It's April second, nineteen eighty four. Twenty thousand people are in the stands at the Hoosier Dome, which was four times the expected attendants, to celebrate the arrival of the Colts to Indianapolis, just four days after the Mayflower vans rolled into town from Baltimore. Indianapolis Mayor Bill HUDNUTT triumphantly walks out of a tunnel onto the green astro turf at the Hoosier Dome. Next to him as Robert ur say, it's a striking sight. Hudnut waves to the crowd, grinning
ear to ear. Then with his left hand he grabs Robert Ursay's right hand and he lifts it up in the air. The two men walk into the Hoosier Dome, hands held high. As Hudnut makes his way to a stage on the field, he finds the hand of Deputy Mayor David Frick, the man most responsible for nailing down the city's deal to land the Colts, and he hoists Frick's hand in the air too. Hudnut does not stop smiling. He knows the gravity the moment. He is the mayor
who brought the NFL to Indianapolis. Finally, the dignitaries of the day reach a stage on the field. Frick strides to a brown podium with two things on it, white letters spelling out Indiana Convention Center. Who's your dome? Beneath it the NFL shield. Frick is the MC of the day.
Good morning, what a great day for NABLAS.
Over about thirty minutes, Indiana's business and government dignitaries take turns at the podium, drawing raucous cheers from the crowd for their role in bringing the NFL to Indianapolis. Eventually, Colts head coach Frank Kush, the hard ass hired from Arizona State who wouldn't be coaching in Phoenix that fall, takes the mic.
The next group.
I likes that.
I introduces what I would call.
Mayflower midnight Woovers. We have a couple of young kids here. They just got their honorary degree from IU. I think they're about sixteen or seventeen year old. They're geniuses. Pete Ward that handles our administrative assistant we have on the football team and the coaches in a personnelity apartment.
We want to thank you.
We are going to give it the best effort to produce a winning football team here and make you proud of the Indianapolis Colts.
Thank you.
Eventually, Mayor Bill Hudnutt and Colts owner Robert Orsay, the guests of honor take the podium. Mayor Hudnut gets a standing ovation and the grin he's had splashed across his face it hasn't faded.
This is a great day for the city of Indianapolis. And I can't tell you how proud I am to welcome Barbers and the Indianapolis called to this magnificent facility with these blue.
And white seats.
Hudnut gives out keys to the city to several people, include Jim Orsay, Michael Chernoff, and Frank Cush from the Colts, and then he introduces the owner of Indianapolis's pro football team.
Now the moment we've all been waiting for the opportunity to introduce to you the owner of the Indianapolis Colts. I'm going to read a proclamation and then he's going to have the floor and I'm gonna give him a key to the city as well as a proclamation, because this is one of the greatest days in the history of this city. Ladies and gentlemen.
After Huddnut proclaims April second, nineteen eighty four, is Indianapolis. Colts stay in Indianapolis. He welcomes Robert or Say to the stage. They raise their hands in the air one more time, and then Robert or Say begins speaking to twenty thousand of his newest fans.
Thank you very much, needless of saying, I'm very glad to be here. We did go through several mons. Wasn't easy that we did talk to other people. I just I'll give you a little review what happened, and it won't take too much time of years. But we did talk to several other cities. We did choose in Annapolis. Your negotiator, mister Frickett, and your mayor didn't give anything away. We had better offers. I did choose in Indianapolis. I'm
a Midwestern to start with. Second of all, I think the treatment and negotiations were more than fairer with this city than any others I negotiated with. So I think you could put this on a burner. This negotiation with in Annapolis was not really all for dollars. But we're very happy to be here. We're pleased at your Dome Stadium.
We're pleased at the arrangements. We maighed with your city, and we just hope that our team will back you up and take you to the spot you belongs as a pro team in Innneapolis and NFL.
Thank you.
But the pomp and circumstance of the moment and the joyous looks on the faces of those at the Hoosier Dome that day were only a brief respite for a franchise that in many ways was completely starting over just five months before the nineteen eighty four season was set to begin. Pete Ward, now the Colts chief operating officer, was an administrative assistant when the team moved in nineteen eighty four.
We didn't really know where to be. We didn't have phones, we didn't have anybody the answer phones. We didn't have stationary, we didn't know what our address was. We didn't have a copyer in. It was just started a while, starting a franchise from scratch, except that you had your players and your coaches under contract.
