THE BALTIMORE COLTS--GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN
Scratch These Colts : Unitas and Matte Don't Think About How Their Former Team Is Doing, Because They Don't Consider Indianapolis Their Former Team
January 13, 1996 T.J. SIMERS. Los Angeles Times
INDIANAPOLIS — Johnny Unitas, the greatest Colt of them all, said this week he really couldn't give a flying horseshoe who wins Sunday's AFC championship game in Pittsburgh.
"I'll probably watch some of it because the kids will have it on," Unitas said. "But there won't be any feelings one way or the other."
Unitas' rooting interests, it would seem, should be clearly defined: The Steelers drafted Unitas in the ninth round of the 1955 NFL draft and then cut him before the start of the season; the Colts put him to work, and he went on to set 22 club records.
"You're asking me about Indianapolis," Unitas said. "I played for Baltimore."
Unitas, forever No. 19 for anyone familiar with football, is pictured and his storied career chronicled on Page 106 of the Indianapolis Colts' 1995 official media guide, but as far as the Hall of Fame quarterback is concerned, it is misplaced.
"It doesn't belong there," Unitas said. "Those things should be left in Baltimore, and when we get another team, the great things that Lenny Moore, Raymond Berry, Gino Marchetti and people like Arthur [Donovan] did can all become part of the Baltimore tradition again.
"The tradition is in Baltimore. There is no reason for any of us who played for Baltimore to be with Indianapolis. They have never invited me there with a personal invitation, but if they had, I would have said, 'Thank you, but no thanks.'
"The Colts' name belongs in Baltimore just like the Rams' name belongs in Los Angeles. If the commissioner had any power whatsoever, he would petition the owners to vote in that fashion. . . .
"What I think is important is for Baltimore to have a franchise. It's important for the NFL too. Baltimore was one of the dominating teams in the NFL, one that helped the NFL to gain the prominence that it has."
Unitas played more seasons for the Colts--17--and more games--221--than any player in the franchise's history. He holds the Colt record for playing in 10 Pro Bowls and set an NFL record with a touchdown pass in 47 consecutive games.
But when owner Robert Irsay pulled the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle of a snowy night in 1984, Unitas said, they were no longer a part of his life.
"He felt he had a better opportunity, but I didn't like the way he mistreated the people," said Unitas, who lives outside Baltimore and is vice president of a high-tech electronics company. "They raped the city, raped the team. The whole thing was just a dirty, dirty deal.
"I'm sure he left because he outlived his usefulness here. Nobody liked him. He destroyed the team along with [then-General Manager] Joe Thomas. Thomas is the guy who did everything, and Irsay just sat around doing nothing about it."
Running back Tom Matte, who played in place of an injured Unitas in an NFL Western Division playoff game against Green Bay in 1965, said he and Unitas tried to get their records "expunged from the Indianapolis record books."
"Hey, the management there treats the alumni like dogmeat. There's no class at all," Matte said. "When I sign autographs, I don't just sign Colts, I sign Baltimore Colts. The only thing that franchise has done for me is forward my mail to my address. Otherwise, I've never heard from them. There was a time there when they were even passing out the retired numbers to new players until Pete Rozelle put a stop to it."
Matte, who has been working with the Baltimore Stallions of the Canadian Football League, said he "usually roots against the Colts."
"But really I have nothing against those players. I know Jim Harbaugh, and I went to high school with his mother. I wish them well, but I still have animosity toward Irsay, and Joe Thomas for tearing down a dynasty in a matter of two years. . . . Here's the thing, Indianapolis deserves their own records."
The Colts have retired seven jerseys, but the players who wore them have shunned the team since the move to Indianapolis. John Steadman, who covered the Colts for the Baltimore Sun, said, "I wonder how they would be accepted back here if one of them went back to Indianapolis for something, even something like a golf tournament."
When tight end John Mackey was scheduled to receive his Hall of Fame ring, Matte said, he made it clear he didn't want to get it in Indianapolis: "Mackey said, 'I'd rather get my ring in a bar in Baltimore eating crabs than be in Indianapolis.'
"That's the feeling of the guys. I keep in touch with most of them, and I don't know of anyone who has gone back there for something to do with the Colts. Listen, when Indianapolis came to New York a few years ago to play the Giants or Jets, the Colts put on this thing celebrating the '58 championship game. Unitas didn't even get an invitation."
