LOUDY AND BIG WHEEL--BALTIMORE COLTS SUPER FANS
The Colts had a matchless fan Enthusiast: 'Loudy' Loudenslager was a front-office dream, a man so fond of the Colts that he missed only one game in almost 40 years -- and that was because he'd had a heart attack.
By Fred Rasmussen, Baltimore Sun 9/15/96
It's probably a little too early to tell who will arrive on the scene as the new Hurst C. "Loudy" Loudenslager, who was, from 1947 until they left town in 1984, the Colts' No. 1 fan.
Gifted with a wide smile reminiscent of the late comic actor Joe E. Brown, the Baltimore Highlands resident filled his club cellar with Colts memorabilia that ranged from autographed pictures to shoes and from jerseys and helmets to splinters from goal posts.
Footballs were carefully displayed on shelves, and on the walls hung framed front pages from The Sun and News American that chronicled the team's golden years, when Memorial Stadium was known as "the world's largest outdoor asylum."
Outside his home, Loudenslager flew a flag embossed with "GO-GO-COLTS," which was ceremoniously lowered to half-staff when the team lost. In all those years, he missed only one home game -- when he was recuperating from a heart attack.
Whenever the team arrived at or departed from the old Friendship Airport, now BWI, Loudy would be there to run out onto the tarmac with his record player and 100-foot extension cord to play the "Colt's Fight Song."
He'd go out to the airport at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. -- it made no difference to him what time it was -- and he figured he must have done it at least 626 times.
He and his wife, Flo, who died last year, also sent 3,059 birthday cards and 3,797 Christmas cards to players, coaches and front-office employees. The couple also baked 913 black-walnut cakes, which Loudy would present to players on their birthdays during breaks in practice.
"I cut the cake with a tongue depressor, then I back away," he told The Sunday Sun magazine in 1979. "The guys rush for it. It lasts about a minute."
The tradition began in 1960. "It seemed a nice way to show appreciation for what they were doing," said Loudenslager in the interview. "Ordell Braase was the first. The other guys would come up and ask about their birthdays. The thing just snowballed."
The former retired National Guard master sergeant organized Colt Corral 2 in the late 1950s and served as president of the Council of Colt Corrals.
In 1984, when he learned that the team had left Baltimore, he broke down and cried. "Bob Irsay may have owned the franchise with his money, but I owned them with my heart," he told The Evening Sun.
On September 3, 1984 -- what would have been the first day of the football season in Baltimore -- Loudy, dressed in his Colts T-shirt and blue pants, arrived with his wife and several friends at Memorial Stadium hoping to sit in their old seats one more time in a place they had considered their second home for 25 years. They were turned away by a security guard.
"I was going to stand up and sing the anthem, close my eyes and pretend that I could see Unitas, Moore, Donovan, Marchetti and Berry runnin' around out there. All of 'em -- just one more time," he told The Sun.
On April 24, 1989, Loudenslager died of a heart attack in Ocean City while planning a Colt Corrals' convention. At his request, he was buried wearing blue and white, the Colt colors, a team sweater and the gymnasium shorts he wore to training camp after coach Joe Thomas appointed him an assistant equipment manager.
He was carried to his grave by John Unitas, Lenny Moore, Jim Mutscheller, Art Donovan, Buzz Nutter, Mike Curtis, Fred Miller, Rick Volk, Stan White, Toni Linhart, Jesse Thomas, Sean Landeta, and trainers Bill Neill and John Lopez
"It would be easy to classify Hurst Loudenslager, who fought in World War II and then served as a sergeant with the National Guard, as some kind of extremist. And he was about the Baltimore Colts," wrote sports columnist John Steadman in The Evening Sun.
"When he's carried to his grave at Glen Haven Memorial Park, the mourners will be singing, low-key, the appropriate lines of the team song, and where it says "Fight on for Baltimore and Maryland," they'll add, "and for Hurst Loudenslager, too."
He watched it all roll away Cheers: Leonard Burrier exercised his own mode of voice and body language at the old Colts games.
By Kevin Cowherd, Baltimore Sun, 7/14/96
At a rear booth at Della Rose's in Overlea, Leonard "Big Wheel" Burrier has a fist the size of a large ham wrapped around a Diet Coke, which immediately makes you think of the kids' game "What's Wrong With This Picture?"
The Wheel, 51 now, used to be a big deal in this town. Twenty years ago, he spent his Sundays in the fall lumbering around the upper deck at Memorial Stadium like a deranged giant, screaming himself hoarse and contorting his 6-foot-5, 250-pound body to spell out the letters C-O-L-T-S as Bert Jones went deep to Roger Carr and 45,000 true believers roared into the afternoon sunshine.
On most of these occasions, the Wheel was heavily into the Budweiser, not to mention some schnapps, brandy and whatever else other fans would press on him.
So seeing him nursing a Diet Coke now is like running into Rush Limbaugh on a buffet line with nothing on his plate but a small mound of cottage cheese.
Anyway, the Wheel is not here to drink but to talk football. Across town, in the bayou-like heat and humidity of Owings Mills, the Ravens training camp is about to open, signaling the long-awaited return of NFL football to Baltimore.