So how did the Colts go about the gargantuan task of getting their first season in Indianapolis off the ground and back in Baltimore? What was the fallout in a region rocked by the midnight departure of their football team.
Like the talking has some life during wartime and you know that gunfire and the distance of time getting.
Used to it now Jimmersay, the owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts.
Is just like so absurd that no one would possibly you just could not believe what was going on in that first year.
I mean, it just it.
Was just unbelievable.
This is episode four of The Move Aftermath. The goal for as Cush called them, the Mayflower Midnight Movers on March twenty eighth, nineteen eighty four, was not organization. The goal was speed. It didn't matter how boxes were packed or how the trucks were loaded up. It just mattered that the boxes were packed and the trucks were loaded up before the State of Maryland could authorize the City of Baltimore to try to seize the Colts through eminent domain.
And that left an absolute mess to sort through after the trucks arrived at Fall Creek Elementary School on the east side of Indianapolis. Remember what Pete Ward said in episode three about how the Owings Mills facility was packed up.
It wasn't like, Okay, i's suit this office in this office, so I couldn't be everywhere to label box it. It was just mass chaos, and so that's how things ended up being packed and shipped. And when we got to Indianapolis, there was just a big pile of boxes and desks. You know, we new Bank's hat and the footballs and everything.
Ward, who was then a twenty something you described himself as quote cheap labor, found a mattress. He stashed it at Fall Creek Elementary School and he went to work both exhausted and energized at the same time.
You know what it was, So he had so much adrenaline because you were so excited, because the city was excited.
You know.
It just was such a different feeling than Baltimore. So you're excited, but you're also just overwhelmed and mentally exhausted because there's so many first yet hardly had any sleep, and there's so much to do.
It took about a week of nearly round the clock work for the Colts to get set up at their new facility, which again was an abandoned elementary school, and so an NFL team which provided some of the highest paying jobs to some of the largest men in our country, was about to set up shop in really an elementary school.
No one could.
Possibly believe it.
You know.
It's like we're using this grade school sports field which was barely big enough for a football field, and we got to get this field ready in four weeks, you know, for mini camp.
While Indianapolis's movers and shakers, led by Mayor Bill Hudnutt, had stuck their collective necks out to build the sparkly new Hoosier Dome, the city had not also built a practice facility for an NFL team. That would come later once a team arrived back in Maryland. Though the Colts complex in Owings Mills was state of the art, in Indianapol, the Colts would have to set up where children used to learn about states and art.
When we landed, they kind of buttered us up. They took us to the brand new Hoosier Dome.
John Scott was the Colt's equipment manager in nineteen eighty four.
And wow was that cool. I mean, especially for an equipment guy.
All our home.
Games are in no rain, no infield, in dirt or whatever. So we saw that and it was great and even the seats were blue and white, you know, like it was made for us. So now we're going to take you to the complex. I'm thinking, great, I hope it's as nice as the one in Baltimore. And we pull up to Fall Creek Elementary School. Yes, I why are we here?
A new complex for the Colts on the west side of Indianapolis, which is where the team still practices to this day, was under construction and expected to be completed in nineteen eighty five. Fall Creek Elementary School was a temporary solution. The most important thing to both parties, the city of Indianapolis and the Colts, was that, well the culture in Indianapolis.
You know, you go inside these rooms that's going to be for the offensive linemen, and you walk in there and there's little tiny seats because it was the first grade room. You know, I said, well those are gott to go. You know. There was a lot of had living I gues whatever the word is, just to try to figure out how are we going to make this work for an NFL you know, team to be in an elementary school.
Fall Creek Elementary was indeed retrofitted to house an NFL team. Showers were put in not for four foot tall kids, but for six foot tall adults. Coaches and front office staffers were assigned to classrooms and where kids were once taught multiplication was now where pro football players would be taught how to defend Dan Marino. Jim Rsay, then the team's general manager, set up his office in the school library. The cafeteria was divided into becoming the locker room, training room,
and equipment room. Half of the gymnasium came the weight room.
