I have not any intentions of moving the goddamn team. If I did, I will tell you about it, but I’m staying here.”—Baltimore Colts owner Robert Irsay, Jan. 20, 1984

Terri Ricigliano’s two kids were not yet two years old when her husband, Sun sports cartoonist Mike Ricigliano, built a larger-than-life papier mâché dummy of Baltimore public enemy No. 1—Colts owner Robert Irsay—in their two-bedroom Cockeysville apartment.

“For whatever reason, they weren’t scared of it,” she says of her then-infant and toddler. “They seemed to like it. We were on the first floor and had sliding glass doors and I’d sit him in a chair at night like he was watching TV when ‘Ricig,’ that’s what I call him like everyone else, was at work. Sometimes, people stopped by, and I’d have to explain the whole story.”

The whole story is this: The Orioles won the 1983 World Series just as the Riciglianos arrived from Buffalo. The citywide euphoria they witnessed was short-lived, however. Five months later, the Chicago-born Irsay, who had sold his Midwestern heating and air-conditioning company to buy the Colts 12 years earlier, packed the franchise into Mayflower moving trucks. He snuck the beloved team out of town under the cover of a late-night winter squall on March 28, 1984—40 years ago this month.

“To move here and immediately see another carpetbagging owner at work, it raised your blood pressure,” says Ricigliano, explaining the inspiration behind the dummy—and its subsequent trip to Philadelphia that fall for an early season game between the now, shockingly, Indianapolis Colts and Eagles. “His head definitely has a caricature quality, but it did in person, too,” Ricigliano adds, laughing. “It looks real because I painted its skin and put on costume hair. I got him one of those light blue suits, which Irsay wore a lot, and white patent leather shoes, which he also wore, from a Goodwill. Then, I stuffed fake money into his pocket.”

Irsay had long since destroyed the organization, turning a franchise that hadn’t had a losing season in 15 years into a perennial loser, alienating players, coaches, and fans alike by sticking his nose into football decisions. He also fabricated stories about growing up in poverty and his non-existent college football and World War II combat careers. In fact, he made his fortune after driving his own father, who’d given him a leg up in heating and air-conditioning contracting, out of business.

“I’d compare the vitriol here to the feeling we had in Buffalo for Bills owner Ralph Wilson, who didn’t live there and wouldn’t spend any money,” Ricigliano says. (When O.J. Simpson’s agent told Wilson during negotiations that his client could make the Bills a championship contender, Wilson shot back: “What good would a championship do me? All that means is everybody wants a raise.”)

On Oct. 14, 1984, several thousand Baltimore fans, many donning “Irsay Sucks” caps, rode buses up I-95 to curse Irsay in person on the Colts’ first return East. Meanwhile, Ricigliano and his wife piled the replica Irsay into their coincidentally named Colt Vista. Turned away at multiple stadium entrances, the Riciglianos were only allowed in after the daughter of the Eagles owner, a team VP, intervened. She told them they needed to buy an additional nosebleed seat for their sidekick.

After the Eagles won 16-7, photos of Ricigliano and his Irsay caricature went viral, appearing in newspapers around the country and Newsweek magazine. During the game, Baltimore fans laughed and posed for pictures with the dummy—and offered money to punch it.

Upon return, the dummy became something of a local celebrity, joining WBAL sportscaster Chris Thomas to make weekend football picks. An irreverent wit, Thomas mocked and hurled insults at the doll, which “replied” through edited tapes of inebriated public statements from the real Irsay. Over the holidays that year, the papier mâché Irsay became a regular presence at Baltimore parades, where it was generally pelted with whatever refuse happened to be nearby.

After the ’84 season, Schaefer’s Pub in Towson bid $1,400 in a charity auction for the dummy. Later, when the Bay Café opened, it moved to Canton. The dummy fared no better in the bars than on parade, however—not all wounds heal.

“I got called to repair it a few times, but it’s chicken wire and eventually there was nothing left of the body,” Ricigliano, now 72, says. “The head remains. Since the Bay Café closed, it’s sat behind the bar at Nacho Mama’s. It was a great adventure for us. I do wonder sometimes if the younger crowd there even knows who it is.”

Hall of Fame coach Don Shula, who died Monday at 90, is best remembered as the architect of the Miami Dolphins and their undefeated 1972 season—still the only perfect year in NFL history.

But before Shula won in Miami, he’d burnished a legacy in Baltimore.

The Colts went 71-23-4 in their seven years under Shula. In their 1967 and 1968 campaigns, they lost just a single game each of those regular seasons. The Colts, however, did lose 27-0 to the Cleveland Browns in the 1964 NFL championship. And, of course, they were upset by the New York Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl after winning the NFL title, a game that ultimately forced the merger of the AFL and NFL, as well as Shula’s departure to Miami.

While no cause of death has been announced, the Miami Herald reports that a close associate said Shula was not ill at the time of his passing.

An Ohio native, Shula played seven years as a slow, but smart and hard-nosed defensive back in the NFL, including four for the Colts between 1953-1956 before beginning his coaching career. He was offered the Colts top coaching job at just 33 years old, becoming the youngest head coach in pro football. His reference? None other than Hall of Fame defensive end Gino Marchetti.

From Collision of Wills, Baltimore writer Jack Gilden’s 2018 book on the relationship between Shula and quarterback Johnny Unitas:

In 1963, Gino Marchetti, close to Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom, recommended that head coach Weeb Ewbank be fired from his post and that Don Shula be hired to replace him. Rosenbloom barely remembered Shula even though the granite-jawed young man played for the Colts himself for four seasons, calling all of the team’s defensive signals.
“You mean that guy who played here that wasn’t very good?” Rosenbloom asked Marchetti.

