OPINION:
Before Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, more than 350,000 fans observed a moment of silence for the memory of Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, who died last week at 65.
I suspect around the DMV, there were many football fans who quietly paid their own respects to the departed NFL owner.
Irsay, after all, was one of the first NFL power brokers to speak into existence the desperate hope that so many regular Washington fans carried in their damaged hearts for years — that it was time for the league to jettison Dan Snyder.
Irsay emerged from an owners meeting in October 2022 and told reporters, “I believe that there’s merit to remove him as owner of the [Commanders]. I think it’s something that we have to review. We have to look at all the evidence, and we have to be thorough in going forward. But I think it’s something that has to be given serious consideration to.”
Boom. Nine months later, Snyder sold the franchise to the Josh Harris ownership group.
“That’s not what we stand for in the National Football League,” Irsay also told the reporters, talking about the ongoing allegations of Snyder’s misconduct. “And I think owners have been painted incorrectly a lot of times by various people and under various situations. And that’s not what we’re about. … There’s just a lot of closeness in this league. And I don’t think, some of the things I’ve heard, it doesn’t represent us at all. And I want the American public and the world to know what we’re about as owners.”
At the time, it was Irsay breaking ranks with fellow owners. They had all heard about the toxic, corrupt Snyder ownership — nothing that they didn’t really already know — but only Irsay took a stand.
Why not open the curtain and show the fans a league willing to clean up an embarrassing mess?
Because in the old-boy club that runs the NFL, there is one rule when it comes to turning on a fellow owner: “There but for the grace of God go I.”
That’s their code, and no one, one might think, would have followed that code more than Irsay, who was suspended for six games and fined $500,000 by the league in 2014 after pleading guilty to DWI and being sentenced to one year of probation.
His mug shot was all over the web, and there was a video of him failing a sobriety test. He had a battle with opioids that forced him into rehab twice that we know of. This was what we knew publicly about Irsay. Who knows what was going on privately.
He wasn’t a member of the Boy Scouts. NFL owners are rich men who can indulge their dark sides, often privately. Who knows what secrets Irsay knew about his fellow owners.
So why step out of line and drop the hammer on Snyder? Yes, there was the Beth Wilkinson report into allegations of sexual harassment made by dozens of women who worked for the football team during Snyder’s ownership, followed by the Mary Jo White investigation after the damaging congressional testimony against Snyder during the hearings. But all that still remained behind closed doors. Why was Irsay the only owner to publicly express his disgust for Snyder?
Maybe because when he looked at Snyder, he saw his father, Bob Irsay — perhaps the only NFL owner in history more publicly despised than Snyder.
Jim Irsay seemingly spent most of his adult life trying to prove he wasn’t the horrid human being his father was.
Bob Irsay, who died in 1997, was the Colts owner who in the dead of night had Mayflower vans move his team out of Baltimore and to Indianapolis in 1984, breaking promises he made to Maryland public officials and leaving a city heartbroken.
But he was so much worse than even that. There were countless stories of drunken public behavior, lies (his military record) and allegations of running his father out of the business. In a December 1986 Sports Illustrated story, Bob Irsay’s 84-year-old mother, Elaine, called her son “a devil on earth, that one … he stole all our money and said goodbye.”
On the list of the worst NFL owners, Bob Irsay and Dan Snyder are 1 and 1A.
Maybe Jim Irsay couldn’t abide by Snyder’s sins because they were too close to the legacy that the younger Irsay tried to escape.
Remember Jim Irsay’s declaration, “I want the American public and the world to know what we’re about as owners.”
From a May 2021 Athletic story: “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.”
The comparisons dogged Jim Irsay. “Jim’s nothing like his old man,” said Bruce Laird, a safety for the Baltimore Colts in the 1970s who knew father and son, according to a 2014 Sports Illustrated article.”He’s respectful. He cares about Indianapolis, cares about the National Football League. I think he wanted to do right by his franchise.”
He did do right by the Colts, and was beloved in Indianapolis despite his flaws.
He and the Colts won a Super Bowl, and Indianapolis hosted a Super Bowl, too.
Most importantly, to fellow owners, Jim Irsay got a new stadium built. Jim Irsay was not his father.
Maybe Dan Snyder was a ghost who conjured up the nightmare of Bob Irsay. That was too much for Jim Irsay to stay quiet.
• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.