We put a dividing wall on their old basketball court and half was going to be the weight room. And I remember I was there late one night. Like I said, there was this wall dividing the basketball court, and then there was the weight room, which wasn't much of a weight room, but you know, we had no security, We had NOMI, and so all of a sudden, you know, it's nighttime and I'm working. And as we were working,
you know, sixteen hour days, I hear this. I walk into the opposite half of the basketball car and I hear this, like on the floor. You know, I'm like, what is there is someone in here to rip his off? I mean I don't know. Of course, no cell phones, but you know, what the hell am I going to do? And so you know, I'm meekly peeking around the corner of the wall and Bob Turpin he's in there, the handful of two handfuls of them, and m's.
Going like.
Outside. An AstroTurf field was installed, but only seventy yards could fit on the property and there were no end zones.
They put a makeshift astro turf field down and as we got into the season. I'll never forget this.
Matt Bozo was a wide receiver on the Colts in nineteen eighty four.
It was raining like it can rain, and you know, in the fall, early fall, and that field we went out and the AstroTurf field was floating. It was like floating on the top of a bathtub.
There was genuinely no spinning this anyway else. This was not a situation where business staffers worked out of an office and the team practiced at a local high school or college while waiting for their new facility to open up. No, this was legitimately an entire NFL team operating out of an abandoned elementary school.
It's an elementary school. It's you walk in and it's like, yeah, I went to this school like when I was thirteen. That's what it was, was a school.
Mike Chappel is entering his fortieth year covering the Indianapolis Colts.
Inside you're thinking, so this is the NFL. Well, no, not really. It's a precursor to the NFL until you get your headquarters together. So but back then we didn't worry about that because, again as a fan invasion, as the media, you were just glad to be out to that facility for the reason you were.
As Colts staffers figured out what classrooms everything belonged in, they needed to hire some support staff. The team's business operations like ticketing, marketing, sponsorships, public relations, et cetera. Were largely left behind in Baltimore. The Colts football operations were intact, but everything else was in disarray.
You're starting to fill the staff and the coaches. We'd go over to the Irish pub down the street and several of the hired secretaries from there at lunch.
Hower coaching bartenders was one solution to the team's staffing problem, but the Colts would quickly find out that they had a problem that required more than just a quick fix.
March twenty nine of eighty four, the Colts arrive in Indy and I still remember thinking, wow, that's kind of late, you know, in the ticketing process to move, and I thought, wow, that's going to be pretty tough for someone over there in Indy.
That's Larry Hall, who in the spring of nineteen eighty four was a young twenty somethingter ticketing guy for the Cincinnati Bengals. Initially, the Colts figured the staff at the Hoosier Dome could handle tickets for the nineteen eighty four season, but about a month after settling into Indianapolis, the Colts realized demand for their tickets was so high they need to hire someone as soon as possible to begin managing Indianapolis's intense interest in Colts tickets.
Their safe Hamory shout to the Brown family. Mike Brown calls me and hey, Larry, how.
You doing good?
So you know the Colts moved from Baltimore, India. Yes, sir, I do know that, And well they've called an asked permission to talk to you about being their lid ticket guy at the end of this long day, and it went really well. I was very open and honest about my experience and how I would do it if I were doing the ticket process. And at the end of the day by Brsees says, you're our guy.
We want you.
When can you start?
And I said, well, I need to go home to talk about coaches.
Call let's whatt tomorrow.
We want to know, we want to know, right, And he was very anxious, and I later found out why because they had put out in the newspaper on it. I remember a midnight run everyone told me of the newspaper had this famous application you could order, you know, up to ten tickets in a thirteen day window. Thirty thousand applications for one hundred and forty thousand seats poured in in a thirteen day window. This is no credit cards, this is cashier's checks and money orders, no personal checks.
So they shut down the post office box and returned anything came in after that. But the building held sixty twenty seven six zero one two seven.
That's it.
So he's got a little bit of a challenge here with this this this ticketing demand which is off the charts, and it's wonderful and it's great, and the enthusiasm for the team, you know, was just at a height that I'd never witnessed before.
Larry Hall began working for the Colts in May, and he had less than three months to not just figure out who would get tickets, but how they would get them. First things first, though, he had to find his office, which would be in a classroom at Fall Creek Elementary.