A Colt spokesman said if any former players had contacted the club, it would have helped them. He added no former player from the Baltimore years even asked for tickets to Sunday's game.
Don Joyce, a scout employed by the current Colts and a defensive end for Baltimore from 1954 to '60, will act as ceremonial captain for the game. Former running back Lydell Mitchell was the only other player from the Baltimore era approached for the honor. He declined.
Many of the players who achieved great success in Baltimore have remained ever since, and it's another reason Indianapolis is so far, far away.
"There was something special here; it was the closeness between players and fans," Unitas said. "The people went out and sold 25,000 tickets to get the Colts in the first place. There were Colt Corrals, social clubs, set up to help promote the team. There were nothing but sellouts. On a Sunday when the Colts were in town, you could shoot a cannon down the middle of Baltimore Street and not hit anyone, because they were either at the game or inside listening to it."
Steadman said he recently stopped by a deli owned by a man named Gino O'Connell. "I asked him if he was named after Marchetti," Steadman said. "He said, 'That's my middle name. I'm Gino Marchetti O'Connell.' That's just the way it was around here; people named their children after the football players."
Colt Following
Thirty years after the Mayflower trucks pulled out of town, is Baltimore still angry?
By Jess Blumberg Mayhugh - Baltimore Magazine March 2014
Here’s a story everyone knows about Baltimore. That we’re still collectively bitter and depressed. That we’ve never gotten over the incident from the wee hours of March 29, 1984, at the Baltimore Colts Complex in Owings Mills, when fifteen Mayflower moving trucks—like a funeral procession—were loaded with the team’s equipment, books, and furniture and directed out of town to Indianapolis. All told, it took a mere eight hours to move out a team that was here for 31 years. “I was out there all night and it really felt like a burial,” recalls John Ziemann, a veteran member of the team’s marching band. “We were there until morning when Walter Gutowski, the team’s PR director at the time, came out, closed the gate, and said, ‘Go home guys, they’re gone.’”
This month marks 30 years since that ominous night, which, it should be noted, is almost the exact amount of time the Colts were in Baltimore. And, though they say that time heals all wounds, this is a gaping one.
But, have the past three decades—with the passing of nefarious owner Bob Irsay, the welcoming of the Baltimore Ravens, two Super Bowl championships, and an entirely new generation of football fans—been enough for us to grieve? After all this, are we finally over it?
Of course, initially, the Colts moving left most everyone in Baltimore distraught.
“You just cried and cried and couldn’t believe it,” says Antoinette Duda, 63, owner of Duda’s Tavern in Fells Point and a diehard Colts—and now Ravens—fan. “It was very hard. You cuss out Irsay, and you go through all of that.”
Undoubtedly, the gut reaction when it comes to thinking about the Colts varies by age.
“If you’re in your 60s and 70s, there is part of your heart that is missing. You’ll always feel slighted, cheated, and robbed,” says WBAL-TV broadcaster Gerry Sandusky. “The Baltimore Colts are to you what the Brooklyn Dodgers are to someone in New York.”
While there were plenty of tears to go around 30 years ago, there was also a sense of “good riddance” from some, as Irsay had already tainted the team and its reputation long before that night, and the fans had made their disappointment felt at the turnstiles. In 1972, Irsay got rid of 27 players; Crowds went from sellouts to upwards of 29,000, if the team was lucky.
“Of course the change was dramatic,” says Tom Matte, running back for the Baltimore Colts for 12 years. “But, by that time, everyone was so disenchanted with Irsay. I was happy that he left because he dismantled our team.”
For the city of Baltimore, as a whole, the Colts leaving town represented something much larger than a few Sunday games.
“A population becomes invested emotionally in a team because it defines that city’s sense of self,” says professor David Andrews, who studies the sociology of sport at the University of Maryland. “And when a team goes, what happens to that?”
The city was surely invested in the Colts, as players were ingrained in the community, hanging out at the same bars as fans and interacting often with the Colts Corrals, which were local fan clubs. Suffice it to say, it was more than just a game.
“Let me put it this way—I was 25 minutes late for my own wedding because a Colts game went into overtime,” says Duda. “I knew the players personally because they would come down to your bull roast, and they did a lot for small businesses.”
