up his ankle during his sophomore season, that was that. Irsay calls it a blessing all these years later, partly because the Mustangs had a star running back arriving on campus who was about to make practice miserable for every member of the defense.

“We’re talking about Eric Dickerson here,” Irsay says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t have been able to touch him. He would’ve embarrassed me.”

Four decades later, he cherishes those days. It gave him a new lens on the game that would become his life’s work. He saw what the players saw, and he never forgot that. The pull a young Jimmy Irsay felt when he first watched an NFL game — sitting with dad in the bleachers at Wrigley Field as a 7-year-old and marveling at the great Gale Sayers — was back, and it wasn’t going away.

To him, there was just something about being in it.

Three days after Ted Marchibroda quit the Colts, Jimmy sat with him for five hours aboard his father’s yacht — aptly named “The Mighty I” — and begged him to return. Joe Thomas was there, bristling over the power structure, and so was the boss, whose anger and obstinance nearly drove away the only successful coach he’d hire in 25 years as an NFL owner.

Finally, the sides settled. Bob Irsay caved. Marchibroda agreed to return, so long as he got to pick his assistants. The Colts were division champs four months later.

For Irsay, it was a rare triumph amidst decades of turmoil. He was perhaps the most oppressive owner in league history — vicious and vindictive, tight-fisted and tyrannical. He routinely made life miserable for those he employed. He’d call down to the sideline during games, more than a few drinks in, because he wanted certain plays called and certain players benched. Sometimes, like that afternoon in Philadelphia, he’d do it from the sideline, shouting at his head coach from a few feet away.

“We always said, the later in the game, the more problems for us,” Venturi remembers.

Irsay’s ire most often came to rest on coach and quarterback. “Nice game, Marty,” he once needled starter Marty Domres in front of a crowded locker room after a loss. “Too bad most of the passes you threw were to the wrong team.” According to Venturi, the boss once grew so agitated after a game he stormed into the locker room and fired the defensive line coach thinking he was the offensive line coach. Another time, he fired every last one of Marchibroda’s assistants — without even telling the head coach himself.

By 1984, the year Irsay moved his team from Baltimore to Indianapolis, he’d all but run a once-proud franchise into the ground. He’d churned through seven head coaches in 12 years, including interims, and it would take a decade before the team would stabilize in Indy. “One of the great dynasties in professional sports, dismantled by one man,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 1986, “Destroyed, not by luck or circumstance, but by what numerous people cite as incompetence.”

But it didn’t stop with incompetence. It wasn’t just that Irsay didn’t know the game. The man was impulsive — after the Colts drafted John Elway first overall in 1983, and Elway vowed he wouldn’t play for the team, Irsay traded him in the middle of the night without even telling his general manager or head coach. He was spineless, too — he moved the entire team in the middle of the night a year later without even telling the mayor of Baltimore. William Schaefer had to find out on the radio.

Said Jones, Irsay’s QB for eight seasons, in that SI story: “He doesn’t have any morals.”

Said Irsay’s own mother, in the same story: “He’s a devil on earth, that one.”

Said Schnellenberger, asked about Irsay a few years after he was fired: “I don’t want to spend another minute of my life thinking about that asshole.”

Said his own son, there to witness it all: “He had no idea how to run a football team.”

But while the father failed, victim to his own worst impulses — his drinking, his anger, his ego — the son watched. The real education came in watching his father cripple the franchise. The team would be his one day, so long as dad didn’t burn it to the ground.

To know how to run it, the son had to first learn how not to run it. For that, all he had to do was open his eyes.

“The fact that Jimmy Irsay turned out as good as he did, with that crazy motherfucker of a father?” says Robin Miller, a longtime Indianapolis sports columnist who was merciless on both Irsays for years. “You have no idea how unbelievable that is.”

“It was like growing up in the circus,” Jim says now. “The sawdust just gets in your blood.” (Courtesy of Jim Irsay)

Bob Irsay built his fortune, in part, by driving his own father’s business into bankruptcy.

According to that 1986 Sports Illustrated profile, Irsay left his father’s sheet metal company in 1951 intent on starting a rival one. Charles Irsay was out of business within two years, and his son — by this point estranged from the family — was on his way to building the most successful heating and air conditioning company in Chicago.

Bob would boast in the years that followed that he turned a single dollar into $50 million, a typical exaggeration from a man who spent the better part of his life at war with the truth. But there was no denying his business prowess, at least early on: Back then, Bob was sharp and ambitious, an astute salesman and savvy dealmaker. Ruthless, too.