I'm driving to the complex to go to work for the first day. I park and I go in and a young lady named Kristin Palmore was receptionist from the south side of Ending. She was pretty sassy, and you know, had took a high volume of calls everyone know about tickets and people from Baltimore still threatening their say family was terrible, right terrible, and she could give back pretty well to whatever she got on the phone. And I remember walking up and saying, well, I'm Larry Hall. I'm
here to run the ticket office. He said okay, and there's a long pause, and I said, dum, is there somebody in particular supposed to see She goes, no, I don't, but there's open classrooms if you want to find one down the hallway. So I just sort of walked down the hallway and no computer, no staff. I'm pretty sure if I didn't bring a pad and a Penda rite with there may not have been one. When you say from scratch, I'm talking from scratch, all right. I remember
going into the classroom that I picked. I forget what room number it was, but you know, the ceiling tile was kind of had a few leaks and some of the tiles were popped up. And my wife came over, and we came from pretty humble beginnings, but she walked into that room and went We left Cincinnati for this.
With demand for tickets more than doubling the Hoosier Domes capacity, Hall would have to find a solution. Folks in Indianapolis were desperate to land tickets to watch their new team play, but not everyone would be able to get in the door. The plan then became to hold a lottery to determine who could get season tickets.
There was no Indiana lottery at that time. By the way, mister say bobber Say Jim's father knew the governor of Illinois they had a lottery. He convinced him to borrow their lottery machine, put it on his private jet, strap it down, bring it over right to Indy, and roll that thing out.
Among those thirty thousand applications, if lottery number six was drawn, every sixth person on the list would be able to purchase season tickets. For Jeff Haggard and his family, who were among the early winners of the ticket lottery, it felt like they won the actual lottery. Haggard has been a cult season ticket member ever since the team's debut in Indianapolis in nineteen eighty four.
It was just going to get really want you know ticket back then, because it was all over the news. I mean, we actually made it an evening of it. We ceramonsly drove the envelopes them in the mailbox and put it in and you all gave it a wish for reluctant so we could get it. And so when we ben we got it was excitement.
As the week's bled off the calendar that summer, the team's staff worked long hours with little sleep, trying to get a mountain of tasks completed before the team kicked off at the Hoosier Dome for their first preseason game that August.
They could work twenty four hours a day for six months and still not be where you wanted to be. Really, I had a recurring nightmare that was I would wake up like that I overslept for opener, you know, and it's like a recurring nightmare, and I'd get to the game and it was like half time.
One of the biggest challenges, as it would turn out, would be just getting tickets in the hands of fans who bought them. Because the Colts didn't know where they'd be playing in nineteen eighty four until late March, and because they completed their lottery just a few weeks later, there was no guarantee tickets would be printed and in
the hands of the people that bought them. Before the Colts preseason opener on August eleventh, nineteen eighty four against the New York Giants, Hall begged the company that printed the Colts tickets to speed up the process. They couldn't.
We were really, really behind any normal process for any team, and did our best to accelerate everything, including asking a company out of Arkansas that printed the tickets then to expedite things, and they said, for a number of reasons, they really couldn't. We offered to pay more money. We said, hey, can you put a third shift on, can do Saturdays? We're kind of already doing that, you know, So it's getting closer and close to the first game, and we're
really thinking ourselves, what's what's the plan B? Is there a plan B if we can't physically get someone a ticket? So we started literally thinking, is there a way? Do you just have to at some point open the gates and trust people.
The Colts ultimately had to hand deliver some tickets just before that first game at the Hoosier Dome to ensure all sixty two hundred and thirty six fans could get in the door to the seats they had purchased.
I remember different people's personalities and how we all got along, and you know, with that common cause and knowing that this is such a abbreviation, i'll call it a short runway. You got to stick to landing. I would imagine I haven't done that, but I've seen video right of landing on an aircraft carrier where you've just got it. You got to get right, because if you don't, the game's gonna happen anyway, right, and you'll deal with whatever issues happened.
There's maybe never been more buzz for a preseason game than when the Colts kicked off against the Giants that August.
Without looking it up, we.
Twenty.
I mean, it's funny, I can it just it was you think about the movie Rudy when Ned Batty said this is the greatest thing of it ever seen, you know, and then that's when you know as a FOOTBA player, that's what we felt. It just we stopped at the top of the concourse and when we first won't walk in and you just stopped, just just just looking around. And and even though it was a preseason game, I mean,
the crowd was just raucous. It was loud, it was fun, and you know, it's it's one of those games and I'll never forget.