“When people remember the Colts, they remember them in the community,” says Marco Romanell, 29, a Ravens blogger for SouthBmore.com. “That’s why it was probably such a shock when the team left. Not only is the team leaving, but so are the people you conversed with or people you’d see every weekend. I think young fans relate by imagining what it would be like if the Ravens left tomorrow.”
Ziemann, who is now the deputy director of the Sports Legends and Babe Ruth Birthplace museums, uses this tactic a lot—especially when kids ask him why there’s an exhibit at the museum about the “Indianapolis” Colts.
“The only way I can relate it to the younger generation is to have them imagine they wake up one day and the Ravens are the Portland, Oregon Ravens,” he says. “Then they start to realize how sad it was.”
Like any mourning process, there are stages of grief. And the bleak 12 years without a team—the CFL didn’t cut it—finally ended in 1996, when Art Modell and the Ravens arrived from Cleveland.
“When we came to town, we had to overcome the fact that, in some fans’ minds, we had just ‘Irsayed’ Cleveland,” says Kevin Byrne, Ravens senior VP of public and community relations. “We knew that everyone here still loved their Baltimore Colts, so we reached out to the old players. The keys were getting Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore out on the field for that first game. That kind of told the fans, ‘It’s okay to root for the Ravens.’”
Almost seamlessly blending the old guard and the new appeared to change the minds of a lot of skeptical Colts fans.
“Every game you go to, you see Johnny’s statue. Every time a Raven is inducted in the Ring of Honor, Lenny Moore is on the field,” says Sandusky. “That the Ravens were inclusive helped to close some of those wounds. They made a story that wasn’t two chapters, but softly blurred the lines—making it Baltimore football history instead.”
Of course, the concept of keeping the same marching band—one that was profiled in Barry Levinson’s ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Band That Wouldn’t Die—was another way to bridge the gap.
“The Modells came in and said, ‘We’re not here to erase your history, we’re here to add to it,’” Ziemann says. “They had the statue built, adopted the band, recognized the Colt Corrals. That made it 100-percent easier to move on.”
Something else that has made it easier over the years? Well, that’s where the game comes in. Many close to the organization—and fans alike—are quick to point out that we beat Indy to the Super Bowl.
“The city was ecstatic and the fans were ecstatic,” says Duda. “Us oldsters will remember the way it was, and we’re going to compare it, of course. But it was so great for the city, and it certainly proved a point.”
Members of the younger generation, who admit that they have no personal attachment to the Colts, have grown up with the Ravens franchise, which turns 18 this season. They feel that winning Super Bowls in both 2000 and 2012 forged the team’s symbiotic relationship with the city of Baltimore.
“Winning one championship was okay, since we stuck it to the Colts before they did,” says blogger Romanell. “But winning that second championship, having a Raven in the Hall of Fame, and the fact that we now have a franchise quarterback, there is no reason to be bitter still.”
Clearly, younger fans seem to be over it, but where does that age divide fall?
“Every year, I try to figure out what the age line is,” says Sandusky. “There’s a line at which point the Colts are not your issue. Right now it’s around 55 years old.”
This generational rift is unique to Baltimore. With most sports teams, you are loyal to whomever your parents (or grandparents) rooted for. Because that can’t happen here, another interesting phenomenon is starting.
“I think now families are connecting again,” says Byrne at the Ravens. “Normally in sports, the generational love moves downward. Here it’s moving upward. Old Colts fans are being persuaded by their grandchildren to give the Ravens a chance.”
Judging by citywide purple Fridays and fans of all ages filling the stands at M&T Bank Stadium every Sunday, the transition seems to be working.
“Kids take their parents to the game now. It used to be that parents bought the tickets, but now that’s reversed,” says Duda. “To me, if you like football, you like football. And the Ravens are my team now.”
In essence, being a Baltimore Colts fan and being a Baltimore Ravens fan are not mutually exclusive concepts.
“These fans have a dual identity now,” professor Andrews says. “They have memories of their parents, Unitas, Memorial Stadium. But they are now wedded to a new team, which has become the new definer of Baltimore.”
The old Colts themselves have helped to bridge the 12-year gap between teams.
“Lenny Moore is a regular at our practices and has lunch at our cafeteria,” Byrne says. “Ray Rice and Lenny are friends. Stan White is on our radio broadcast. Kids rub the foot on Johnny U’s statue outside the stadium. All these things help our players and fans understand how meaningful the Colts were.”
