Q & A WITH : Making Colts Thoroughbreds : 28-Year-Old General Manager Builds a Winner at Indianapolis

James S. (Big Jim) Irsay, the 28-year-old general manager of the Indianapolis Colts, is spending the 1980s rebuilding the team in his image.

The youngest general manager in the National Football League, Irsay is a weightlifter from Southern Methodist University.

The coach he brought in last year, Ron Meyer, and the club’s most prominent new acquisition, Eric Dickerson, are also from SMU.

Meyer is 9-5 in Indianapolis. This year the Colts are tied for first in the NFC East with a 6-5 record. And at running back, Dickerson has exceeded 100 yards every week since he came over from the Rams.

As for the club’s other veteran players, most have joined Irsay at the weight machines for hours at a time in recent years.

Some get bonuses of $10,000 to $50,000 annually just to live here and work out year-round in the Colts’ weight room, where they have gained the strength to revive a team that had been one of the NFL’s weakest.

The revival has surprised the league, which had grown used to a loser in Indianapolis as operated by Irsay’s father, Robert, who promoted Jim from the personnel department to general manager in 1984.

Since then, the progress of the team has been steady but clouded by injuries. Against Houston Sunday a high was reached when the Colts became the first team in the NFL to score 50 points in one game this year.

Irsay, one of the league’s numerous second-generation leaders, has thus been more successful than some, and his is a story that’s all the more remarkable when set against the heavy-handed image of his father.

Has Big Jim just been lucky? Or did he instigate the revival of the Colts? The evidence suggests that he has played a large part in their comeback.

Jim Irsay has intimately involved himself in the family business since the July day in 1972 that the Colts came into his father’s hands.

It could be said that after a 15-year association with the club--interrupted only by class work at SMU--Irsay is one of the NFL’s more experienced general managers.

Amiable, bright and industrious--with streaks of gray already in his black beard--the young executive is a 6-foot 1-inch, 220-pound native of Illinois who at stadiums and airports commands the same kind of attention his players get.

“I think it’s an advantage for (an owner) to be in the players’ generation,” Irsay said in a recent interview in which he discussed his family, his personal philosophy, the years he has spent in football, and the future of his team.

Question: Is it realistic for the Colts to think about the Super Bowl in the near future?

Answer: Our ultimate goal is to be the first to win three consecutive Super Bowls. But before then, there are a lot of steps to take--one at a time.

Q: Can you identify them?

A: Well, there are no miracles in this game, no shortcuts. I’ve been around the Colts since I was 12, 13 years old. It isn’t too difficult to see what you have to do if you’ve spent your life in football. It’s mostly just hard work.

Q: What can a teen-ager learn about the NFL?

A: It depends on your degree of interest. At training camp in the early days, I had dinner most nights with the general manager. He may have felt that he had to go with the owner’s son, but I think he grew to like me. I asked him question after question night after night for months.

Q: Who was the general manager?

A: (The late) Joe Thomas, the main builder of our last winning team. Joe also built champions at Miami and in other cities. He was the smartest personnel man I’ve known, and he had all kinds of other good ideas about football.

Q: What was Thomas’ basic approach?

A: He told me, “When you know what you want or need, go get it. You can’t operate out of fear. You have to be willing to take a chance.”

Q: You have to go after, say, an Eric Dickerson?

A: Yes. Or, say, a new sound system for the weight room. When you grow up in football, you know what’s on the minds of football players. When you’re in their own generation, you know how important their music is to them.

Q: Does music make lifting more palatable?

A: The right sound does. We have a ($10,000) digital disc system that would blow the walls off the Hoosier Dome. People say Dad won’t pay to get a winning team, but that isn’t true. Explain the benefits, and he’ll pay.

Q: People say many other things about Robert Irsay, few of them laudatory. How much does that bother you?

A: Not much. Dad is like me in that he grew up in his father’s business--heating and air-conditioning--and got to know it very well. The difference is that football isn’t a quick-fix business. It’s hard for successful business men to substitute the patience you need in football for the kind of go-getting that’s gotten them good results all their lives.

Q: Were you an only child?

A: No, I have an older brother, Tom, and I had an older sister, Roberta. Our family has had its share of tragedy. When my sister was 15, she was killed in a car accident with two of her friends. That was in 1972.

Q: The year your father purchased the Colts.

A: Yes. At the time, my brother was in an institution in Florida. He has been mentally disabled since birth. I visited Tom again this year when we played in Miami. Growing up with tragedy helps a kid keep his perspective, but I couldn’t really put myself in my parents’ place. I know now that it’s affected my father a great deal.

Q: Does it still?