But the attention on the game wasn't all good.
It was crazy, you know, and we had so many death threats and everything else. And so the FBI or whatever agency gave me a bulletproof best and a and a gun for my ankle, so you know, this is optional for the first Giant preseason game.
My wife saw me putting out as.
He was like, what the hell are you doing. I going, well, something some bitch comes after us.
I'm being prepared.
You know.
Most people in Baltimore, of course, were not going to commit a felony over losing their team, but It's important to remember that Indianapolis's gain of a team came at a cost. Bill Hudnutt even admitted that, saying in a TV interview in nineteen eighty four that he felt sorry for the people of Baltimore, but he also emphasized he had to do right by Indianapolis as the city's mayor.
Debbie Knox, the longtime Wish TV reporter, certainly spared a thought for Baltimore amid Indianapolis's celebration.
I just remember having a little bit of a sort of felt sorry for the people of Baltimore because at the time they didn't have the Ravens, you know, so here they were bereft, you know what.
Now, back in Baltimore, in the days and weeks following the Colts move, there were a few prevailing emotions among the population. While Indianapolis was able to puff out its chest as an NFL city, all of a sudden, Baltimore was deflated to no longer be able to say that.
It was hard to see people who were really attached to that organization and to the idea of an NFL team.
Jane Miller reported for WBALTV from Owings Mills the night the Colts moved.
I think that's one of the things I really learned throughout my career in criticularly in Baltimore, because it went through this. There's kind of a psyche about having an NFL team that is really pretty powerful, and that people were.
Really missed them, miss missed the idea of it.
A team may not have been all that good at the end of the day, but certainly the fact that the Colts got everybody you know, refers to it as being stolen, stolen away in the middle of the night. So the fact that that happened, I think, you know, really a lot of people were very, very sad.
John Zeman, the leader of the Colt band, who was auditioning drummers for the nineteen eighty four season the night the Colts moved, remembered an empty feeling waking up on March twenty ninth.
The next day, commerce was moving on Baltimore. Nobody died, the son came, but we lost a big part of Rupert and the way it was done, it was heartbreaking.
For the city of Baltimore losing the Colts. Even if most people were resigned to that outcome by the time the team left, it was still a baffling feeling.
There are certain things in life. We just went through one of them here in Baltimore with the collapse of the Francis Scott key Bridge. There are certain things in life where you look at as permanent and all of a sudden they're not.
Jerry Sandusky is a Baltimore native and is the voice of the Ravens.
The Baltimore Colts were a permanent part of this town. They were. You can make a case that the Baltimore Colts and the Baltimore Orioles are the axis that this town kind of gravitated around in winter and in spring and in football season, in baseball season, and to have one of them removed was so devastating and disorienting.
Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaeffer gave a dour press conference outside his home the day after the Colts left, but a few days later he tried to put a smile on the face of his residence.
It was a Monday morning in downtown Baltimore. Some of the curbs had been painted pink for his Pink Positive Day. He realized that there was.
The whole mood was very dim.
And you know, trying to like cheer up the place.
But among the sadness that permeated the city of Baltimore, there was also hope and determination. For years, state and local officials didn't think the Colts would actually leave, but they were worried about the chances their much more successful baseball team would skip town. The loss of the Colts, painful as it was, spurred action to begin working to keep the Orioles, who won the World Series five months before Mayflower Van showed up in Owings Mills.
The second the shocks settled in eighty four that hey, wait a second, If Baltimore Colts aren't actually a permanent part of this community, the Baltimore Orioles could move too.
All of a sudden, the roles between Baltimore and Indianapolis were kind of reversed. For years, Indianapolis had worked hard to keep the Pacers, knowing if their NBA team left, their chances of getting an NFL team were slim to none. Now for Baltimore, there was an urgency to keep their major League baseball team, knowing if the Orioles were to leave, the chances they'd get another NFL team were pretty slim.