That wouldn’t change.

“I only got to see the tail end of it, but in his 30s and 40s, he was a brilliant businessman, maybe one of the most brilliant businessmen of the 20th century,” his son says now. “He was a riverboat gambler, a guy who felt most comfortable at the baccarat tables in Vegas. He could put his head on the pillow at night with more debt than assets. His pillow wasn’t one many people could sleep on.”

While the heating and air conditioning business made Bob Irsay a millionaire, it was the Baltimore Colts that gave him his coveted seat at the NFL table. The scheme was originally cooked up by Carroll Rosenbloom, the Colts’ then-owner, and Thomas, an NFL personnel man looking for a new start. Rosenbloom wanted out of Baltimore and into the lucrative Los Angeles market, so in the summer of 1972, he and Thomas recruited Irsay — by this point flush with cash and eager to buy an NFL team — to purchase the L.A. Rams for a then-record $19 million, then swap them for the Colts, straight up. Rosenbloom would get the Rams, Irsay the Colts, and Thomas would start as his general manager.

It’s a transaction that seems implausible today: one NFL franchise for another, no strings attached.

But that’s how Irsay entered the league. And once he did, it didn’t take long for one of the NFL’s proud franchises to begin to flounder. The Colts won five games in Irsay’s first season as owner, four in his second, just two in his third. Johnny Unitas was traded. Other franchise pillars were cut. Irsay’s relationships soured, first with his players and coaches, eventually with the local press. Stars fumed over his penny-pinching — according to that SI story, Irsay used to insist on keeping the hot tub at the team facility turned off during the season as a means of saving money. He was a nasty negotiator who’d toss out cheap insults during contract talks.

On top of that, he drank too much. He lied. He exaggerated. He blamed. He threatened. He rarely remembered players’ names, instead calling them all “Tiger.” Venturi says he’d fire someone in a state of heavy inebriation, then forget about it the next day.

Improbably, there were good years. Thomas was no coach, but he could find talent. Add in Marchibroda’s steady hand, and the Colts won three consecutive division titles from 1975-77. But things began to crumble after that. Starting in 1978, Irsay’s team would finish either last or second-to-last in the division for nine consecutive seasons. Fed up with Baltimore’s aging Memorial Stadium, he began to hint at moving the team, and by the winter of 1984 found himself in a vicious feud with the city. That January, Irsay called an impromptu press conference after canceling a flight to Arizona to speak with the governor there about moving the Colts out west.

“I have not any intention of moving the goddam team!” Irsay famously shouted that day, the stench of liquor on his breath. “If I did, I will tell you about it, but I’m staying here.”

He moved the team two months later.

For Irsay, the final straw came in the state of Maryland’s push to pass an eminent domain law and seize control of the franchise. It left him irate. “That’s against everything the United States stands for,” he said later. “It’s not your ball team, it’s not their ball team, it’s my family’s ball team. I paid for it. I worked for it.”

Thus the decision was made, though the Colts were still operating in a constant state of chaos. A week before the move, Irsay ordered his son and head coach Frank Kush to fly to Indianapolis. The pair checked into a hotel under assumed names, and Jim called his father the next morning awaiting orders.

“So, what do you want us to do?” he asked.

“Wait a minute, what the hell are you doing in Indianapolis?” Bob shouted back.

“You told us to come here!” Jim replied.

Apparently, the old man had forgotten.

“Life turned into wartime back then,” the younger Irsay says now. “You’d just assume the bombs were going off and the bullets were gonna be flying by.”

Almost 40 years later, Jim acknowledges his father’s many faults — “He messed up a ton of stuff,” he says, “with his volatility, his drinking, his lack of knowledge of the game” — but the son takes issue with how the Baltimore move is remembered. He believes Bob had no choice.

“People lose sight of how dire it was,” Jim says now. “The stadium situation was a disaster, and it wasn’t getting resolved. Some people were saying (former Browns owner) Art Modell was going to give my dad $25 million and allow him to pay it back. That’s such bullshit! Art was on the verge of bankruptcy for godsakes! The only thing I don’t like in how my dad is painted is that Maryland was going to the state legislature to pass an eminent domain law. OK, then, what was he supposed to do? Call them up at 9 in the morning and tell them, ‘I’m thinking of moving the team’? You think that’d be OK?”