While his relationship with the veteran Unitas was often challenging, Shula was ready for the post. He won The Sporting News Coach of the Year honors in the 1964, his second season. He won it again in 1968 with the Colts. (In a twist of fate, it was Ewbank who directed the Jets to their upset of the Colts.)

“His two most memorable moments in football were losing to Joe Namath and the Jets in Super Bowl III, a painful and colossal upset, and beating the Redskins in Super Bowl VII to cap the undefeated season,” Gilden wrote on his Facebook page yesterday. “Those two games sum him up perfectly. He endured a great deal of humiliation to achieve the most storied accomplishments in his sport. Don Shula was one of the greatest men in the history of the game.”

In Miami, after his relationship with Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom soured following the loss to the Jets, Shula won back-to-back Super Bowls and eventually 347 games, the most in pro football history. The Dolphins offered Shula part ownership of the four-year-old franchise.

“After Super Bowl III, my relationship with Rosenbloom was not very pleasant,” Shula told The Sun in a 2008 interview. “I loved Baltimore—the people, the fans and everything that Colts football stood for. But Rosenbloom’s New York buddies never let him forget [the heavily favored Colts’ loss], and he never let me forget it.
“If we had won that game, and continued to win, I certainly wouldn’t have gone. I’d still be in Baltimore, eating crab cakes.”

Don Shula with Art Donovan during their playing days in Baltimore. (Courtesy of Debbie Donovan)

“He was one of the greatest of the true Colts . . . ”
—Pete Genovese, son of an Italian barber

Last week, when the first reports of Gino Marchetti’s death hit the news, somebody on TV flubbed the Hall of Fame football legend’s last name. Instead of pronouncing the second syllable with a hard C—as in “kettle”—he made a soft C, like “cheddar.”

Obviously, the guy behind the microphone did not grow up in Baltimore.

“Gino Mar-cheh-tee died,” was how it came over Phyllis DeFelice Rubino’s television in Belair. As soon as the words were out of the announcer’s mouth, the die-hard Colts fan called the station to complain.

Rubino, who came of age in 1950s Highlandtown when the area was Baltimore’s second Little Italy, wasn’t the only Colts fan to call TV Hill with a correction after Marchetti succumbed to pneumonia on April 29 in Paoli, Pennsylvania. He was 93.

But it’s a good bet that the she was the only one who jumped up and down on the Memorial Stadium sidelines and screamed Marchetti’s name —along with Unitas and Donovan, Ameche and Parker—in white boots and a short blue jumper way back when she was an original Colts cheerleader.

“He was like a freight train,” said Rubino of the 6-foot-4, 245-pound defensive end, a Colt from 1953 through 1966. Freight train, yes—his surviving peers were quoted in nationwide obituaries saying you did not want to get in Gino’s way. But he was also quick off the snap, agile, and as fast as just about anyone in the backfield, be it running back or quarterback, whom it was his job to bring down. “We went crazy when he made a tackle,” said Rubino, who cheered for the team for more than a decade.

The West Virginia-born Marchetti was the son of an immigrant coal miner. He was the husband to Joan Plecenik; father to Gina Burgess, Michelle Kapp, John Marchetti, and Eric Marchetti; stepfather to Donna Lloyd; and beloved grandfather and great-grandfather many times over.

But to Nazzareno F. Vellegia—the 86-year-old son of one of Little Italy’s original restaurateurs—Marchetti was a dear friend and, not long after the Colts were humiliated by the New York Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl, the best man at his wedding.

He was a big fan of the polenta parties hosted by Enrico Vellegia, founder of the restaurant at 829 East Pratt Street, which began serving meals out of the family’s private kitchen on High Street in 1937 and was sold in 2009. It is now a failed and shuttered sports bar.

“Gino’s favorite dish was veal saltimbocca,” said “Naz” Vellegia of the veal, prosciutto, and sage dish marinated in dry white wine. The name translates into “jumps in the mouth,” for how good it is and plenty made the journey from plate to palate when Marchetti dined at Vellegia’s.

Naz said his extended family got to know Marchetti and some of his teammates—particularly fellow Italians Alan Ameche and Joe Campanella—when the local Italian-American Civic Club invited them to a father and son dinner. “He was very proud to be Italian. We all were,” said Naz.

The trio of Italian ballplayers would later launch a fast-food restaurant called Gino’s in Dundalk, which became a chain whose “Gino Giant,” is said to have been copied by McDonald’s for the Big Mac. The burger joint’s jingle is still fondly remembered: “Everybody goes to Gino’s, cuz Gino’s is the place to go . . .”

“Marchetti was one of the greatest defensive players I ever watched,” said Pete Genovese, who grew up above his father’s barbershop at 234 South Highland Avenue before moving to St. Louis to teach college literature. “No smart coach or quarterback ever ran a play to his side.”

Genovese’s father Pietro was not an especially keen fan of sports, but he knew enough to know which teams had an Italian on the roster and would root for that paisan no matter for whom he played. “He’s the one who told me that [Red Sox outfielder] Tony Conigliaro’s name meant ‘rabbit,’” he said. “It was all a matter of pride.”

When it came to other ethnicities, however, the old barber had a decidedly closed mind. Pete never told his father that Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella of the Brooklyn Dodgers [and the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro Leagues] was African-American.

Marchetti, however, was vocal in his support of his black teammates, both in college and in the pros. “He stood up for his black college teammates [at the University of San Francisco] before a bowl game that tried to exclude blacks,” said Jack Gilden, author of Collision of Wills, a 2018 book about the testy relationship between Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula. “Gino urged the team to turn down the invitation and they did.”

Deeply held, Marchetti brought his convictions to Baltimore—where in 1969 he was named the best defensive end in the first half-century of NFL history—and the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio in 1972.