One thing that has remained constant throughout the past 30 years (besides the band, of course) is the city of Baltimore. Byrne and others agreed that last year’s overwhelming Super Bowl parade underscored what we already knew—we are a great football town.
“If you put it all together, we’d be the winningest franchise,” says former Colt Matte. “Between the Colts, [CFL] Stallions, [USFL] Stars, and Ravens, every team we’ve had has been successful, and that’s because we have the greatest fans in the world.”
When it’s fall in Baltimore—no matter if it’s 1964 or 2014—the exuberance and passion for the game of football is obvious to this day.
“I’d say 99-percent of the people I know are diehard Ravens fans,” Romanell says. “It’s kind of hard not to get wrapped up in it, the energy, the purple Fridays, it’s hard not to embrace.”
But, have these great and loyal fans moved on and let go?
Truth be told, emotions still remain raw when talking about the Colts, but some of that anger and bitterness seems to have mellowed.
“The edge is definitely gone,” Sandusky says. “I don’t think people feel as compelled to drive a Mayflower truck off the road as they used to.”
Credit the Modells, the Ravens franchise, the Super Bowl rings, or the fans, but this much is certain: Our cynicism from 30 years ago now feels a lot more like optimism.
“I’ll never forget the good times, the pride I had in that horseshoe logo, and the name Baltimore Colts,” Ziemann says. “But my heart and soul now belong to the black helmet with the purple bird head.”
Ravens Maintain a History Longer Than Their Existence
By HILLEL KUTTLER New York Times, JAN. 24, 2013
BALTIMORE — If Harry Swayne could choose, he would appoint Lenny Moore as the Baltimore Ravens’ honorary captain for the pregame coin toss at Super Bowl XLVII.
At the very least, Moore will be one of several former Baltimore Colts players who still live here to accompany the approximately 1,000 employees of the Ravens and their families to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, Swayne said.
“We love our former Colts,” said Swayne, the Ravens’ director of player development, who played 15 years in the N.F.L. as an offensive lineman and reached Super Bowls with three teams, including the Ravens in 2001.
Since the Ravens came into existence in 1996, when the owner Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, the franchise has embraced the city’s football past. For fans still smarting from the Colts’ middle-of-the-night departure from Baltimore to Indianapolis in 1984, the presence of stars they had cheered for decades helped connect them to a new team with a different nickname and logo.
Moore, a Hall of Fame running back, is often at the Ravens’ training complex in Owings Mills, Md. The former Colts running back Tom Matte used to be an analyst on Ravens radio broadcasts, and the former Colts linebacker Stan White currently is. The former Colts safety Bruce Laird is the N.F.L.’s uniform inspector at Ravens home games.
Team-sponsored alumni events involve former Colts and Ravens alike. The Marching Ravens band evolved from the famed Baltimore Colts Marching Band, and the Ring of Honor in the Ravens’ stadium includes eight Colts. Each year, the Ravens take their rookies to the Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards so they can learn about the city’s athletic history.
Ravens fans entering M&T Bank Stadium even rub the feet of a Johnny Unitas statue for good luck.
Most of those fans are too young to have seen Unitas and Moore play, but the two remain beloved for leading the Colts to N.F.L. championships in 1958 and 1959 against the Giants.
Unitas, a Hall of Famer, was the quarterback here for 17 seasons, including for the team that won Super Bowl V. Even with his death in 2002, his legacy endures, perhaps more than any other Baltimore Colt’s. Fans still wear No. 19 throwback jerseys, and the football stadium at Towson University bears his name. His legacy also endures in a Ravens employee handling executive sales: Chad Unitas, whose flat-top hair style evokes that of his father.
“It makes me feel good that people haven’t forgotten about him,” the younger Unitas said. “They still want to hear stories about him.”
This football-mad city with enough pigskin-abandonment issues to keep numerous therapists busy is now fully behind the Ravens heading into the Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers, to be played Feb. 3. Purple lights illuminate building facades downtown, team flags flap on storefronts and from car windows, and Joe Flacco and Ray Rice jerseys are ever more ubiquitous.
The shadow the departed Colts cast over Baltimore began lifting when Modell relocated the Browns here after the 1995 season. Modell, Chad Unitas said, “called my dad as he was moving the team to Baltimore” to gain his support. The current owner, Steve Bisciotti, who grew up a Colts fan, embraced their legacy, too, Unitas said.
While Baltimore’s enduring love affair with its lost franchise and its players endures, it is nuanced and generational.