A: Mention either name, it still hurts him to talk about them. I see it in his eyes, although he has tried to hide the pain. It’s his nature to suck it up and keep going, but losing a daughter at 15--on top of the (trauma) with your first child--is devastating. Having three children of my own, I see now the impact it had to have on my parents.

Q: Now that your mother and father are separated, do both still come to Colt games?

A: Yes, mom is here for all home games. Dad sees them all, home and away. He’s only missed two games in the 15 years that he’s owned the club, both (exhibitions), once when he had the flu.

Q: Have your parents adopted Indianapolis yet?

A: Dad lives in Chicago, but he has a ranch here, and he’s usually in the office at least one day a week. Mom lives in Winnetka (Ill.) and also spends some time in Florida. The family has three boxes at the Hoosier Dome.

Q: Whom do you sit with?

A: Before the game I move around, socializing in Mom’s box for a while, then Dad’s, then in the small box I have for my wife and family. At road games, I sit in the press box.

Q: Which Irsay runs the Colts, Jim or Robert?

A: It’s dad’s team. I run the office but turn to him on the major things, although I make the recommendations there, too--the financial things, the first draft choice and so on.

Q: The two of you don’t, of course, see eye to eye on every matter.

A: We’re seldom far apart. My father and I have had a close football relationship since the days I was a boy and we’d go out and freeze together at Wrigley Field, where the Bears used to play. He likes to joke me around. When he was in last week, he said, “The best thing about the Dickerson trade is that it got you off my back on Cornelius Bennett.”

Q: Is it true that before trading Bennett to Buffalo, you would have paid him his price but your father balked?

A: That’s what I read in the papers.

Q: What was your reasoning in going after Dickerson?

A: In this day and age, all NFL teams are equal in so many things that it’s hard to get an edge. When the opportunity came to trade for a Dickerson in his prime, we went after him because he’s the kind that gives you an edge.

Q: You’ve doubtless heard the rumor that the Colts tampered with Dickerson.

A: Yes, and the rumor is absurd. It’s based on nothing more substantial than we all knew each other at SMU. I was the one who opened the discussions with the Rams. After the trade, when I asked Ron Meyer to phone him, he didn’t even have Dickerson’s number.

Q: You did sign him rather easily--for double his Ram pay--after all the years of arguing in Anaheim.

A: The reason we could sign him so quickly is that I knew, before the trade, the salary that Eric was looking for. We read it in The Los Angeles Times. As part of our daily operation here, we look at every big paper in every NFL city.

Q: What was your reasoning in hiring Meyer?

A: We’d wanted him the year (former coach) Frank Kush left. At that time we took Rod Dowhower instead because we thought it inadvisable to immediately bring in another disciplinarian.

Q: What kind of personal relationship did you have with Meyer at SMU?

A: One thing I liked about him was that when I had to give up football with an ankle injury, he called me into his office to hear my story. I never played for Ron--I was a walk-on at SMU--but he took the time to make sure that I felt all right about the way I was leaving the team. That impressed me. He’s a charismatic coach that players want to win for.

Q: Otherwise, do you have a definite idea of the kind of coach you need in pro football?

A: Good coaches are all different, but we have some minimum standards. For instance, our head coach has to be involved in, and contribute to, every aspect of the team, offense, defense, special teams, personnel, everything. He can’t be a specialist--or a figurehead--not in the NFL.

Q: As a general manager, who are your personal NFL models?

A: You can always learn from Don Shula (Miami) and Tex Schramm (Dallas). I have a lot of respect for Dan Rooney (Pittsburgh) and George Young (New York Giants). Bill Polliam has Buffalo on the right track. Ernie Accorsi (Cleveland), Ted Marchibroda (Buffalo) and Frank Kush are good friends. When I was a teen-ager and Marchibroda was our coach, Ted went over a lot of film with me. I’ve always been grateful for that. It’s important to me still.

Q: What else seems important? What are the elements of your basic philosophy as you’ve been able to develop it so far?

A: I’d say that the first essential--and the hardest thing to learn and stick to--is: Never trade a proven player, and always draft the best player. The talent gap will catch you if you consider needs or anything else but talent--in the draft or anywhere else. This spring, despite the Dickerson trade, we’ll draft an offensive back first if he’s the best player on the board.

Q: But what you really need are defensive backs.

A: The point is that there are only a few great players, and you can’t afford to pass one up. If you are doing everything right, you’re still going to make some big mistakes. Don’t deliberately make a personnel mistake, I keep telling myself.

Q: What other advice do you give yourself?

A: In football, you win with defense, and the front seven is where you’ve got to dominate. Don’t take a defensive back in the first five picks.