Upon learning of his old friend, teammate, and fellow Hall of Famer’s death, Colts running back Lenny Moore told the The Baltimore Sun: “With all of the racism and stuff going on then, Gino was right there in our corner, and we never forgot that.”

Marchetti’s death, said Moore, “ . . . hits the heart.”

Right between the blue horseshoes on a white helmet.

Boog Powell had the best view of anyone at a packed Shea Stadium. The O’s slugger had just singled Frank Robinson to third and stood at first base as the potential go-ahead run in the top of the ninth. Only two teams in modern Major League history had posted more regular-season wins than this ’69 Orioles club—the legendary ’54 Indians and ’27 Yankees. But at this confounding moment, Powell and his teammates trailed the New York Mets 1-0 in pivotal Game 4 of the 1969 World Series. More disconcerting: They also trailed the previously laughingstock Mets, who had never finished better than ninth place in the National League, 2-1 in the series.

With two runners on base and one out, Brooks Robinson, who had more All-Star appearances (10) than the Mets had seasons (7) under his belt, stepped to home plate to restore order to the universe. New York manager Gil Hodges slow-walked to the mound to buy time for his fading young starter, but to no avail. On cue, Brooks ripped Tom Seaver’s next delivery into the vast green ocean in right center field. With the ball whizzing by in front of him, Powell took off for second.

Watching clips of the game on YouTube a half-century later, it’s still hard to believe Robinson’s line drive does not hit the turf, skip off the warning track, and bounce to the fence. But out of nowhere, diving headlong into NBC’s shot, comes Ron Swoboda, an outfielder nicknamed “Rocky” because of his less-than-smooth reputation with the glove, who proceeds to make what is possibly the greatest catch in World Series history. Certainly it is the catch of his life—a full-speed, belly-up, lose-your-cap plunge across the Shea grass. As Swoboda staggers to his feet—the 396-feet sign visible on the outfield wall behind him—and improbably finds the ball in his mitt’s leather webbing, Frank Robinson tags and scores from the third. The O’s rally, however, has been thwarted.

“I’ve seen the replay dozens of times,” Swoboda recalls with a laugh. “You know who isn’t in the picture? [Center fielder] Tommie Agee, who was playing Brooks to pull. It was ‘do or die,’ and 99 percent of the way there I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

“Oh, I remember the catch,” Powell says. “I can see it like it happened yesterday. What I don’t remember is how I reacted. I don’t know if I stopped dead halfway between first and second or tried to get back to the bag. I was stunned. Mesmerized.” Destiny on their side, the Mets won on a controversial bunt play in the 10th. After another break from the umps in Game 5—known since as “The Shoe Polish Incident” (Google it)—Swoboda, a fun-loving, career .242 hitter, finished the Orioles with a go-ahead-to-stay double.

That it was the unlikely Swoboda who struck the mortal blow to Baltimore’s last, best hope of a championship in 1969 proved the perfect, fluky capstone to the most heartbreaking year in the annals of professional sports. He was a Sparrows Point kid who grew up going to Memorial Stadium. Brooks Robinson was his favorite baseball player.

“Listen, I worshipped the Orioles and Colts. I still have a John Unitas-autographed Colts helmet in my office,” Swoboda says. “To this day, I practically genuflect every time I walk past it. Fifty years later, it still burns me up they didn’t bring him in earlier in the Super Bowl that year.”

Yes, the 1969 Super Bowl. We’re getting to that.

Heading into the Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, and World Series in 1969, the Colts, Bullets, and Orioles had each posted the best regular-season record in their respective sports—a feat never accomplished before or since by a single city’s franchises. The Colts went 13-1 and redeemed their only loss (to Cleveland) with a 34-0 thrashing of the Browns in the NFL title game. The Colts and the O’s—who topped the Major Leagues in pitching and fielding and finished third overall in runs scored—were bandied about as possibly the greatest teams ever. Maybe they were. But when it mattered most, all three Baltimore powerhouses were soundly toppled in the postseason by underdog squads from the Big Apple.

In January, favored by 18 points, the Colts were upset by the New York Jets of the second-string American Football League. In March, Wes Unseld, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, and the Bullets were swept in four games by the Knicks. Then, in October . . . where do you begin? For most of the season, the Cinderella Mets lineup averaged 24 years old. (“The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea,” George Burns cracked in the movie Oh, God!)

“Not a very good year for Baltimore, was it?” sighs Powell, who knew some of the Colts—the O’s shared the same workplace after all—and watched his buddies lose Super Bowl III from the sidelines in Miami.

Local scribes had a diagnosis for the city’s sports woes: “The New York Syndrome.”

The City That Never Sleeps was a darker place in the 1960s, struggling with poverty, crime, racial strife, and conflicts over the draft and the Vietnam War, like most cities, including Baltimore. But New York also remained exciting and seductive. It was still Broadway, Wall Street, Frank Sinatra, pop art, mod fashion, and Greenwich Village. (Good luck staying awake all night after a shift at Beth Steel or General Motors.) “Tug McGraw and I were naïfs when we arrived in New York,” Swoboda says. “We’d walk around during the day staring at the skyscrapers, talk our way into the audience of The Tonight Show, and then take the subway to the ballpark.”

It certainly wasn’t like that in hardscrabble Baltimore, which acclaimed New York sportswriter Pete Axthelm described as a “dreary city.” Perhaps, although at the time no one imagined a third of the city’s population would flee over the next three decades. Pockets of civic pride and hope remained in Baltimore’s neighborhoods, and it’s not a stretch to say that much of that public optimism was tied to the blue-collar city’s dominating sports teams.

“Oh, we wanted to kill Joe Namath,” recalls former Colt star Tom Matte.