On January twentieth nineteen eighty five, The Baltimore Sun reported that Mayor William Donald Schaefer was lobbying the Maryland state legislature for funds to build a new stadium for the Orioles, and after years of strain between the mayor's office and state government over stadium funding, state delegates were starting to shift their stance. One delegate told the Sun quote, something should be done to make sure the Orioles don't leave and encourage the NFL to put a team here. Eventually,
the shock of the Colts leaving did spur action. There would be a new stadium for the Orioles. And it wasn't just a new stadium. Oriol Park at Camden Yards, which opened in nineteen ninety two, began a wave of retro inspired Major League Baseball parks, and that home of the Orioles is still regarded as one of baseball's best stadiums, and it's still a source of pride for people in Baltimore, and Camden Yards ensured the Orioles would stay in Baltimore.
Now you've got the footprint that, Okay, this team's not moving, which makes it really idyllic when a few years later you bring in the Ravens, and they set up shop right next door, and you have this magnificent downtown ballpark complex, and it rejuvenates the city, and all of a sudden, Baltimore gets a step back into some of his glory days.
Baltimore was passed over when the NFL expanded in nineteen ninety five, much to the anger and frustration of a city that had worked hard to not only support the Orioles, but to show it was still a destination for the NFL. A major part of those efforts was the cult band led by Zeeman, which stayed together after the team moved. It's the subject of a fantastic ESPN thirty for thirty
called The Band That Wouldn't Die. But by nineteen ninety five, Cleveland Brown's owner Art Modell was experiencing the same stadium related pains Carol Rosenbloom and Robert Ursay went through in Baltimore. Cleveland was not willing or able to build the Browns a new stadium, and their home of Cleveland Stadium was deteriorating. Baltimore offered the promise of a new stadium if Modell
moved his ball club. On November sixth, nineteen ninety five, Modell announced that the Cleveland Browns would play their final game in Ohio that year and they would relocate to Baltimore for the nineteen ninety six season. It would be the second time Baltimore gained a team called the Browns
and renamed them after a bird. The news brought elation and relief to NFL fans in Baltimore, but it also came with some mixed emotions because everyone in Baltimore remembered what they went through just over a decade prior.
Nineteen ninety six rolls around and the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore, and we're on the other end of the move, and so we understood what they were going through in Cleveland, and as excited as we were in Baltimore to see the NFL return, it was a little tricky having lived on both sides of having somebody's heart ripped out. Once you know you're on the receiving end, once you're on the losing end.
The Baltimore Ravens, twenty eight years later, are one of the NFL's model franchises. They've won two Super Bowls and they're a consistent contender in the AFC They have their own franchise legends, from Ray Lewis to Terrell Suggs to Joe Flacco and now Lamar Jackson. But for those old enough to remember the Baltimore Colts, there's still this lingering sense of loss.
I was angry about it for so long, bro, I lan ended at your airport and I went in passed the Kolachi stand and into Center City for years and would see that cult shop.
In the mall.
It would piss me off.
Nestor Apparitio is a radio host in Baltimore.
I told you how angry it made me just to see the horseshoe, like, no bullshit, dude, like real angry. It felt very stolen to me. It felt like a little peace. So my soul's been taken. Time.
They say heels all pain, but losing the Colts, I don't think it will in Baltimore, especially with the older generation. You've got to realize. Now, let's face it, in Baltimore and Indy, they're going to say there was a Baltimore Coults, the Indie cults were in Baltimore.
The success of the Ravens might be a happy ending to this story. In Baltimore. But maybe the best way to put it is that it's complicated. For some the animosity toward the Colts and Robert or say has not faded. For others, it has.
All these years later, it's really I'm fifty five now, it's like a second marriage. It's like a marriage you had in your twenties, or girlfriend you had at high school, or the girl you went the problem with. All these years later, you're happy. She's in Indianapolis living a good life, and you know, had a Super Bowl and whatever.
I don't have any enmity towards Indianapolis. Mayor Nutt was smart enough to see the landscape of the NFL and took advantage of it. He played the game to the advantage of that. He did his job. You know, the politicians in Baltimore misplayed it, the politicians in Cleveland misplayed it, and other cities benefited and lost from the way they played the game.
I've seen that horseshoe and I see the good times, the championships, the love I had for this professional football team, the pride I had in miss team. But my heart belongs to the birdie head helmet. That's my team. That's my team.
No city is ever happy or okay with losing their team, of course, but there is something different about Baltimore losing the Colts. As Jerry Sandusky explained.
To me, those other moves did not have those historical threads that we were talking about with beating the biggest cities, producing the biggest stars, giving birth to coaching legends. They didn't have that.
