Baltimore still bitter about team's flight
Boston Globe
January 10, 2007
BALTIMORE -- There are still scars here, nearly 23 years after the Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis. Diehards will always bleed blue and white.
"They did us dirty," said Manny Spanomanolis, owner of Club 4100 in the blue-collar Brooklyn Park section.
With Sinatra on the jukebox and Unitas on the walls, it's always 1958 here. Seniors sit in the same booths under the same sepia-toned Baltimore Colts pictures and talk about plays hiked when Ike was President.
"Unitas used to sit right there drinking Schlitz," said white-haired Bob Francis, pointing to a corner table. Francis said he was a Colts season ticket-holder from 1957 until team owner Robert Irsay sneaked the team out of Baltimore in the middle of the night in 1984.
"Nobody bothered him when he came in here; he could relax," said Francis. "He was friends with everybody. If you were here Sept. 11, 2002, at roughly 4:30 p.m. -- the day that [Unitas] died -- you would not have seen a dry eye in the place. I hate to say it's a shrine, but it is."
Baltimore is still Unitastown, and for most people, that horseshoe on the helmet is really a capital U. There's the bigger-than-life Unitas statue in Unitas Plaza outside M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens will host the returning Colts in a divisional playoff game Saturday. It's a local custom that fans streaming into the stadium rub Johnny U's famous black hightops for luck. They've been rubbed so much that the bronze shows through.
There's a Johnny Unitas Stadium at Towson University. Unitas bobblehead dolls outsell such icons as the Baltimore-born Babe Ruth and working-class hero Cal Ripken at the Sports Legends at Camden Yards museum, which features the Johnny Unitas collection -- including the bed he was born in.
But it's the old haunts where the blue and white come to life.
Tom Matte, the Baltimore Colts halfback, walks into Club 4100 greeting everybody by name, just as he's done for the last 40 years. He's been a color announcer the last 10 years for the Ravens, who arrived in 1996 after cameo appearances by the United States Football League's Baltimore Stars and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore Stallions earlier in the decade.
Matte said covering a Ravens-Colts game was difficult.
"I made a couple of mistakes and started rooting for the Colts again because that was such an integral part of my life," he said. "It's that horseshoe. The Super Bowl championship ring we have on from 1970 is the horseshoe. Hey, I wish [Indianapolis quarterback] Peyton Manning well -- he's a great guy; I know his father well -- but as far as that franchise, we're not part of it. We don't need to have our records up there."
Matte is best remembered for taking over at quarterback when Unitas and Gary Cuozzo were hurt prior to the NFL Western Conference championship against Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers Dec. 26, 1965. With the plays scrawled on his vinyl wristband, he forced overtime before a questionable field goal gave the Packers a 13-10 victory. The wristband wound up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
"The only thing I wish they would've done was left the name Baltimore Colts here," said Matte. "Take a look at all the memorabilia that's in the Hall of Fame -- it's under Indianapolis Colts. John Unitas was called an Indianapolis Colt. John Unitas was a Baltimore Colt.
"Indianapolis has not considered us alumni. They have not kept in touch with us. They haven't even sent us mailers of what's going on."
Madge Stanley has been a 4100 Club waitress for the last 40 years. She remembers that on Sundays, three buses of fans would depart for the games.
"It was wild, a real Colts bar," said Stanley. "If they lost, the fans would drink more. There was a whole lot of players, they'd eat together. They were very approachable. You could walk up to them at any time and they'd talk to you. They were very much into the community. Now I root for the Ravens and against the Colts. The only thing that bothers me is that horseshoe on the helmet. That bothers me."
FEELING OF BETRAYAL
It was a snowy December night in 1984 that a fleet of Mayflower moving vans took the Colts away from Baltimore.
George Mills, a retired television technician, was one of the very few on scene in suburban Owings Mills when the vans rolled.
"It was heartbreaking," he said. "Irsay promised to stay in Baltimore just a week before. There were no people there. It was 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm 75 years old, so I can't get emotional. It's a business world.
"What disturbs me is that we went to Canton to see John Mackey inducted into the Hall of Fame, I got my camera up there and I'm shooting all the statues and it says 'Indianapolis Colts' on the bottom. I made some comment, and there's a guy standing next to me and he says, 'I think that's terrible, son.' It was Gale Sayers."
At Sports Legends, Unitas gets his own section. Visitors can view his shoulder pads, No. 19 jersey, and helmet, and see the football he used for his last Colts pass, a touchdown to wide receiver Eddie Hinton.
They can also listen to a miked Unitas actually calling a play. Hovering over everyone is a huge blow-up of the Sports Illustrated cover with Unitas and the headline, "The Best There Ever Was." The bow-legged, crew-cut icon threw at least one touchdown pass in 47 consecutive games, won the MVP three times, and was the first quarterback to throw for 40,000 yards.