“We have a tendency, and did then, to measure ourselves against New York,” says longtime former Sun columnist Michael Olesker, the author of five books about Baltimore, then a 23-year-old reporter with the Baltimore News-American. “It’s glamorous, and we’re a little insecure about our working-class roots. The Colts were Sunday religion, and 1969 was going to be ‘The Year of the Three Earls’—Earl Morrall, Earl ‘the Pearl,’ and Earl Weaver.” (For non-Baltimore sports historians: Morrall, playing in place of injured Hall-of-Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas, had won the NFL MVP award; the aforementioned Monroe averaged nearly 26 points per game for the Bullets; and the feisty, foulmouthed, diminutive Weaver, of course, managed the Orioles.)

But it didn’t turn out that way.

Ever since free agency entered pro sports in 1976, the teams have become fairly homogenized. Players move from city to city. The Baltimore Ravens are not really from “Baltimore.” They’re a professional football team who happens to play here. Not the case when Unitas, Tom Matte, the Colts’ all-purpose back who spent his entire 12-year career here, the great tight end John Mackey, and all the rest lived in Baltimore, worked at Black & Decker and Sparrows Point, and sold liquor in the off-season. They raised families here. They were part of the community fabric.

In that environment, Unitas’ crew cut, high-top black cleats, and no-nonsense demeanor meant something to a town that valued substance over style.

Conversely, “Broadway Joe” Namath wore a Fu Manchu mustache, expensive suits, mink coats, white cleats, and dated New York actresses. He was the first rock star football player. Sports Illustrated followed him around and chronicled his late-night exploits in a piece titled, “The Sweet Life of Swinging Joe.” He was cocky. Braggadocious. A hedonist anti-hero straight out of Easy Rider, which had been released in the summer of ’69. Namath, like Muhammad Ali, did not play well in Baltimore in those days, when the city was a more of conservative, Southern town.

“Oh, we wanted to kill Joe Namath,” says Tom Matte.

At a dinner given by the Miami Touchdown Club before Super Bowl III, glass of scotch in hand, Namath—18-point spread be damned—responded to a heckler with his famous boast: “We’re gonna win the game. I guarantee it.” The next morning, The Miami Herald dutifully ran “Namath Guarantees Jets Victory” on the front page of its sports section, creating a firestorm. Then Namath repeated his decree when confronted by Lou Michaels, a Colts defensive end and kicker, nearly starting a brawl. This was after Namath, who from the photos appeared to be spending the week lounging by the team hotel’s pool, told a reporter he thought five AFL quarterbacks were better than Morrall—including himself and his backup, Babe Parilli.

It is suffice to recall that Morrall blinked in the klieg lights, heaving three interceptions and failing to see wide-open Jimmy Orr waving his arms in the end zone. The Colts, cut down 16-7, were shut out until the sore-armed Unitas, who also threw an interception, was called upon in the fourth quarter. Namath, named MVP, went on to star in a biker movie with Ann-Margaret, take Raquel Welch to the Academy Awards, and shoot a shaving cream commercial with Farrah Fawcett.

The silver lining? There wasn’t one.

The Colts went 8-5-1 the following year and missed the playoffs. “We were embarrassed, we had embarrassed the whole NFL,” Matte says. “And everyone took it out on us following year.”

“To lose three times to teams from New York was a dagger to the heart. A bloodletting.”

Though it is less remembered because an equally precocious Knicks team sideswiped them in the postseason, the Bullets were the feel-good story in Baltimore in 1969. The Colts and O’s had championship track records. But the year before the Bullets won the most games in the NBA—topping the likes of the Bill Russell-led Celtics and Wilt Chamberlain-led Los Angeles Lakers—Baltimore had finished last in the Eastern Division. The year prior, they were the worst team in the entire NBA—by 10 games.

After the back-to-back basement finishes, they lost the coin flips for the first pick in the draft, too. A blessing in disguise, however. Monroe, taken with the second pick in ’67, and Wes Unseld, taken with the second pick in ’68, each earned Rookie of the Year honors (and Unseld took home the MVP trophy as well). The Bullets leapt from 20 wins to 57 in the process. “I liked to say we lost the coin flip, but won the toss,” recalls former Bullet public relations man Jim Henneman, another longtime Baltimore sportswriter.

With Monroe’s whirling dervish act and Unseld’s length-of-the-court outlet passes, the Bullets became one of the most colorful, fastest-paced, and highest-scoring teams in the league overnight. The Knicks, also an up-and-coming team, had a better bench, however. They trounced a bruised, road-weary Bullets squad by double-digits in the first two games of the opening round of the playoffs.

The much-anticipated series was over before it had started, as were the dreams of a first-ever NBA title in Baltimore. “The NBA All-Star Game had been in Baltimore that January, too,” Henneman remembers. “But it was a bittersweet end to the season.”

In a Greenmount Avenue barroom near Memorial Stadium, Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III watched Mets left fielder Cleon Jones cradle Davey Johnson’s fly ball and put the World Series—and Baltimore’s three goose eggs—in the books. There were no signs of shock in the subdued tavern, just resignation, and the sense of a familiar tragedy being played out.

“I’m getting used to it,” D’Alesandro told a New York Times reporter on hand, as he drafted yet another good-loser telegram to New York Mayor John Lindsay. “They were making unbelievable plays. I’m going to call a legislative [conference] and see what I can do about an ordinance forbidding Baltimore teams to meet New York teams after the regular season is over.”

Olesker was born in the Bronx, but he moved to Baltimore as a child and grew up a diehard fan of all three local teams. Six years out of City College high school, he took the accumulative losses with less humor than the mayor.

“To lose three times to teams from New York, oh boy, that hurt,” Olesker says. “That was a dagger to the heart. A bloodletting.”