Bob Irsay didn’t call anyone. Instead, on the morning of March 24, 1984, he ordered his staffers to start packing. The Mayflower trucks would arrive an hour to midnight. The Colts were on their way to Indianapolis.

The headlines in the following morning’s Baltimore Sun:

“Irsay ends 31-year marriage”

“Loyalty is nothing, money all”

“12 years of Irsay denials”

Miller, then the top columnist at The Indianapolis Star, remembers calling up some sportswriters in Baltimore and asking about the man who was bringing his football team to town.

“They said, ‘Good luck with that guy,’” Miller says. “But I promise you, they didn’t use the word ‘guy.’”

The son spent his teenage summers in something of an all-encompassing NFL apprenticeship, pushed by his father to learn every inch of the operation. Jim Irsay is likely the first — and will be the last — league owner to start out by picking up jockstraps in the locker room and working as a ball boy for $5 a week. Once, upset about their meager salary, Irsay and his fellow grunts held out during training camp, demanding a steep raise. They wanted $15 a week.

Thomas, the GM, promptly fired them all.

They returned a day later “tails between our legs,” Irsay remembers, happy with the $5.

From there Jimmy climbed, from equipment manager to ticket sales to marketing to, finally, the front office. His welcome-to-the-NFL moment, as he likes to tell it, arrived that first summer, when Unitas was still on the team. The 12-year-old was eating lunch in the cafeteria when the legendary quarterback walked up and wanted his seat.

“Move your ass, kid,” Unitas told him.

Twelve years later, the Colts were working out of a local elementary school in Indianapolis when Bob Irsay tapped his son as the team’s new general manager. Jimmy was just 24, two years out of college. He’d last a decade on the job, taking one big swing after another as he tried — and failed — to build the Colts into a consistent winner. While some of the moves worked out (trading for his old college teammate, Dickerson, in 1987), most did not (trading two starters and two picks for the chance to draft Jeff George first overall in 1991; taking Steve Emtman first overall in 1992). Mostly, the Colts sank further into irrelevancy.

The boss didn’t help. Bob Irsay was an absentee owner, flying in on the weekends from Chicago to catch the game and, often, unload on the staff after it was over. Once, when he was asked by a local television anchor how much he truly knew about football, Irsay bristled.

“Just enough to be dangerous,” he replied.

Robert Irsay congratulates Eric Dickerson following a 55-19 win over the Houston Oilers on Nov. 29, 1987. (Don Larson / Getty Images)

And so it went. The Colts didn’t win a single playoff game their first 11 years in the city.

Venturi lived it, as a position coach, defensive coordinator and eventually interim head coach during the Colts’ dreadful 1-15 campaign in 1991. The boss would fly in on Fridays, throwing a few back on the plane while staffers schemed up ways to slip out of the office before the White Tornado blew through. (“I’m not sure Jimmy didn’t come up with the nickname himself,” Venturi remembers with a chuckle.)

“It was like growing up in the circus, the sawdust just gets in your blood,” Jim says now. “Dad fired me more times than I can remember.”

Venturi barely made it out of the ’91 season. In fact, 10 games in, he was sure he was finished. The Colts were 0-9, playing the Jets at home, and trailing at halftime. Venturi got word that the boss was on his way to the locker room, and he was furious. “The old man’s really pissed,” a staffer told him. “He’s on the warpath.”

Here we go again, Venturi thought. Only this time, the coach wasn’t in the mood. “Keep him out,” he ordered.

No luck. Irsay barged in, his lawyer a step behind. Venturi assumed the worst. He figured he was getting fired.

“This is a godawful-looking team!” Venturi remembers the boss shouting. “What the hell are you doing? You’re so conservative! You won’t throw it!”

With that, the coach snapped. Venturi knew if he sat there and took the verbal abuse, it’d never stop. “Don’t ever back down to dad,” Jimmy had always told him in private. “If he senses weakness, he’ll kill you.”

So Venturi went right back at him. The Colts were 0-9. What did he have to lose?

“Listen, goddammit! All I’m trying to do is keep this shitty team close until we get to the fourth quarter! Then we’re gonna try and pull it out then!”

Then he threw the boss a bone: He promised him the offense would take a deep shot early in the third quarter. To everyone’s surprise, Irsay seemed satisfied.

And by god, it worked. “Something like a 45-yard gain,” Venturi remembers with a laugh. The Colts squeaked out a one-point win, their only triumph in an otherwise miserable season.