Those coming of age after the Colts left have no football past with which to grapple, while some older fans never adopted the Ravens. For them, “it’s the Colts, the Colts and only the Colts,” said Neil Alperstein, 65, a communication professor at Loyola University who grew up here and studies what he calls the “imaginary relationships” admirers form with celebrities.
Still, Alperstein and some of his contemporaries became passionate Ravens fans for whom the team’s defeat of visiting Indianapolis in an opening-round playoff game this month carried no additional emotional charge.
But like with some people in happy second marriages, some scars linger. Matte, for one, said he remained upset that his wristband displayed at the Hall of Fame identified him as an Indianapolis Colt, although his entire 12-year career was spent here.
Ted Marchibroda, who coached the Colts in the 1970s and returned as the Ravens’ first coach, has a singular perspective, having had his feet planted in all three domains. Marchibroda said that he considered Baltimore “a great football city,” but that he would cheer for the 49ers next weekend because their coach, Jim Harbaugh, as a Colts quarterback, “almost took us to the Super Bowl, when I was coaching Indianapolis.”
Matte has connections to even more Baltimore-area teams than Marchibroda. He announced games for the U.S.F.L.’s Baltimore Stars in 1985, although they played near Washington, and he co-owned the C.F.L.’s Baltimore Stallions, who played at Memorial Stadium in 1994 and 1995, 2 of the 12 seasons in which the city had no N.F.L. team.
Matte’s first year with the Colts, 1961, was the last for Art Donovan, a defensive lineman who had a Hall of Fame career in Baltimore.
Donovan is perhaps second only to Unitas when it comes to recognizable stars from the Baltimore Colts’ glory days, and his first connection to the Ravens is from his youth in the Bronx. He played football for Mount St. Michael Academy, where he faced Eddie Breslin of Fordham Prep. Breslin’s sister, Patricia, was someone “I had a bit of a crush on,” Donovan said.
She would go on to marry Modell, the first Ravens owner.
Donovan actually played for two Baltimore Colts franchises. The one he played for in 1950 folded, but he came back with the second incarnation, which moved here from Dallas and, before that, New York.
Now 87, Donovan is remembered by many as a raconteur.
These days, Donovan’s children and grandchildren frequently join him to watch telecasts of Ravens games in the home he built on the grounds of a country club he and his wife, Dorothy, own. The home’s front door evokes the Colts, with blue-on-white tiles reading “DONOVAN 70,” his uniform number.
He recently returned from the hospital, where he had a bladder operation. Dorothy is now in the hospital herself, and when Donovan visited her this week, “these two doctors went like this,” Donovan said, suddenly extending his arms in a blocking motion.
“I love it!” he said. “I love that they remember me. You never forget your roots.”
Early Cheerleaders Still Feel Colts Tug
January 14, 2007 by Mike Klingaman, Balitmore Sun
There is a Ravens pennant on her porch and a Ravens doll on her front door. But what's in Rosemary Baldwin's heart?
Baldwin is a former Colts cheerleader. For 13 years she rooted them on from the sidelines, in rain and snow and boot-sucking mud. At 66, she remembers the jumps, shouts and kicks that trumpeted Baltimore to NFL championships in 1958 and '59. Her faded Colts outfit lies, folded carefully, in a cedar chest in her home in Federal Hill.
Hence her conflict this afternoon when the Ravens host Indianapolis in an AFC divisional playoff game.
"I'd hoped this day would never come," Baldwin said of the first playoff between the clubs. "It's going to hurt, but I have to root for the Ravens.
"It's heartbreaking, rooting against my Colts. It's hard to look at the blue-and-white uniforms and cheer against them.
"They'll always be in my heart."
While many Baltimoreans have come to terms with the Colts' departure 23 years ago, a number of the team's former cheerleaders feel the tug of the horseshoe.
"It's going to be a roller coaster ride for me," said Thelma Mack, 72, of Reisterstown. In 1954, she helped organize and lead the Colts' cheerleaders, the first such group to perform in the NFL.
Mack, 72, is recovering at home from hip surgery. She said she'll muster up "some yays and some boos," though she won't say for whom.
Phyllis Meyers Rubino (left) cheered for the Colts from 1959-1970, and Eleanor Dudley cheered from 1956 to 1966.
