Johnny Unitas signing an autograph at the Baltimore Colts’ Westminster training camp in summer 1964. Photo by Joel Kaufman.
Recalling the infamous, midnight move of Baltimore’s beloved Colts to Indianapolis in 1984
The faces of Baltimore’s NFL team weren’t always Lamar Jackson and the Ravens. And the Colts were not conceived in Indiana. Looking back to 1984, dyed-in-the wool rooters from Charm City and the surrounding region awoke one snowy March morning to learn that their beloved Colts had unceremoniously just skipped town, with no warning, in the dark of night.
In the wake of the initial shock and dismay among local NFL football fans, furor ensued when the news broke. The anger wasn’t so much directed at what happened as it was toward how and why it transpired—and who was responsible.
Baltimore native C. E. Vance, a former member of the Memorial Stadium grounds crew now transplanted in retirement to Maryland’s Eastern Shore recalls, “Loving the Colts was part-and-parcel of who I was. I was 26 when the Colts left, and none of us fans liked what the team had become under [owner] Robert Irsay. They were ours, and Irsay presented as an irrational buffoon who just happened to own an NFL franchise.”
The City’s Team
The football season in these parts was as constant and predictable as autumn itself. Season tickets were willed to next-of-kin to keep them in the family. A Colts game in wooden-seated Memorial Stadium was a local tradition—some likened it even to a religious experience.
The players were accessible and approachable parts of the community. Many of them took side jobs in the city and were recognized on the street as TV and radio pitchmen for products such as Dixie Cola and National Bohemian beer (“from The Land of Pleasant Living”), and some of the nation’s first fast-food stands. The first was named Gino’s after Gino Marchetti, one of the last of his breed of linemen to play on both offense and defense. To locals, Gino’s was “where everybody goes, ‘cause Gino’s is the place to go,” as the catchy TV and radio jingle went.
Robert Irsay at a press conference in January 1984 with then-Baltimore Mayor William Schaefer, denying his intention to move the Colts.
Alan “The Horse” Ameche—a co-founder of Gino’s, with Marchetti—in turn opened his own Ameche’s Drive-In, with locations in Glen Burnie, Reisterstown Road, Loch Raven Boulevard, Dundalk, and Timonium. The chain promoted “Powerhouse Burgers—A Banquet in Every Bun.” Also popular was the higher-scale dinner-club/nightclub owned and operated by the hightop-spiked, crew-cut, and squeaky-clean quarterback, Johnny Unitas: dubbed “The Golden Arm.”
As an aside, it was later disclosed at a Maryland Historical Society panel discussion—moderated by WBAL’s long-time sportscaster Jerry Sandusky and featuring former players Art Donovan, Jim Mutscheller, and Ordell Braase—that Unitas’s teammates called him “John,” never “Johnny,” which was a media invention, they all agreed.
The “day-job” resume of all these men included having won the 1958 NFL championship game (before there was a Super Bowl) against the New York Giants, regarded later as “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” with Ameche scoring the winning touchdown behind an offensive line led by first-team All-Pro Jim Parker.
Trademark plays on the field were indelible images: impossible-to-defend sideline passes from Unitas to bespectacled Raymond Berry, who caught the ball, then fell out of bounds; the likes of Tom Matte and Lenny Moore breaking loose for hard-fought ground yardage up the middle when they weren’t catching screen passes; tight end John Mackey for shorter gains, unless he broke through the line of defenders for even bigger yardage, “flanker” (once the name for a wide receiver) Jimmy Orr going deep for a pass in the corner of the endzone, appropriately named “Orrsville.”
There were stars on defense, too: middle linebacker Mike “Mad Dog” Curtis, giant lineman Bubba Smith (later playing the character “Moses Hightower” in the TV series “Police Academy”), feared safety Rick Volk, and defensive back Jerry Logan, to name but a few of the group once known as “The Sack Pack.” Most of these players not only worked in Baltimore, they lived there, too. For those of a certain age, the scenarios were in the very fabric of a hardscrabble, blue-collar world: the state of Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, and especially, the city of Baltimore itself.
Images of the infamous Mayflower trucks moving the Baltimore Colts equipment from the team’s facility on the snowy night/morning of March 28, 1984.