And because of the depth of the Colts' roots in Baltimore, the pain, it just won't go away for some people there.
For people over probably fifty years old in Baltimore, there's still a touch of pain for a lot of them, and a lot of them still will not say the Indianapolis Colts. They'll just say the Colts. Look, it didn't work out great for Indianapolis. And here's the one that I remind people of now, the Colts have been in Indianapolis longer than they were in Baltimore. I don't know that things work out the way they should, things work out the way they do, and they just worked out
the way they do. And over time, the Baltimore Colts will become like the Brooklyn Dodgers, where people who aren't older don't even know that really the Colts played in Baltimore.
So that's the PostScript to our story in Baltimore. But the other part of this story is how Indianapolis over the last forty years has made good on its opportunity to be an NFL city. Just this spring, demand for Colts season tickets was so high that a waiting list was created to secure twenty twenty five season tickets. Trust me, Colts fans are as loud, loyal, passionate, and knowledgeable as
any fan base in the NFL. That development into one of the best fan bases in the league, though, didn't happen overnight.
What was evident once the season started was that it was a basketball state with a tremendous heritage. Because whenever the offense got in the field, they were cheering. So we kind of kind of hold our hands down, like no, no, no cheer when they're on defense.
Well, I'll never forget it.
People were cheering everything.
Everything, They would cheer, everything didn't matter.
It was clear.
All I knew was had an NFL team.
And I do remember that season seeing a lot of people reading the newspaper. They just hadn't learned. They weren't avid NFL fans. In eighty four, the crowd was really into NFL football, you know, they spent their lives watching the Packers or Bears on TV. You know, and and here's finally, NFL football is in Indianapolis. But there was not a speck of blue in the crowd. Speck of blue, you know, unless somebody's wearing something by accident.
There was a learning curve to becoming a crowd.
I think there were reasons to be optimistic as the nineteen eighty four season began, and not just because the Colts were making their Indianapolis debut. In nineteen eighty three, the Colts were six and four at one point, and while they stumbled to a seven to nine finish, the hope was a young roster led by Frank Cush and bolstered by two top twenty draft picks, could give Indianapolis a playoff contender right away.
You gotta play New England, My Emmy and the Chats, the Niners, Browns and Chargers, plus both them La Threads.
Lad.
The Colts lost three of their first four games, including when they blew a nine point lead in their second game at the Hoosier Dome, which wound up being a one point loss to the Saint Louis Cardinals.
It started out pretty good. We lost our opener, and then we won our second game. It was at Houston. We won it pretty handily. We really played well. And then we came home and played Saint Louis and we were kicking their ass, and then the crowd was so excited, We're really doing well. And then they came from behind and kicked a field goal with I think a few seconds remaining at one, you know, and then things guy went downhill from there.
Colts these schedule is.
The Colts won just two of their eight games at the Hoosier Dome that season, and they lost their final five games, finishing their first year in Indianapolis with a four and twelve record. Head coach Frank Cush resigned with one week left in the season to go coach in the USFL. The team he left the Colts for the Arizona Outlaws, who played in Phoenix.
I think when we didn't move the Phoenix that kind of sealed it for him, and he left to go to the USFL in December before the end of the season.
The Wosia Dome is lovely, what is sight, But when the team plays football.
Things never worked out right long, Lord.
We struggled a little bit, and we never really caught her momentum. It was just kind of awkward. So you can blame it on transition, But I just think we were a really, really young team and we kind of thrived on the confidence factor. So we were just young. I think in essence, we were playing with reckless at bat in eighty three, and maybe with all the changes in eighty four, it was just a little bit much for us.
I felt like it was such a disappointment, and it was a disappointment from the standpoint that here we had a fan base that was just ready to roll, and we didn't provide them with the kind of team that they could really jump on top of.
The Colts won just twelve games over their first three seasons in Indianapolis, inspiring Duke Tomato to write and perform the folks see Lord, help our Colts tune on the Bob and Tom Show. But even with those early struggles, the vibes around the city were still good regarding their new football.
Team, even though they didn't have great success early, Right, You've just felt they were building something.
Jimmy Madis is an Indianapolis native and a former radio host in our city.
Not a great deal of on field success, but still building something in the community that was ours and the beach cherished.