At 69, Eleanor Dudley can still wear the Colts' sweater she donned for 11 years, starting in 1956. And while she sides with the Ravens - "I'm so ashamed the Colts' owner snuck them out of here the way he did" - Dudley won't completely turn her back on the team she grew up with.
"I will wear my old Colts' sweater, just to aggravate my family," said Dudley, who lives in Arbutus. "Nobody would dare to punch me in my own house."
Of the 11 former Colts cheerleaders contacted by The Sun, all have saved their uniforms.
Baldwin said she has been offered $20,000 for her Sunday best.
"It's not for sale," she said. "That outfit represents 13 of the best years of my life."
Mim-Mi Cholewczynski, 73, keeps her outfit tucked in a box in the attic of her Owings Mills home.
Phyllis Meyers Rubino framed the blue sweater, which hangs in the basement of her house in Forest Hill. "The first game I cheered was the 1959 championship," said Rubino, 65. "I had the sweater on that day when I left my house in Greektown for the game."
Suddenly, Newkirk Street thundered with applause as neighbors lining the sidewalk cheered the 18-year-old bound for the stadium.
"I felt like a bride going to her wedding," Rubino said.
Many of those early cheerleaders hailed from Patterson Park High, whose school colors were also blue and white. After graduation in 1954, Patricia "Pinky" Brodowski cheered the Colts on for eight years, until motherhood intervened.
Relinquishing the sidelines wasn't easy.
"My first game sitting in the stands, I wore sunglasses because I cried and cried," said Brodowski, 71, of Rosedale.
She keeps her cheerleader uniform in a garment bag. As for the sweater, she wore it to honor the Colts at the last baseball game played at Memorial Stadium in 1991.
Every so often, Barbara "Babs" Kroger, 69, drags out of storage her 1955 uniform - the short blue skirt, the white boots, the cowboy hat "to make sure it's still OK."
Back then, Kroger said, cheerleaders bought their own clothes, made their own pompoms, built their own placards. The Colts paid their travel expenses and gave them two tickets to every game.
(Rubino said her husband "had the idea to plan the birth of our two sons for July and August, so I could keep cheering and we'd keep getting those tickets.")
The cheerleaders practiced their routines in Druid Hill Park, on a field behind the reptile house at the zoo.
On frosty Sundays, the cheerleaders lined their boots with plastic bags to warm their feet. Once, on a trip to Cleveland, they found themselves changing into their uniforms in the back of a bus.
"We did it all because we believed in the Colts, not because our careers would be enhanced by it," said Kroger, of Hanover, Pa.
Though she'll back the Ravens today, Kroger "won't be upset" if the Colts win.
"You never forget your first husband," she said.
Sometimes, when no one's around, Connie Cavallaro Banashak plays the scratchy old tape recording of the Baltimore Colts' fight song and cheers up a storm in her Cockeysville home.
"I do as many of the routines as I can remember," said Banashak, 65. "I don't kick as high as I once did, but I try my best."
A cheerleader from 1963 to 1969, she once worked the sidelines while six months pregnant.
No problem, Banashak said: "My obstetrician had season tickets and was there in the stands."
On a shelf in her bedroom, there are photos of her teammates as well as a Barbie doll dressed as a Colts cheerleader.
"I will never get over thrill of marching down the field in front of 60,000 people as the band played that song," Banashak said.
"That was my proudest moment.
"I'm not loyal to the Indianapolis blue and white. But the Baltimore Colts, I'll always be loyal to."
Colts departure from Baltimore really hurt, once upon a time
But 30 years since the move, the hurt is a long time gone
By Dan Rodricks, Baltimore Sun, 3/29/14
You have to be of a certain age now, your mid-30s at least, to even remember the midnight trauma of March 28-29, 1984. But to fully appreciate the hard, numbing slap of that snowy night — how much it hurt, once upon a time — your memories of the Baltimore Colts would have to go back further than the 30 years since they packed up and moved to Indianapolis.
For this old story to have any meaning anymore, you'd have to remember the last good years of the Baltimore Colts, the Bert Jones-Lydell Mitchell years, at least seven seasons before the move. The last time the team had a winning record before its move was 1977.
Of course, the true golden age was before that — before Robert Irsay, the ruddy-faced heating-air-conditioning contractor from Skokie, Ill., got his hands on the Colts and almost immediately alienated the most loyal fan base east of Green Bay.