In hindsight, 1969 was a weird year. Strange juxtapositions made it appear the country was being yanked apart at its seams. In January, Richard Nixon was inaugurated and in March, John Lennon and Yoko Ono began their Bed-In For Peace. In July, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The next month, Woodstock rocked Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York. In October, massive demonstrations—the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam—coincided with the afternoon start of Game 4. Mets Fans for Peace handed out flyers with Seaver’s image, highlighting the pitcher’s recent anti-war remarks.

In the context of the sports world, Baltimore’s postseason debacles proved more of a blip than anything else.

The O’s would come back and win another staggering 108 games the following season and dismantle Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in the 1970 World Series. “Weaver rode us like the whole way like a jockey down the stretch at Pimlico,” recalls Jim Palmer, the O’s Hall of Fame pitcher. After taking their licks following their humiliating defeat to the Jets, the Colts rebounded and won Super Bowl V.

Meanwhile, the Bullets and Knicks continued one of the fiercest rivalries in sports. In 1970, the Knicks, on their way to their first title, bested the Bullets again in the playoffs, but in seven games. The match-ups were epic: Unseld vs. Willis Reed, Gus Johnson vs. Dave DeBusschere, Jack Marin vs. Bill Bradley, Monroe against Walt Frazier, Kevin Loughery against Dick Barnett. The next year, in the Eastern Conference finals, the Bullets broke through and beat the Knicks in seven games.

Of course, nothing lasts forever. As thrilling as they were, the Bullets didn’t draw. The Civic Center wasn’t a great venue and, in the wake of the ’68 Baltimore riots, a lot of fans decided to stay home. Unseld’s uniform still read “Bullets” when they finally won an NBA title in 1978, but now he played in Landover for the Washington Bullets. In 1972, Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom traded the team to Robert Irsay, and after a flurry of division titles in the mid-’70s, well, we all know how that ended.

By the 1970s, deindustrializing Baltimore was folding under the weight of soaring unemployment, crime, interest rates, and subsidized white flight. Quickly shifting from a segregated, majority-white city to a majority-black city, the social upheaval had been acute during the previous decade.

“Those teams, the Colts and Orioles, in particular, and the Bullets bound the city together through difficult times,” says Olesker.

It was a two-way street.

When the Orioles lost in Game 5 at Shea Stadium, delirious Mets fans rushed the field. In the midst of spontaneous celebrations across New York, the O’s players still had to make their way back to Baltimore. “Shea was going crazy,” recalls Powell. “We had to pack everything up and then deal with some obnoxious fans as we got on the bus to the airport. Nobody really said a word the whole way. It was quiet. Same thing on the flight home.”

Flying into Friendship Airport (now BWI) that evening, Powell was exhausted, dispirited. The Orioles had scheduled a shuttle bus to take most of the players to Memorial Stadium to pick up their cars—the burly first baseman lived in a rowhouse five blocks away in same neighborhood with Dave Johnson and Eddie Watt. He was fond of firing up his backyard barbeque on nights the O’s won. The off-season would be long.

“So, we get off the plane and 5,000 fans are there to greet us, cheering,” Powell recalls. “No cell phones in those days. We had no idea. You can check it—I don’t know if it was 5,000—it might have been 20, but I know the way I felt, it seemed like 5,000. We went toward them, reaching through the fence to shake hands with everyone who had turned out for us. I know I shed a tear. I don’t think there was a dry eye on the team. You don’t have words for something like that.”

It was, to turn a certain phrase around, the worst of times, it was the best of times.

Sports tend to be a great outlet for a city to express its collective id. And while Baltimore has had plenty of modest, lunch-pail, grind-it-out sports heroes (Johnny Unitas and Cal Ripken, Jr. being the obvious examples), it’s also had more than its fair share of larger-than-life characters.

One of our first great sports celebrities was the Colts’ Artie Donovan, a funny, irreverent raconteur who was as comfortable on The Tonight Show couch as he was on the gridiron. We also had the Orioles’ famously pugnacious Earl Weaver, whose nose-to-nose, spittle-flying, profanity-laced confrontations with umpires, pictured, were the stuff of legends. Weaver often clashed with his gifted right-handed pitcher Jim Palmer, who with his perfect teeth and off-field polish made him a perfect foil to his manager.

The rowdiness of Weaver extended to the fans in the stands, who exuberantly took it upon themselves to improve the National Anthem by inserting a raucous “O!” before “Does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave?”—a tradition that continues to this day. Meanwhile, at Memorial Stadium, Wild Bill Hagy became an icon for donning that ubiquitous cowboy hat and leading the cheap seats in a pantomimed chant of O-R-I-O-L-E-S. (We also like to think that Hagy is the one responsible for “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” emerging as the official song of the seventh-inning stretch.)

Our tradition of eccentric athletes continues into the 21st century with the preacher-warrior linebacker Ray Lewis and his unforgettable “Hot in Herre” pre-game dance; our delightfully geeky, opera-singing, Royal-Farms-pitching kicker Justin Tucker; and the bubble-blowing, food-loving, do-gooding Adam Jones.

Each of our sports heroes tell us a little something about ourselves—what we value, what makes us laugh and cheer, how we choose to be perceived by the rest of the country. And while there will never be another Donovan, Hagy, or Jones, we’ll undoubtedly find another endearingly oddball athlete to idolize. It’s what we do.

“I’ve been coming here for a long time. Since before they closed,” said Shamia Howard, 9, smiling after skated off the freshly laid hardwood—with a gaggle of 15 friends and cousins and aunts—at the grand re-opening of Upton’s legendary Shake and Bake Family Fun Center Friday night. “I like to come every weekend.”

Last August, the iconic West Baltimore roller rink and bowling alley—founded by former Colts star Glenn “Shake & Bake” Doughty” in 1982—closed for major repairs. But without a timetable for a new start, there were fears that the 36-year-old family friendly institution might not make a comeback.