So it seems logical to get together with the Wheel and see if he'll be going to the Ravens games, and if so, if he might be persuaded to lead a few cheers -- with or without cocktails -- as in the old days.
There is a long pause as the Wheel considers this while swirling the ice in his Diet Coke.
At last he says: "I said in the newspapers that I didn't want nothing to do with [the Ravens]. But I've been to a couple of, um, drinking establishments and people say: 'Wheel, you gotta go, you gotta go.' So yeah, I'm gonna go."
There is another pause, then: "This is my fourth team, though. I'm just afraid people are gonna say: 'Who's this big, fat jerk?' "
To understand the Wheel's conflicted feelings about the Ravens, you have to understand where he's been emotionally. And you have to know the tumultuous history of pro football in this town.
The year is 1975. The Wheel, a big Colts fan since the days of Big Daddy Lipscomb and Artie Donovan (his two favorite players), is at the Browns game at Memorial Stadium. It's hot. The crowd is listless. The game stinks.
Meanwhile, the Wheel and his buddies are pretty beered-up, only they're not having much fun, which is the whole purpose of being beered-up.
"I said, 'Man, this is boring!' " the Wheel recalls. "And I just stood up and started cheering. Until I started losing my voice."
Doing the twist
Your average beered-up fan, if he starts losing his voice, he thinks, "OK, I'm done," and passes out somewhere. But the Wheel is not your average fan. Plus the beer is starting to talk to him. And what it's saying, apparently, is: "Only you, Len Burrier, can liven up this joint."
So with messianic zeal, the Wheel somehow twists his body into a shape resembling the third letter of the alphabet while &L mouthing the words "Gimme a C!" to the rest of Section 32.
This, of course, is hard enough to do sober. With half a load on, it takes a skill level approaching world-class balance-beam gymnastics. The crowd loves it.
From that point on, the Wheel is leading cheers at every game, moving from section to section like an itinerant peddler of good will. Artie Donovan starts talking him up on his radio show. John Steadman, then sports editor for the News American, profiles this gregarious owner of Leonard Tire and Wheel Co. and promptly nicknames him "The Big Wheel."
The Wheel is now a gen-u-ine celebrity.
The Colts, 1-3 before he started windmilling his arms, are undefeated the rest of the season. And the Wheel, hell, he's hobnobbing with team owner Bob Irsay and being backslapped at post-game parties by the Colts players and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle.
There is even this big cabdriver with a beard like shredded wheat, a heavy-duty Orioles fan by the name of "Wild Bill" Hagy, who wants the Wheel to show him a few cheers.
Breaking new ground
In terms of his role as in-house entertainment, "I was sort of treading where no man had tread before," the Wheel says now.
As you might imagine, though, not everyone is thrilled with the Wheel's act. The Wheel, just 30, has a wife, Betty, and two young boys, Michael and Matthew, at home. They quickly discover that seeing your old man carousing in the stands is not something that fills you with pride.
"My wife didn't want to associate with that," the Wheel admits. "She hated when they called her Mrs. Wheel."
Then in 1984, the Wheel's heart is broken for the first time. Bob Irsay has the Mayflower vans back up to the Colts complex in the dead of night. And when the Wheel wakes up the next morning, the Baltimore Colts are suddenly the Indianapolis Colts
Which means that unless the Wheel is up for 560-mile road trips up and down lovely Interstate 70, he is pretty much out of a cheerleading job.
But the Wheel, he's not about to shrivel up and die. A year later, he tries cheering for the new Baltimore Stars of the United States Football League. But it's not the same. For one thing, they play their home games in College Park, which might as well be on Saturn as far as the Wheel is concerned.
For another, the stadium has a no-alcohol policy, which, the Wheel discovers, tends to considerably mute the level of enthusiasm generated by some fans.
Not that it matters much. Because as soon as the Stars win the championship, the league goes belly up. And another little piece of the Wheel's heart breaks off.
In 1994, though, he finds himself thoroughly captivated by Baltimore's new team in the Canadian Football League. The CFL has these crazy fields and crazy rules -- 43 men in motion on every play, or maybe it just seems that way. But Memorial Stadium is rocking again and the Wheel is doing his cheers, and he can feel something of the old magic on 33rd Street again.
Then, just like that, the Stallions are gone, too.
"The thing that really got me," the Wheel says now, looking out the window at the traffic on Bel Air Road, "is that the Stallions won all those games last year then a week before their first playoff game, [Cleveland owner Art] Modell announces that the Ravens are coming to Baltimore. It took something away from the whole thing."
So maybe you can understand why the Wheel is a little leery about throwing his arms around yet another football team.
"I'm glad for Baltimore that they got an NFL team," he says softly. "But I'm unhappy at how it came about. Here's a city, Cleveland, that sold out a 70,000-seat stadium. I can't understand how, with all the TV revenue, NFL products revenue, concession revenue, he [Modell] says he's losing money and has to get out of there."
Still, the Wheel says he'll be there at Memorial Stadium this fall when the new home team in those hideous black, purple and gold uniforms takes the field.
"I think it's gonna be a nice, young crowd, and I think they're gonna enjoy it," he says. " 'Course, I can still show these youngsters how to party. I hope they have half as much fun as I had."
That might be too much to ask.