As the years rolled on and his health deteriorated, Bob Irsay drifted into the shadows. After he fired his son in 1994 — this time for good — and hired Bill Tobin as general manager, the Colts finally became competent. Tobin drafted Marshall Faulk, Marvin Harrison and Tarik Glenn within a four-year window and built the team that came a Hail Mary shy of playing in Super Bowl XXX.

Bob Irsay suffered a stroke in 1995 and died in January 1997.

The apprenticeship was over. It was now Jimmy’s team, and he could do what he wanted with it.

And this is what he did: He got out of the way.

Jim Irsay became sole owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts in the winter of 1997, and five months before the team drafted The Quarterback Who’d Change Everything, Irsay made the shrewdest move of his 50 years in football: He sent a third-round pick to the Carolina Panthers in exchange for their general manager. Then he let Bill Polian build a Super Bowl champion.

Irsay wouldn’t meddle, wouldn’t micromanage. He wouldn’t call down from the owner’s box during games and demand the quarterback be benched — or worse yet, scream it from the sideline. He’d let his GM draft. He’d let his coaches coach. It was a conscious decision, one Irsay had been mulling for years, one he knew had to make.

The day he retired, Peyton Manning noted Jim Irsay’s kindness after Manning’s grandmother passed away. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)

There were better personnel men out there, simple as that. He was never going to be the next Jerry Jones.

“There’s no way I could do both, even back then,” says Irsay, now 61. “I think it’s dangerous when owners try and impose their will.

“I know what you have to do to be a general manager. There’s no way I could see a guy at the Senior Bowl or the combine, watch three rolls of film on him and be an expert. It’s impossible the amount of time guys like Bill Polian and (current Colts GM) Chris Ballard put in.”

He recognized what his father never did, and it’s why he’s done what his father never could: build one of the league’s most consistent winners. Since 2000, only three NFL teams have more wins than the Colts’ 208 (the Patriots, Steelers and Packers). Weigh the Bob Irsay years (144-219 in 24 seasons, two playoff wins, 13 different head coaches) against the Jim Irsay years (213-139 in 25 seasons, 16 playoff trips, 13 playoff wins and a Super Bowl title), and it’s not remotely close.

Most telling, Jim has owned the team a quarter-century and has had just three general managers and five head coaches. The stability his father never attained has become a bedrock of his success.

“He’s one of the last owners who grew up a real football guy,” says Venturi, who after 35 years in coaching now works as the Colts’ radio analyst. “The only one I can think of was Al Davis. Jimmy gives you whatever it takes to win. Now, he’ll get angry with you if things aren’t going well, and he’ll hold you accountable, believe me, but I’d rather have someone holding me accountable who knows what the hell he’s talking about.”

“As passionate as anybody I’ve ever been around about football,” says Colts coach Frank Reich. “He’s an old-school owner. I love that.”

“Couldn’t ask for a better owner,” adds Ballard. “He lets Frank and I make the decisions.”

Venturi ranks Irsay among the best in the league and credits those early years in the organization as essential in shaping his hands-off philosophy. “Well, that,” Venturi says, “and his father, who showed him for 20 years what it shouldn’t look like.”

And maybe that — however unintentional — remains Bob Irsay’s greatest feat as an NFL owner, perhaps his only one. He molded his son into a football man, then showed him how much a meddling, controlling, impulsive boss can cripple a franchise. It has forever shaped how Jim runs his team.

“He didn’t just have the keys handed to him,” Miller says. “After being a GM himself, and screwing it up, and knowing the game, he said, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta go get someone else. We’re never gonna do anything if I don’t.’

“To look in the mirror and accept that? Not a lot of guys in his shoes would be able to do that. Trust me.”

Chris Ballard and Jim Irsay have forged a harmonious relationship in the Colts’ front office. (Michael Conroy / Associated Press)

But Irsay has his quirks. He’s as eccentric as they come, prone to rambling on in press conferences, too eager to state outlandish goals — three straight Lombardis! — that no doubt heap undue pressure on the shoulders of his head coach.

He’s spent untold millions on guitars owned by Elvis, Prince, John Lennon, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan and others, often showcasing them in museums for the public. Back in the 1990s, he grew tight with the late Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who inspired the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Thompson would call late at night and the two would talk for hours. He routinely wrote Irsay letters, always addressing them to “James.”

One, dated March 14, 1998, instructed Irsay and the Colts to take “the Leaf boy” with the first pick in the following month’s NFL Draft.

“He looks strong and Manning doesn’t,” Thompson wrote.