Friday night proved otherwise, with lines stretching down Pennsylvania Avenue before the official 7 p.m. re-opening. During the shutdown, the center received a $300,000 overhaul from the city, including the current skating floor, plus heating, roof, and air conditioning upgrades, as well as a new paint job and flat-screen televisions (turned to CBS and the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament for an appreciative number of non-skating fathers on hand).

“When I shut it down you would have thought I shut down heaven,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said earlier Friday while standing next to Doughty, who sold the Shake & Bake, which has struggled financially over the years, to the city long ago. But “the roof was falling in, the floor was buckled, you were hard-pressed to find matching skates in here.”

Doughty returned for the reopening wearing a vintage, blue Colt warm-up jacket with his No. 35 emblazoned across the front and said that what he liked about Shake & Bake is that it is “an oasis in a neighborhood with some challenges.”

“You’ve got the conscious of America saying, ‘What are you all doing in urban areas?’ Shake & Bake is it,” Doughty told reporters. “This is a model for the country.’”

Doughty brought excitement and fun, on and off the field, to Baltimore when he arrived from the University of Michigan before the 1972 season. One of the game’s most colorful downfield threats during his 8-year career, all in Baltimore, he helped lead the team’s stunning worst-to-first AFC East turnaround in 1975, pacing wide receiver corps in catches, yards, and touchdowns.

The same year he formed The Shake & Bake Band with teammates Ray Chester, Freddie Scott, and Lloyd Mumford.

No. 35 didn’t forget Baltimore after his playing days ended in 1979. Three years later—after 60 months of fundraising efforts—the former Colt brought the $5 million Shake and Bake project to fruition. An emotion-filled Doughty, who grew up in Detroit’s tough lower east side and recognized the lack of investment in Baltimore’s black neighborhoods, donned a white tuxedo for the ribbon-cutting with then Mayor William Donald Schaefer. He called the occasion “ . . . a dream come true.”

According to the Baltimore Afro-American, the 70,000 square foot structure, which also includes 40 bowling lanes, video games, and a snack bar, represented one of the first major black-owned and operated facilities of its kind in the country when it was built. In 1984, Doughty coaxed Muhammad Ali into paying visit, filling not just the roller rink, but quite a bit of Pennsylvania Avenue outside, too. The Shake and Bake is estimated to have served more than a million visitors over its history, including 34-year-old Faunyette Brown.

“I love to dance and I love to skate and I love the combination of the two,” said Brown, a public relations manager at the Maryland Jockey Club, at the re-opening Friday evening.

“I wanted to be an ice skater, a figure skater, when I was 5 years old, but there was nowhere to close by to go and so my babysitter started to bring me here,” added the Upton-native. “I’ve been coming to the Shake and Bake since 1988. I’ll be back Sunday, too.” 

Six decades ago—right about this time of the year back in 1956—an unknown rookie quarterback named Johnny Unitas walked onto the gridiron of Baltimore’s consciousness.

And he never left. Not today, some 14 years after his death nor more than 30 after the team with which he is synonymous—the famed and fabled Baltimore Colts—quit town for some obscure Midwestern burg.

Unitas was perfectly in tune with the psyche of the unsung factory town on the Patapsco in which he set records, won trophies, and made lifelong friends.

“I came into the league without any fuss. I’d just as soon leave it that way,” he said upon leaving the game in 1973 en-route to the Hall of Fame. “There’s no difference I can see in retiring from pro football or quitting a job at the Pennsy Railroad. I did something I wanted to do and went as far as I could go.”

Unitas’s debut in 1956—the tectonic plates of American football about to shift though no one knew it—has been dramatically misremembered for decades. Even Unitas was wrong, going to his grave in 2002 believing it had been one way when it was another.

Jim “Snuffy” Smith, 73, a longtime Baltimore area basketball coach and fervent fan of all Crabtown sports, tells it like this.

“I was 13 and watching the Colts play the Bears at Wrigley Field. The Colts weren’t good yet,” said Smith of the game, in which Chicago crushes Baltimore 58 to 27. In that game, starting quarterback George Shaw broke his leg and out came a young Lithuanian-Catholic from Pittsburgh wearing No. 19, his scrawny right arm not yet cast in gold.

“Unitas was forced into the game and we didn’t know a thing about him, a skinny kid with stooped shoulders who walked like an 80-year-old man,” said Smith. “His first pass was intercepted for a touchdown and the rest is history.”

Yes, history, lots of it. Unitas quarterbacked the Colts victory over the New York Giants in the 1958 “Greatest Game Ever Played” championship and was a member of two other Baltimore title teams.

But Smith’s version history—the same one Unitas believed up until his fatal heart attack—jumps the gun by two games.

In 2006, veteran Baltimore Sun reporter Mike Klingaman set the record straight, pointing out that the first time the locals got a glimpse of Unitas under center was not via television from Chicago on October 21, but in front of 42,622 fans at Memorial Stadium on October 6.

The Colts lost that game as well, 31 to 14 to Detroit. But Johnny U was launched, right about the time Brooks Robinson was going gold at third base for baseball’s Orioles, and Baltimore would never be the same.

Late in the life of Johnny Unitas, the children from his second marriage played a lot of community and school sports in and around Baltimore County. At one lacrosse game in the 1990s, Hampden resident Joe Mooney had a daughter in a game against a member of the Unitas progeny.

Mooney grew up going to Colts games with his parents in the 1960s and, like thousands of other kids back then, had Johnny U’s autograph and pictures on his bedroom wall.

“He was critical of the refs whenever he felt like it,” said Mooney, 63. “All I could think of was, ‘What must that be like for [a small-time] lacrosse refs to get chewed out by Johnny Unitas?’”

After the game, Mooney walked over to the other team’s side and asked if he could shake the hand that had thrown 290 touchdowns in an 18-year professional career, all but one of them in Baltimore.