The interest and appreciation for the Colts was born partly from it being the NFL, which, in the twenty five years since the Colts triumph over the New York Giants and the greatest game ever played, had passed baseball to become America's dominant most popular sport. But for Indianapolis residents, the Colts represented something bigger than just a football team.
Obviously, the Pacers were already here, but the NFL has a certain level of us of prestige that just added to the prestige of Indianapolis.
It was like we've gotten to the promised Land.
NFL is us something different. It elevates the city. It just does when you're one of whatever would have been back there, twenty eight teams or whatever.
When the Colts arrived, it was as if Indianapolis had arrived.
Oh and the praise to a MEN'SI balloy of honors and fame and told foraching I had to attain the goal the Indianapolis Colts to concor and winoo all.
The work put into downtown Indianapolis by mayors Richard Luger and Bill Hudnutt, by movers and shakers like David Frick and Jim Morris, and by the support of the community had built to this crescendo. Indianapolis was no longer this sleepy little town known for basketball and race cars in the middle of Flyover Country. Indianapolis was now in NFL city with an established presence on American TV sets every Sunday between September and December.
And it certainly builds our reputation.
Tom Griswold is the law long time host to The Bob and Tom Show, which has been broadcast from Indianapolis since nineteen eighty three. The song We're playing, by the Way is called in praise of the Indianapolis Colts, and it was sung by Luciano Gaspacho on The Bob and Tom Show in the nineteen eighties.
Here's a really pretentious one percent or example I interview because that's.
What I do.
I was skiing.
I've been skiing for years and I don't know if you ski or not.
When you do, you have occasion.
To get on a chair lift with a bunch of strangers or whatever.
It might be.
Back in the day, you'd get on the chair lift and someone to go where you're from, and you'd say Indianapolis. Go oh yeah, that's that's.
Where the five hundred is.
Pretty soon ask you about the late eighties. It was suddenly, oh yeah, you guys got the calls.
Bob say to his team and began to roam. Heya. Pud Nut said, hey, here's a Randall Dome ball. Tim Mar was a man the most di fall but not recent. Cheer the culture right here, they phoned the new home.
In the forty years since the Colts moved to Indianapolis, the metropolitan area's population has boomed from about eight hundred and sixty thousand to nearly two million in twenty twenty four, and at a time when some other Midwestern and Rust Belt cities have experienced population declines, Indianapolis and the surrounding
area have grown. A lot went into that, of course, but at least a small part of it, I think it's fair to say is because Indianapolis has had a national and international presence thanks to its NFL team.
Indy wasn't just a ghost down at all. I'm not saying that, but it was centered around the track in basketball and the NFL. It just coming here, it just elevated the city's reputation, presence and all of that. And we've seen how it's grown exponentially since then and.
Over the Colts forty years in Indianapolis, the team has become as deeply ingrained in this community as it was in Baltimore. Jim Ersay and his family didn't just bring Indianapolis a Super Bowl trope. They've invested in the community through several initiatives, the latest being Kicking the Stigma, which over the last few years has made real positive change
to our state's mental health services. Peyton Manning helped bring Indianapolis not just a championship, but a children's hospital, a new stadium, and scores of locals born after nineteen ninety eight named after him and today. Something that always strikes me about the Colts is how supportive the entire team is of the community. I think about how Kenny Moore the second ran out of the tunnel in twenty nineteen with Mighty Mason Garvey, a nine year old with terminal
cancer who the Colts cornerback befriended. I think about t Y Hilton, the South Florida native star wide receiver who stayed in the area after his playing career ended, showing up to almost every Indiana Fever game. I think about going out in the community to playgrounds or farmers' markets or restaurants and spotting current players mingling with locals, and more than anything, I think about how hard it is to imagine Indiana the city we know today without the Colts.
For the most part, a lot of the gentlemen who have played for the Colts have been gentlemen and real quality people, which I think has been extremely helpful and it makes makes the city and all the people here kind of proud. We've got some really good people that are part of our group here in town.
And the praise to a mensable, honest and fame mental had to attain the call to concord and win the soul.
Thank you for listening to The Move. All four episodes are available to download on the Colts Audio Network. Episode four of The Move was written and narrated by JJ Snakobitz and produced by Casey Valier. Amber Harrow, Dave Knickerbocker, and Matt Taylor contributed with research and editing.