Following the recent death of Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, Bill Christine goes down memory lane to recall his dealings with a colorful family
I never met Jim Irsay and I met his father Robert only once. In 1972, the elder Irsay and Carroll Rosenbloom pulled off some sort of a back-room hocus-pocus that ended with Rosenbloom owning the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL and Irsay owning the Baltimore Colts. The sleight of hand was admirable.
I was working at a Chicago newspaper, and, Robert Irsay being a Chicagoan, they treated the story like a local item and sent me out to the suburbs to do lunch with this newcomer to the NFL.
Irsay took my menu, added it to his and put them aside. “We won’t need these,” he said.
When I got back to the office from the liquid lunch, I called Ernie Accorsi in Baltimore. He was an old friend from my newspaper days there, but had moved on to be PR man for the Baltimore Colts when Rosenbloom owned the team.
“Have you met your new owner [Robert Irsay] yet?” I said.
“No,” he said.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” I said, “but I just drank lunch with him and he’s a real loose cannon.”
“So I’ve heard,” Ernie said.
Many years passed. Ernie went on to several important jobs in the NFL, and ended up as president of the New York Giants. I was in New York for the Breeders’ Cup, and a sadist in the office decided that I should pull extra duty by going over to the Meadowlands in New Jersey for a Giants’ Monday night game. I bumped into Ernie Accorsi in the lunch room at half-time. It had been years.
“You were right about Robert Irsay,” he said.
Irsay, of course, eventually moved the Baltimore Colts, literally in the middle of the night, to Indianapolis. When he died, his son Jim, just 37, took over the team.
Jim Irsay, 65, died recently. Besides the football team, he left behind a collection of memorabilia that has been valued at $1 billion. The Jim Irsay Collection tours the United States as part of an ongoing traveling exhibit and concert series.
The titular collector got hooked on rock ’n’ roll at an early age and his collection included hundreds of classic autographed guitars. He also had personal items, most of them signed, from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin and scores of others.
Irsay hadn’t missed many – and he hadn’t confined his trove to music. In a vast collection featuring a multitude of important American history artifacts and popular culture items, Irsay had signed documents from at least six US presidents, including George Washington and John F. Kennedy.
He had original letters written by Susan B. Anthony and (right) the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. The latter, a 120-foot scroll written over a 20-day period in Manhattan, was Irsay’s first major acquisition for the collection in 2001.
Naturally enough, sporting memorabilia also featured heavily among Irsay’s interests. In 1973, Secretariat was running in the Belmont Stakes. If he won, he would become the first horse to sweep the Triple Crown in 25 years.
On June 8, Secretariat won the Belmont by 31 lengths, in a record time that’s still on the books. Five days later, Jim Irsay had his 14th birthday party.
Ron Turcotte rode Secretariat. After the Belmont, he kept the saddle that he used in the three races. Turcotte’s career ended tragically, when he was left a paraplegic after a spill at Belmont Park in 1978.
Came 2023, and it was the 50th anniversary of Secretariat’s Triple Crown. Belmont Stakes week, the track brought the wheelchair-bound Turcotte from Canada for week-long interviews to mark the occasion.
At 81, Turcotte was the last of the Secretariat crew still alive. Penny Cheney, who owned the colt, was gone. So were Lucien Laurin, his trainer, and Eddie Sweat, the irrepressible groom. Secretariat himself died in 1989.
Turcotte always shot from the hip and was as fast with the quip as he was with the whip. He was still a delightful interview in 2023. One night, over dinner, I asked him about Sham, who was second in both the Derby and the Preakness, and gave up in the face of Secretariat’s tour de force in the Belmont.
“How good was Sham?” I said.
“We’ll never know, will we?” Turcotte said.’
Leading up to the 1973 Kentucky Derby, Dave Feldman, a Chicago turf writer, repeatedly pooh-poohed Secretariat’s chances. The colt had lost his prep race, the Wood Memorial, and Feldman questioned whether his bloodlines were stout enough to carry him to victory at the Derby’s mile and a quarter.
Minutes after Secretariat won the Derby in record time, the usual gaggle of turf writers burst into the jockeys’ room. Dave Feldman was leading the pack. Turcotte, still wearing his riding pants and a white t-shirt, sat on a wooden bench in front of his locker, smoking a cigar that seemed as big as he was.
“Hey, Dave Feldman,” he shouted. “Still think they [sons of Bold Ruler] can’t get a mile and a quarter?”
Early announcements about the 50th anniversary hubbub in New York caught Jim Irsay’s attention. He had no horse racing items in his eclectic collection. In February 2023, he called Turcotte and asked him about the Secretariat saddle.
Reportedly there was no haggling. Irsay paid Turcotte $2 million for the leather keepsake. Turcotte’s shares of Secretariat’s purses from the Triple Crown races? They seemed like pin money now.
• Bill Christine covered the 1984 Breeders’ Cup for the Los Angeles Times, where he was a staff writer for 25 years and shared in a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Author of a biography about the Hall of Fame jockey Bill Hartack, Christine’s current projects include a true-crime book and a novel
• Read previous articles in the View From The Rail series
• Visit the Jim Irsay Collection website and the Indianapolis Colts website
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