Remembers Mooney: “I said, ‘Do you mind?’ And he said, ‘Not at all.’”

The hand that Mooney shook was the first to throw for more than 40,000 career yards. In 1959, he set a record with 32 touchdowns, the first to throw more than 30 in a season. Between 1956 and 1960, he threw a touchdown in 47 consecutive games, a feat once compared to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

All of those National Football League statistics have been broken by bigger and faster athletes who now play 16-game seasons and are aided by rules designed to protect the quarterback from injury.

Yet the aura of Unitas permeate the metropolitan area not unlike, we daresay, that of Babe Ruth.

From the Beltway sign announcing the exit for “Unitas Stadium” at Towson University to the statue of Unitas outside of M&T Bank Stadium to the flurry of blue and white No. 19 jerseys at Ravens’ home games, he is here.

“He’s the foundation of Ravens football,” said Jimmy Rupert, a 30-year-old Pasadena realtor born the year after the Colts left town. “Growing up watching football with my father and grandfather that’s all I ever heard about—Johnny Unitas, the guy who put up the big numbers.”

Rupert goes to at least two Ravens games a year, sometimes more. Before each game, he joins fellow pigskin pilgrims in touching the one of the Johnny U statue’s high-topped cleats, now discolored from years of the tradition.

He does it, he said, “For good luck.”

There’s a story everyone knows about Baltimore. That we’re still collectively bitter and depressed. That we’ve never gotten over the incident from the wee hours of March 29, 1984, at the Baltimore Colts Complex in Owings Mills, when fifteen Mayflower moving trucks—like a funeral procession—were loaded with the team’s equipment, books, and furniture and directed out of town to Indianapolis.

All told, it took a mere eight hours to move out a team that was here for 31 years. “I was out there all night and it really felt like a burial,” recalls John Ziemann, a veteran member of the team’s marching band. “We were there until morning when Walter Gutowski, the team’s PR director at the time, came out, closed the gate, and said, ‘Go home guys, they’re gone.’”

This month marks 30 years since that ominous night, which, it should be noted, is almost the exact amount of time the Colts were in Baltimore. And, though they say that time heals all wounds, this is a gaping one.

But, have the past three decades—with the passing of nefarious owner Bob Irsay, the welcoming of the Baltimore Ravens, two Super Bowl championships, and an entirely new generation of football fans—been enough for us to grieve? After all this, are we finally over it?

Of course, initially, the Colts moving left most everyone in Baltimore distraught.

“You just cried and cried and couldn’t believe it,” says Antoinette Duda, 63, owner of Duda’s Tavern in Fells Point and a diehard Colts—and now Ravens—fan. “It was very hard. You cuss out Irsay, and you go through all of that.”

Undoubtedly, the gut reaction when it comes to thinking about the Colts varies by age.

“If you’re in your 60s and 70s, there is part of your heart that is missing. You’ll always feel slighted, cheated, and robbed,” says WBAL-TV broadcaster Gerry Sandusky. “The Baltimore Colts are to you what the Brooklyn Dodgers are to someone in New York.”

While there were plenty of tears to go around 30 years ago, there was also a sense of “good riddance” from some, as Irsay had already tainted the team and its reputation long before that night, and the fans had made their disappointment felt at the turnstiles. In 1972, Irsay got rid of 27 players; Crowds went from sellouts to upwards of 29,000, if the team was lucky.

“Of course the change was dramatic,” says Tom Matte, running back for the Baltimore Colts for 12 years. “But, by that time, everyone was so disenchanted with Irsay. I was happy that he left because he dismantled our team.”

For the city of Baltimore, as a whole, the Colts leaving town represented something much larger than a few Sunday games.

“A population becomes invested emotionally in a team because it defines that city’s sense of self,” says professor David Andrews, who studies the sociology of sport at the University of Maryland. “And when a team goes, what happens to that?”

The city was surely invested in the Colts, as players were ingrained in the community, hanging out at the same bars as fans and interacting often with the Colts Corrals, which were local fan clubs. Suffice it to say, it was more than just a game.

“Let me put it this way—I was 25 minutes late for my own wedding because a Colts game went into overtime,” says Duda. “I knew the players personally because they would come down to your bull roast, and they did a lot for small businesses.”

“When people remember the Colts, they remember them in the community,” says Marco Romanell, 29, a Ravens blogger for SouthBmore.com. “That’s why it was probably such a shock when the team left. Not only is the team leaving, but so are the people you conversed with or people you’d see every weekend. I think young fans relate by imagining what it would be like if the Ravens left tomorrow.”

Ziemann, who is now the deputy director of the Sports Legends and Babe Ruth Birthplace museums, uses this tactic a lot—especially when kids ask him why there’s an exhibit at the museum about the “Indianapolis” Colts.

“The only way I can relate it to the younger generation is to have them imagine they wake up one day and the Ravens are the Portland, Oregon Ravens,” he says. “Then they start to realize how sad it was.”

Like any mourning process, there are stages of grief. And the bleak 12 years without a team—the CFL didn’t cut it—finally ended in 1996, when Art Modell and the Ravens arrived from Cleveland.

“When we came to town, we had to overcome the fact that, in some fans’ minds, we had just ‘Irsayed’ Cleveland,” says Kevin Byrne, Ravens senior VP of public and community relations. “We knew that everyone here still loved their Baltimore Colts, so we reached out to the old players. The keys were getting Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore out on the field for that first game. That kind of told the fans, ‘It’s okay to root for the Ravens.’”

Almost seamlessly blending the old guard and the new appeared to change the minds of a lot of skeptical Colts fans.