That would take you back to 1971, when the Colts won a Super Bowl, or back further to the 1960s and the 1950s, the championship seasons of Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore and teammates beloved in Baltimore.
So to have a memory of that time and an appreciation of what the Colts once meant to the city, you would have to be a Baltimorean of a certain age now — north of 55, anyway.
And when you think of the old Colts or see the blue-and-white pentimento emerge somewhere in the local landscape, you probably also think of parents, aunts and uncles now departed, members of the Greatest Generation and long-gone Colts Corrals. They latched onto the team in the 1950s and never let go — even after the Mayflower vans pulled out of the Colts complex in Owings Mills during the night of March 28, 1984.
Indianapolis Mayor Richard Hudnut declared the next day "one of the greatest days in the history of this city."
In Baltimore, the mayor, William Donald Schaefer, an irrepressible civic cheerleader known for making "greatest day" declarations at all kinds of events, had little to say. Like most Baltimoreans, he appeared to be somewhere between stunned and seething.
People cried, too — Norman Goodman among them.
He was an insurance adjuster who loved the team and had been to dozens of games, including the famous 1958 National Football League championship against the New York Giants in Yankee Stadium. The Colts won that game in sudden death, a seminal moment in the history of professional football and network television.
Before the game, a New York City police officer suspected Goodman of scalping tickets. Goodman took umbrage and chastised the cop in Yiddish. The cop was Jewish and understood Yiddish: Goodman came close to getting arrested and missing the Greatest Game Ever Played.
"True story," says his son, Brian.
The elder Goodman started taking his son to games in 1964. The Goodmans went to Memorial Stadium together over the next two decades, and they even went to Miami for the 1971 Super Bowl.
By the time Irsay moved the franchise to Indianapolis, in that dreary March of 1984, Norman Goodman was in a nursing home, having suffered a massive stroke.
"But he understood what happened, that the Colts had left town, and he cried," says his son, now 56, an attorney with Pessin Katz.
Norman Goodman died a year later.
"The Colts were a religion in my house growing up, like everyone here in town," Brian Goodman says. "I have lived in Baltimore my whole life, and I love the Ravens, but [the Colts' departure] was a civic crime."
Certainly it was an act long in the making, with Irsay making noise for years about replacing Memorial Stadium, and with Schaefer and other business and political leaders from the city and Baltimore County trying to ascertain what exactly he was after.
Irsay had not only made a shambles of a storied football franchise — the Baltimore Colts had three winning seasons in the 12 Irsay was owner here — but the constant worry that he'd move the team grated already irritated fans.
In the last year before the move, news reporters tracked his moves — to Arizona, to Indianapolis, to Memphis and Jacksonville — until finally, in an absurd airport news conference, with an uncharacteristically bewildered Schaefer at his side, a finger-pointing Irsay launched into a tirade against sportswriters.
"Whaddaya hang me for?" the Colts owner wanted to know. "I'm a good Catholic. Where the hell did all this come from?"
Convinced that Irsay was not reasonable or rational, and worried that he would soon move the team, the Maryland Senate approved an eminent domain bill to give Baltimore the power to condemn the Colts franchise and seize the team.
The vote was on March 27. On March 28, at least 15 Mayflower moving vans went to the Colts complex in Owings Mills.
By night, with snow falling, those trucks took 31 years of football history out of Baltimore. A lot of people were upset, depressed and bitter. But a good number said good riddance to Irsay and believed the National Football League would soon do the right thing and give Baltimore the next new franchise.
But it took 12 long years — and some cold slaps in the face from the NFL, which bypassed Baltimore to expand in two other cities — for professional football to return to the banks of the Patapsco. And when it did, for the 1996 season, we got Cleveland's team.
The rest is history of a mostly pleasing kind: not only the establishment of the Baltimore Ravens in a new downtown stadium, but the creation of a franchise with committed ownership and savvy management, and two world championships in 18 seasons. In fact, the Baltimore Ravens won a Super Bowl in only their fifth season — and before the Indianapolis Colts finally did, in their 23rd.
Cleveland got a new team in 1999.
With ceremony and bronze and marching band, the Ravens went out of their way to honor the memory of Unitas and the bygone Baltimore Colts, smart moves that ingratiated the new team to fans of a certain age, the ones who took the events of March 28-29, 1984, the hardest. It really hurt, once upon a time — a long time gone.
SORRY INDY, THESE COLTS BELONG TO BALTIMORE
