The range of exhibits that caught Jim Irsay’s roving eye at auctions through the decades offer clues to his enduring curiosity about the world. One day, he could be purchasing Abraham Lincoln’s pocketknife to place among the rest of his presidential memorabilia. The next, he might splurge $6.18 million for the championship belt worn by Muhammad Ali after winning the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman.
He was determined to own the left-handed 1969 Fender Competition Mustang wielded by Kurt Cobain in the Smells like Teen Spirit video. Equally so, he became sacred keeper of the 120-foot-long original scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
Irsay once turned down an offer of $1 billion for his eclectic collection of sporting, musical and historical artefacts. He didn’t need the money. As owner of the Indianapolis Colts, the 65-year-old’s personal wealth was at least four times that.
More importantly, he couldn’t countenance so much stuff of cultural significance being cossetted away in a private home in the Middle East. One of the joys of his life was sharing his largesse with the public, regularly dispatching a travelling exhibition featuring Elvis Presley’s Martin acoustic guitar, David Gilmour’s “Black Strat” and the bass drum Ringo Starr thumped on the Ed Sullivan Show on nationwide tours.
What on earth were China’s women runners on back in the 1990s?
Mayo GAA finances Q&A: What you need to know about an eventful few days for the county
Rugby seasons just keep going, but to what end?
Ken Early: Champions League final is chance for PSG and Ousmane Dembele to finally reach their potential
Far removed from the typical plutocrat owner of an NFL outfit, by the time Irsay inherited the Colts from his late father at 37, he’d already been knocking around the team for more than two decades. On the way to the top job, he put in a stint in just about every department, including a spell laundering kit. As boss, he gifted each employee a card with $100 in it on their birthdays and often walked around pre-season training doling out wads of cash to stunned supporters.
Adored by fans, players, and coaches alike, his former quarterback Peyton Manning reacted to his sudden death last week by calling him the man who turned Indianapolis into a football town.
“Playing for a team that Mr Irsay ran was an honour,” said Pat McAfee, another Colts alumnus turned ESPN host. “He was funny, brilliant, unique, and somehow still wildly relatable.”
A sometimes bizarre, often tumultuous life, his personal highlight reel is a suitably eccentric affair. There’s a well-worn video of him, a patrician in a business suit, wigging out to Meek Mill’s Dreams and Nightmares with his players in a demented locker-room celebration.
It was a transformative innovation that made the league more competitive and compelling
Lesser-spotted footage exists of his eponymous rock band, a group whose ranks were often bolstered by guest appearances from the likes of Mike Mills (REM) and Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top). Then there’s jerky home movies of his post-collegiate career as a competitive powerlifter, a sport he turned to in his youth because “I was a little fat, shy kid with glasses”.
That pastime certainly impressed players who would often gather in the weights room to see if the owner’s son could really break the 700lb barrier. His achievements in the gym caused him residual hip and back problems and ultimately led to him becoming addicted to painkillers. Between issues with opioids and alcohol, there was a DUI arrest that earned a suspension from the league, at least 15 trips to rehab and an incident in 2023 when first responders found him unresponsive in his bedroom following a suspected overdose. If his struggles were constant, embarrassing and inevitably made news, his candour about them won plaudits.
“Any way I can take away from the stigma is good,” said Irsay. “A lot of people don’t understand the disease. They think you choose an addiction. What’s really important is that you can be honest and talk about an illness. There are millions of death certificates that don’t read ‘alcoholism‘, but that’s what it is. Instead, they say, ‘heart attack’, ‘stroke’, ‘liver disease’ or something else. I know it’s not perceived as a disease, as something like cancer. Hopefully that will change.”
In between amassing one of the world’s great collections of musical instruments, from Elton John’s Steinway Model D grand piano to The Edge’s Gibson Explorer, he spent $2.2 million on the original manuscript of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, a tome freighted with personal meaning given his battle with the bottle and his father’s before him.
After forking over $4.5 million for Cobain’s guitar, the singer’s family immediately donated a portion of that money back to Kicking the Stigma, the non-profit Irsay established to try to improve the conversation around mental illness and addiction. Even as he failed to slay his own demons and he faded from public view over the last year of his life, his philanthropy helped many of those suffering just like him.
The youngest general manager in NFL history at 24, he made a genuine impact on America’s national game. Aside from presiding over the Colts’ greatest era, when they won one Super Bowl and were serial contenders, he was part of a four-man committee that devised the salary cap in the 1980s. It was a transformative innovation that made the league more competitive and compelling, driving the box office. Under his canny stewardship, the club his father paid $19 million for in 1972 – which will now be run by his three beloved daughters – is worth $5 billion.
“Irsay’s personality, oftentimes,” wrote Nate Atkins in The Indianapolis Star, “was like a middle finger to the character map in Succession.”
As fitting an epitaph as any.