“Every game you go to, you see Johnny’s statue. Every time a Raven is inducted in the Ring of Honor, Lenny Moore is on the field,” says Sandusky. “That the Ravens were inclusive helped to close some of those wounds. They made a story that wasn’t two chapters, but softly blurred the lines—making it Baltimore football history instead.”

Of course, the concept of keeping the same marching band—one that was profiled in Barry Levinson’s ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Band That Wouldn’t Die—was another way to bridge the gap.

“The Modells came in and said, ‘We’re not here to erase your history, we’re here to add to it,’” Ziemann says. “They had the statue built, adopted the band, recognized the Colt Corrals. That made it 100-percent easier to move on.”

Something else that has made it easier over the years? Well, that’s where the game comes in. Many close to the organization—and fans alike—are quick to point out that we beat Indy to the Super Bowl.

“The city was ecstatic and the fans were ecstatic,” says Duda. “Us oldsters will remember the way it was, and we’re going to compare it, of course. But it was so great for the city, and it certainly proved a point.”

Members of the younger generation, who admit that they have no personal attachment to the Colts, have grown up with the Ravens franchise, which turns 18 this season. They feel that winning Super Bowls in both 2000 and 2012 forged the team’s symbiotic relationship with the city of Baltimore.

“Winning one championship was okay, since we stuck it to the Colts before they did,” says blogger Romanell. “But winning that second championship, having a Raven in the Hall of Fame, and the fact that we now have a franchise quarterback, there is no reason to be bitter still.”

Clearly, younger fans seem to be over it, but where does that age divide fall?

“Every year, I try to figure out what the age line is,” says Sandusky. “There’s a line at which point the Colts are not your issue. Right now it’s around 55 years old.”

This generational rift is unique to Baltimore. With most sports teams, you are loyal to whomever your parents (or grandparents) rooted for. Because that can’t happen here, another interesting phenomenon is starting.

“I think now families are connecting again,” says Byrne at the Ravens. “Normally in sports, the generational love moves downward. Here it’s moving upward. Old Colts fans are being persuaded by their grandchildren to give the Ravens a chance.”

Judging by citywide purple Fridays and fans of all ages filling the stands at M&T Bank Stadium every Sunday, the transition seems to be working.

“Kids take their parents to the game now. It used to be that parents bought the tickets, but now that’s reversed,” says Duda. “To me, if you like football, you like football. And the Ravens are my team now.”

In essence, being a Baltimore Colts fan and being a Baltimore Ravens fan are not mutually exclusive concepts.

“These fans have a dual identity now,” professor Andrews says. “They have memories of their parents, Unitas, Memorial Stadium. But they are now wedded to a new team, which has become the new definer of Baltimore.”

The old Colts themselves have helped to bridge the 12-year gap between teams.

“Lenny Moore is a regular at our practices and has lunch at our cafeteria,” Byrne says. “Ray Rice and Lenny are friends. Stan White is on our radio broadcast. Kids rub the foot on Johnny U’s statue outside the stadium. All these things help our players and fans understand how meaningful the Colts were.”

One thing that has remained constant throughout the past 30 years (besides the band, of course) is the city of Baltimore. Byrne and others agreed that last year’s overwhelming Super Bowl parade underscored what we already knew—we are a great football town.

“If you put it all together, we’d be the winningest franchise,” says former Colt Matte. “Between the Colts, [CFL] Stallions, [USFL] Stars, and Ravens, every team we’ve had has been successful, and that’s because we have the greatest fans in the world.”

When it’s fall in Baltimore—no matter if it’s 1964 or 2014—the exuberance and passion for the game of football is obvious to this day.

“I’d say 99-percent of the people I know are diehard Ravens fans,” Romanell says. “It’s kind of hard not to get wrapped up in it, the energy, the purple Fridays, it’s hard not to embrace.”

But, have these great and loyal fans moved on and let go?

Truth be told, emotions still remain raw when talking about the Colts, but some of that anger and bitterness seems to have mellowed.

“The edge is definitely gone,” Sandusky says. “I don’t think people feel as compelled to drive a Mayflower truck off the road as they used to.”

Credit the Modells, the Ravens franchise, the Super Bowl rings, or the fans, but this much is certain: Our cynicism from 30 years ago now feels a lot more like optimism.

“I’ll never forget the good times, the pride I had in that horseshoe logo, and the name Baltimore Colts,” Ziemann says. “But my heart and soul now belong to the black helmet with the purple bird head.”

How The Deal Went Down

For
11 long years, Baltimore got the cold shoulder from the National
Football League. But when the Cleveland Browns called, suddenly
Baltimore was the belle of the ball.

January 1996

Behind The Battles Over Baltimore’s Sports Future

With
or without the Stars, the city’s chances of rejoining the NFL – and
keeping the Orioles – are in serious doubt. Here’s the inside story of
local big shots working to save our big-league sports status.

November 1984

The Annotated Greatest Quarterback of All Time

He passed away on September 11, 2002, the victim of a heart attack. John Constantine Unitas, we will miss you.

When Baltimore lost football great Art Donovan in August at the age
of 89, he was remembered not just as a feisty defensive tackle for the
Baltimore Colts—helping the team to world championships in 1958 and
1959—but as a self-effacing funnyman whose popularity far outlived his
NFL career.

For years after hanging up his cleats, the beefy Pro Football Hall of
Famer, who also spent single seasons with the New York Yanks and Dallas
Texans in an 11-year career, appeared on the talk-show circuit, telling
humorous tales of the NFL’s good old days, as he put it, “When men
were, well, men.”

Donovan’s father was famous fight referee Arthur J. Donovan Sr., who
was in the ring at 19 of Joe Louis’s title fights. When the younger
Donovan left the tough New York neighborhood of his youth, he fought in
World War II and played college football at Notre Dame and Boston
College.

“Baltimore is now without one of its best.” —Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti.