This video was made possible by Skillshare.
Start learning new skills for free for two months by being one of the first 1,000 to
sign up at the link in the description.
Hello, good evening, and welcome to another episode of Half as Sports.
I’m your host Sam, and today we’re here to watch a match between a reasonably interesting
story about a football team abandoning its home city in the dead of night, and a bunch
of mediocre jokes that will continually interrupt that story.
Will the information pull through, or will my jokes obscure them enough that everyone
stops watching?
There’s only one way to find out, right here, on Tuesday Night YouTube… or maybe
Nebula!
So, back in the 1980s, the football team that is now the Indianapolis Colts was the Baltimore
Colts, and they were owned by a man named Robert Irsay, who I can’t show you a picture
of because they’re all copyrighted, so just imagine if Herbert Hoover and Babe Ruth had
a baby who was very old and very angry.
The Colts played their games in Memorial Stadium, which was a complicated venue: on the one
hand, it was a bad stadium, but on the other hand it was not a good stadium.
10,000 seats had bad views, 20,000 seats were outdated benches with no back support, 7,000
seats were just crappy bleachers that got moved in for football games, and all the seats
were located in a state whose flag looks the way having a seizure feels.
To solve the first three of those problems, Baltimore’s city planners proposed something
called the Baltodome, which disappointingly was not going to be an enormous concave monument
to the world’s second-best movie about Siberian huskies, but instead a $78 million new stadium
capable of holding up to 70,000 fans.
The plan was supported by the Colts’ owner, the Baltimore Orioles, the Governor of Maryland,
the Mayor of Baltimore, and even this stock-photo baby, but the Maryland legislature didn’t
approve the project, and in 1974, Baltimore’s comptroller, Hyman Pressman even got an amendment
to the city charter passed that banned the use of any city funds to build a new stadium
in Baltimore—a surprisingly bold move for a man with a name as silly as Comptroller
Hyman Pressman.
By March of 1984, tensions between Irsay and the city of Baltimore over a new stadium had
gotten so bad that the NFL owners voted to give the Colts permission to move to another
city—but the good people of Baltimore were desperate to keep their football team, because
after all, we all love to do the thing where we link our self-worth to how well the people
wearing shirts with the name of the place we live in kick, carry, or throw the ball
into that bit at the end of the field.
So, the state legislature decided to take drastic measures, using eminent domain—which
is the government’s ability to seize private property for public use—to legally prevent
Irsay from moving the Colts out of Baltimore.
It was a pretty bold move—after all, seizing a football team probably wasn’t what James
Madison had in mind when he put eminent domain into the Fifth Amendment.
But on the other hand, the amendments are dumb—just ask all the soldiers outside your
house demanding to live there.
Anyways, on March 27, 1984, the Maryland State Senate passed a law giving Baltimore the right
to seize ownership of the Colts, just because he wanted it, which the Maryland House was
expected to pass within the next two days, when the governor would sign it.
Was this a thing the government should be doing?
Most certainly not, but since when have we starting caring about silly things like “abuses
of power.”
So, in response, Robert Irsay decided to do the reasonable thing—he decided to smuggle
an entire NFL team out of Baltimore in the middle of the night like it was the plans
to the Death Star.
Indianapolis, Indiana had, for years, desperately been trying to transform into a “great American
city.”
They already had a Cracker Barrel, a Hampton Inn & Suites, and an annual event where cars
turn left 800 times, so all they were missing was a football team.
Conveniently, they’d already broken ground on a massive stadium called the Hoosier dome
in 1982 before they had any guarantee of a football team moving there, which is all to
say that, on March 28, 1984, when Irsay called the mayor of Indianapolis to discuss the Colts
moving there, it was basically like asking Hank Green to excitedly explain how anglerfish
reproduce while using a lot of jump cuts.
They’d spent years preparing for someone to ask that very question.
The Indianapolis mayor offered the Colts use of the Hoosier Dome, a $4 million training
complex, a $12.5 million loan, and a single, tender kiss on the check, and Robert Irsay
accepted.
Then, just like in any totally above-board political arrangement, they told absolutely
no one what had just happened.
Out of fear that the state legislature would accelerate the seizure of the Colts, at 10:00
pm that night, Irsay had a friend who ran a moving company quietly send 15 tractor-trailers
to the Colts facility, where they loaded up the team and all their belonging, and then
drove through the night, with each tractor-trailer taking a different route from Baltimore to
Indianapolis to throw off the Maryland State Police should they try to detain the team.
They were then met at the border by the Indiana state police, who escorted them to Indianapolis,
where they arrived at 6:00 am, having completed the most audacious heist since Oceans 12 scammed
me into buying a $14 movie ticket.
Later that day, the Maryland State House passed the law to seize the Colts, and the Governor
signed it, but of course it was too late.
The people of Baltimore were, of course, devastated to have lost their football team, but football
would ultimately return to the city 12 years later, in 1996, when the Cleveland Browns
did an actually kind of similar thing and abandoned Cleveland to move to Baltimore,
changing their name to the Ravens in honor of the poem by Baltimore’s own Edgar Allen
Poe—because nothing strikes fear into the hearts of opposing football teams like allusions
to narrative poetry.
If you’re interested in smuggling a football team out of a city in the dead of night before
the state government can figure out what you’re doing, you’re going to need to be efficient
about it.
And you might find it useful, then, to up your productivity by taking my friend Thomas
Frank’s excellent Productivity Masterclass, which is available now on Skillshare.
He’ll teach you how to build a productivity system for yourself so that you can spend
more time doing the things you want to do.
Even if you’re already an efficiency whiz, Skillshare will have something for you: it’s
got thousands of classes for creatives to take their skills up a notch, in everything
from writing to business to photography to animation.
There are options for any skill level, and the classes have short lessons to fit into
any schedule.
To get two months for free, just be one of the first 1,000 to sign up at the link in
the description.