America At Large:The participants won't arrive in Miami until Sunday, but with Super Bowl XLI still over a week away, the storyline is already emerging: for the next 11 days we will be inundated with reminders that while no African-American head coach had reached the NFL's Championship game in the first 40 Super Bowls, the 41st will match two of them.
With all due respect to Tony Dungy (Indianapolis Colts) and Lovie Smith (Chicago Bears), the inevitable feeding frenzy over their ethnicity will overshadow what seems to me an equally compelling aspect of the February 4th game at Dolphins Stadium, which is that Jim Irsay has at last been granted an opportunity to dispatch the ghosts of his father's unseemly legacy.
No NFL owner before or since was as roundly disliked as Robert Irsay, once accurately described by the Baltimore Sun as "the most reviled man in football". Always difficult to get along with, Irsay bought his way into the NFL in 1972 when he purchased the Los Angeles Rams and then, in an arranged deal, swapped franchises with Carroll Rosenbloom, who owned the Baltimore Colts.
The Colts were regarded as nothing less than a civic treasure. (Case in point: the Barry Levinson film Diner, in which Steve Guttenberg's character, Eddie, agrees to marry his fiancee only after she passes a 100-question Baltimore Colts trivia quiz). Twelve years later, after reaching a backdoor deal with Indianapolis interests, on the evening of March 28th, 1984, Bob Irsay dispatched a fleet of moving vans to the Colts' headquarters, and by daybreak the team had literally stolen out of town forever.
Brazenly uprooting the Colts was considered an unpardonable act, and not just in Baltimore. That the city was eventually rewarded with another franchise, the Ravens, did little to soothe local wounds. To this day, the doddering remnants of the Baltimore Colts Marching Band are trotted out in their blue-and-white uniforms for municipal celebrations. Longtime Baltimore fans were particularly incensed that, after moving to Indiana, the Colts continued to play in their Baltimore-vintage uniforms, and retained the Baltimore Colts' team records as their own.
And until a bit after nine o'clock last Sunday, when the Colts scored the winning touchdown with a minute to play in a 38-34 win over the Patriots in the AFC Championship game, they had regarded Indianapolis' annual play-off swoon with a certain schadenfreude. (Time and again in recent years, the Peyton Manning-led Colts had amassed the league's best regular-season record only to be ousted, often by the Patriots, in the tournament for the Super Bowl).
According to his own family, the civic legacy of Baltimore wasn't the only thing Bob Irsay robbed. Two years after he had spirited the Colts out of town, Irsay's then 84-year-old mother told Sports Illustrated that her son had stolen family money and described him as "the devil on earth". In the same SI story, Robert Irsay's former wife, Harriet, said that "Owning a football team really made him feel powerful. Between his power and his drinking, he just became obnoxious. He was always belittling the players and coaches, constantly in a fit of temper."
And then Johnny Unitas, the legendary Colts' quarterback of the 1960s and 70s, said of Irsay pere: "You couldn't accept anything Mr Irsay told you as being totally truthful."
Suffice it to say that upon inheriting the team upon his father's death 10 years ago, Jim Irsay became the most haunted heir since Hamlet.
Bob Irsay had been a mean drunk. His son was a closet druggie. (In 2002, on learning that he was the subject of a federal investigation, Jim checked himself into a rehab unit and confirmed that he had been abusing prescription drugs for at least seven years).
The 32 NFL owners are by definition millionaire movers and shakers, and it isn't often that one of them moves in the same circles I do, but Jimmy Irsay has always marched to a different drummer.
He was certainly the only owner of an NFL franchise who had Hunter S Thompson's home number on speed dial. He is an accomplished amateur musician who has a studio in his home, and jams with the likes of fellow Indianan John Mellencamp and our mutual friend, Stephen Stills. He plays a guitar once owned by Elvis Presley and regularly confounds more traditional sportswriters by sprinkling his interviews with obscure quotes from Bob Dylan.
And in 2001, he astonished the literary world by outbidding all other suitors, paying $2.43 million to acquire the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. A few months after Irsay had purchased the scroll, I found myself in Indianapolis for a Patriots-Colts game. Jim Irsay arranged for me to have a private viewing of the manuscript, in a vault at the Lilly Library in nearby Bloomington, where it was being restored.
In contrast to Unitas' opinion of his father, Manning, the current Colts' quarterback, describes Jim Irsay as "as good an owner - and as good a man - as there is". (Some cynic is bound to point out that Peyton has 98 million reasons for his enthusiastic endorsement.)
Ironically, the Colts reached last Sunday's conference title game by beating the Ravens, in Baltimore, the preceding weekend. Jim Irsay was all but hung in effigy on his return to that city, and the stadium was festooned with signs and placards bearing everything from insults to outright threats.
Don't get me wrong: I'm delighted to see two black coaches in the Super Bowl, but I'm happy for Jim Irsay, too. "It's taken faith and belief," said Irsay, before adding in an oblique reference to his late father, "and exorcism of some of the things of the past."