Irsay has his demons, too, the same demons his father fought all those years. The scars of addiction are there, and it’s a battle within him that will never really be over.

He knows this.

Twice Irsay has been forced to publicly confront his addiction to prescription painkillers — which he was first introduced to after suffering injuries in his weightlifting days — and seek professional help.

A haunting scene in 2014 felt like rock bottom, another dark moment for a family that’s suffered through too many: Irsay was arrested on four felony counts, including possession of a controlled substance and driving while impaired, his mug shot and booking video plastered across the internet. It forced him to return to a rehab facility, and Irsay eventually pled guilty to operating while intoxicated. He was sentenced to a year of probation then suspended by the NFL for six games and fined $500,000.

In the video, Irsay is hunched over, stumbling through a sobriety test. His face is worn. His body looks like it’s breaking down.

In that moment, however brief, he looked like Bob Irsay’s son. His father is still in him, for better or worse, and so is that fight — the fight to be the man he wants to be and the owner his father never was.

That was seven years ago. These days, the son looks different and sounds different, revitalized by the depths he’s climbed out of. Just because he’s lost battles along the way doesn’t mean he isn’t winning the war.

Now a billionaire twice over, Irsay gives relentlessly to philanthropic causes, often in private. He donates to foundations dear to him personally but also essential to the state of Indiana. A year after gifting $1 million to the IU Health Foundation to help support addiction treatments across the state, Irsay — along with his youngest daughter, Kalen — spearheaded the Colts’ Kicking the Stigma campaign this spring, which raised $2.2 million to fight mental disorders and the shame and stigma too often associated with them. It’s a mission Irsay has wanted to take on for years, and after the fundraiser was complete, he matched the proceeds, donating $2.2 million out of his own pocket. The money will go to four Hoosier mental health organizations.

“It has to be about more than just football,” he says. “It has to be about the community, making the community better. I think it’s the most noble endeavor you can pursue.”

Irsay is both respected and revered by his players, not just for the weighty contracts he dishes out but for his quiet acts of generosity. The day he retired, Manning noted that he never forgot Irsay’s kindness after his grandmother passed away, lending the quarterback his private plane to fly down to the funeral. Irsay did the same last month after rookie third-string quarterback Sam Ehlinger found out he’d unexpectedly lost his younger brother four days after being drafted.

He stays out of most personnel decisions but steps in when he feels it’s warranted. During the Colts’ negotiations with free-agent T.Y. Hilton this spring — after Baltimore had offered the wide receiver far more money — Irsay texted his longtime receiver, urging him to stay home.

“We need you here,” Irsay wrote.

Hilton would later say that’s what he needed to hear.

And when two of the greatest to ever wear the Horseshoe — Marvin Harrison and Edgerrin James — found out they were headed to Canton, and to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, they didn’t choose a former coach to present them at their induction, or a teammate, or a family member. They chose Irsay. Only one owner, Jerry Jones, has been asked to present a former player more in the last decade.

“The best honor that could have been bestowed on me,” Irsay says. “There are so, so many people that they could pick. To know they respect you like that, and to know they knew I had their backside all those years, I feel incredibly privileged.”

Jim Irsay with Marvin Harrison and the star receiver’s bust during the NFL Hall of Fame Enshrinement Ceremony in 2016. (Joe Robbins / Getty Images)

The succession plan is already in place, and Irsay has told the league office that not one of his daughters — Carlie Gordon-Irsay, Casey Foyt or Kalen Jackson — will own the Indianapolis Colts, but all three, on equal footing. “One will hold the vote as principal owner,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean that it can’t rotate.”

“I want them to be who they are,” Irsay says. “They’ve known this league since they were in their cribs. They’re intelligent. They’re good listeners. They’re motivated. It’s truly a blessing, and rare that it works out this well.”

Be strong, he tells them, but principled. Never lose sight of what makes the game so great.

He’s never forgotten what Lamar Hunt, one of the fathers of the modern NFL, told him when he was a teenager: “We’re stewards of the game.”

“Stewards,” Irsay repeats, letting the word hang in the air for a moment. “I like that word so much more than owner.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: George Gojkovich, Bettmann, Zach Bolinger / Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kW5qa2tjbXxzfJFqZmltX2eEcL%2FIp6pmp5ZiwamxjJ%2BYraCVp3q4tMCtZKOhnWK2s7%2FAsmSlnZGnu6awjLCYrZuYnruoeceiqmackZl6pL7IqaelnV2ptaZ5wqijratf