The Pullout
The Colts’ management at the time obviously couldn’t care less how the diehard fans felt about “their” team. So, at the order of habitually intoxicated Robert Irsay, they pulled a fast one and left town. Boom! Gone in one night! The scheme went down with no apparent warning or exact motive—four decades ago. The fleet of 15 commercial moving trucks that converged on the training facility in Owings Mills in a late-winter snowstorm was mobilized directly by Mayflower Transit CEO John Burnside Smith by way of Indianapolis Mayor William H. Hudnut. The Indy mayor was also earning the ire of Baltimoreans, who called him “the guy who stole the Colts” and “Baltimore’s Public Enemy Number Two.” PE Number One in this scheme’s hall of shame was the relatively new owner of the franchise, the despicable Bob Irsay.
Irsay’s goal was simple. He wanted a new stadium, which would sell more tickets, with a good team already in place. Irsay just needed a place to move the men. With the City of Baltimore on the cusp of claiming ownership of the Colts via “eminent domain,” time was also of the essence. The deals cut by Irsay’s predecessor, Carroll Rosenbloom cannot be overlooked, having started the whole pullout ball rolling by turning over the reins to Irsay in the first place.
To do the grunt work—the dirty job of literally, physically abandoning Baltimore altogether, the Irsay-Hudnut cartel hired college students from the University of Maryland to load the cargo. According to a May 2014 story (for the 30th anniversary of “The Scar”) posted on “Deadspin Sports,” members of Sigma Chi fraternity at the University of Maryland had been summoned and hired by Mayflower (at a handsome hourly rate, in 1984 dollars) to shrink-wrap all the Colts’ gear they could locate and load the loot into the waiting tractor-trailers.
As the story goes, several items—such as uniforms with famous numbers, then-Head Coach Frank Kush’s pants, and athletic gear belonging to Colts’ players, plus a Lombardi Trophy from the team’s 1970 Super Bowl victory, had gone missing. Some claim the trophy was a facsimile, even though it’s still in plain sight in the “Almost Religion” Colts display at the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum on Emory Street near present-day Camden Yards. It’s been reported that Irsay secretly kept the real trophy in his office, which would surprise no one.
While there was enough blame to go around, news commentators searching for the right words to describe the football situation in Baltimore were calling it “Shake and Bake,” borrowing from the brand name of a new way to prepare and cook raw meat. It was between 1972 and 1976, that the Irsay name arose from the swamp, the mere mention of which would raise the collective blood pressure all across town.
The Franchise Handoff
The Sun newspaper ran multiple headlines and stories of the Colts move.
Colts former owner Carroll Rosenbloom—who had been doing battle with the city to, among other concessions, either upgrade the dilapidated Memorial Stadium (home to both the Colts and Major League Baseball’s Orioles at the time), or build a new one—had “traded” the NFL franchise to Irsay, who became a caricature of himself. He was later called “the prototypical bad sports owner and obstreperous public drunk.” (Note: For a video display of Irsay in delirious, untruthful action, search WMAR-TV online for an archived 40-year-old 1984 BWI Airport press conference with Irsay himself and Mayor William Donald Schaeffer.)
One of Irsay’s first NFL transactions was to trade quarterback legend Unitas to the San Diego Chargers. Nicknamed “The White Tornado,” the mogul proceeded to dismantle the city’s beloved Colts such that their last days in Charm City were downright dismal. After several consecutive losing seasons, beginning in 1978, ticket sales at Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street naturally dwindled, and a move seemed inevitable. The City of Indianapolis eventually expressed interest in Baltimore’s NFL team and made an offer to buy the beloved Colts and move them to Indiana. The midwestern city’s “Colts” would have nothing to do with Charm City’s heritage of horse-breeding, much less Pimlico’s second leg of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown, the Preakness.
“Unceremonious” is a polite word for the move itself and its immediate aftermath. Even the TV news reporters that night were confused. One claim was that the whole operation was the work of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. A group of the University of Maryland fraternity brothers included Duffy Welsh, who testified that “It really could have been a movie…I remember so many scenes from that night. Just crazy.”
Even the Mayor of Indianapolis, William H. Hudnut, was complicit in the scheme. But apparently, Mayor Schaefer, later governor of Maryland, couldn’t sway the decision, once refraining: “There’s something obnoxious about the name ‘Indianapolis Colts.’”
It would be just over a decade until Baltimore regained an NFL team. In 1994, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell announced his intention to move that city’s team eastward to the Inner Harbor. Becoming the Baltimore Ravens, the relocated team played its first official game on September 1, 1996, at Memorial Stadium defeating the Oakland Raiders 19–14. With little doubt, this cemented Modell’s own legacy as one of both infamy and hero depending upon which city fans live in and root for. Indeed, history has a habit of repeating itself.