John Unitas Jr. was a ballboy on his father's team. He loved training camp.
"Back then, they played for fun," he said. "The trainer used to walk around with a flashlight at 11 at night, and I'd walk around with him. The players used to be out drinking and they'd put pillows stuffed in their beds. They'd all be smoking Camels with no filters, drinking beer, and having the best time of their lives. If they had a busted-up foot, they'd still play.
"They were just down-to-earth guys. My dad couldn't believe how great the fans were. He was astounded that at intrasquad scrimmages, they would have 40,000 fans. What's missing today is players come into town, they don't live there. People don't put their roots down."
Unitas soured on the Colts' management in 1972 when he wasn't allowed to finish his career in Baltimore.
"A reporter friend called and said, 'John, [you've been] traded to San Diego,' " said his wife, Sandra. "It was so inconsiderate, so horrible for fans."
Colt Hall of Fame halfback Lenny Moore says he was mistreated by the Indianapolis Colts as well. He was working for the Baltimore Colts in community relations when they abruptly left town. "I was temporarily laid off, and that's the last I ever heard from them at all," he said. "Not a letter. Nothing."
An old Colt never forgets. Finding an Indianapolis Colts fan in Baltimore is as hard as finding someone who thought Ripken was a slacker.
When the Colts left town, many fans started rooting for the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles until the NFL returned with the Ravens. The Ravens, they love to point out here, have already captured the Super Bowl. Indianapolis has not.
Rooting against all things Indianapolis is a civic duty.
'PART OF THE COMMUNITY'
Today in Baltimore, there is little evidence of the Colts' existence. Memorial Stadium was demolished in February 2001 and is now a YMCA and senior housing complex. The letters from the stadium facade, "Time Will Not Dim the Glory of Their Deeds," and the urn carrying dirt from all overseas American military cemeteries have been moved outside Oriole Park.
The Colts offices and practice fields in Owings Mills are now part of Villa Julie College. The Ravens built a state-of-the-art facility a few miles away in Owings Mills on 32 acres in October 2004.
The Hollywood Diner -- the same one used in the movie "Diner" -- has been moved near City Hall. The 1982 Barry Levinson comedy featured a group of Baltimore Colt-obsessed fans in 1959.
Tracy Hunt, the diner cashier, remembers the night the Colts left. "I was about 9," she said. "My mom woke me up and said, 'The Colts are gone.' She was upset. She was saying, 'It's not right.' I was happy -- it was snowing, and we got the next day off."
Hunt says she lives near M&T Bank Stadium and can hear the public address announcer from her living room. "The day they put the John Unitas statue there, I couldn't even get to my house," she said. "There was so much traffic."
Although the Ravens beat the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXXV in 2001, it wasn't the same as in 1958, when Unitas led the Colts 80 yards in an overtime victory against the Giants in what has been called "the greatest game ever played."
The Pro Football Hall of Fame credits the game with sparking the NFL's popularity.
"[It] finally gave Baltimore pride," said John Ziemann, deputy director of Sports Legends at Camden Yards. "Before Unitas, people said, 'Let's face it, we're nothing more than a whistle-stop between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.' Then when we won the '58 championship game, we finally had something to cheer about, and Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts did that."
Ziemann also added several questions for the famous quiz Steve Guttenberg's character, Eddie, gives to his fiancee in "Diner," including, "What were the Colts' original colors?" The answer: Green and white. Ernie Accorsi, retiring general manager of the Giants and a Colt fanatic growing up, wrote most of the questions.
Ziemann had been a member of the Baltimore Colt marching band since 1962 and now is president of the Ravens Marching Band. He and Unitas became friends early on.
"It's not like it is now," he said. "In 1963, my appendix exploded. I was in bad shape in the hospital. One of the nurses came in and said, 'Johnny U is going to see you. And I said, 'So is the queen of England.' He came in and said, 'What the hell did you do now?' and stayed three hours.
"They were part of the community."
MOVING REMEMBRANCES
There is a Baltimore Colt section at Sports Legends that dwarfs the Ravens' section. Part of the exhibit is the back of a Mayflower truck, and audio and radio from the night Baltimore cried.
Moving trucks arrived at the suburban offices when nobody was around.
"I hate Indiana Mayflower," said Ziemann. "Baltimore Mayflower didn't know anything about it.
"But the Civil War is over. I got closure. We beat 'em to a Super Bowl championship and we got a better stadium."
Unitas used to show up at Ravens games against the Colts wearing a Lithuanian baseball cap, his son said. He never forgave Bob Irsay for moving the team.
"John owned a restaurant called the Golden Arm and he had a Bob Irsay room -- the bathroom," said Ziemann. "That's what John thought of him."
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