He Doesn’t Mind Being on Outside Looking In

Steve Rosenbloom, 44, sits at his home in New Orleans, talking on the phone with an old sportswriter friend from his Baltimore days.

Steve Rosenbloom is by no means an unhappy man.

He has a 2-year-old son, Jonathan, by his second wife, a New Orleans woman, with whom he is happy. His sons, 10 and 14, from his first marriage live nearby with their mother. He sees them “all the time.”

A Georgetown University graduate, Rosenbloom has been involved in real estate since he was fired by the New Orleans Saints.

“We did some residential things,” he says, “but New Orleans has a depressed economy because of the energy business.

“Nobody has any money right now so nobody’s buying anything. We’re sort of landlords at this point.”

As a young man, Steve Rosenbloom did not dream it would be like this when he reached middle age.

He thought he’d be the owner and operator of the Baltimore Colts, the team his father, Carroll, owned during its glory years.

But Carroll Rosenbloom traded the Colts for the Los Angeles Rams and, a few years afterward, he drowned in the surf off his home in the Golden Beach section of Miami.

Steve’s stepmother, Georgia Frontiere, inherited 70 percent of the Rams. Steve and his brother and sister sold off their share. Before long, Georgia fired Steve from his front office job.

There are people in Baltimore who remember that Carroll Rosenbloom ran a very successful franchise for a number of years, and that Steve was being groomed to succeed him. Some wonder if Steve would come back to Baltimore as owner of a new NFL team, should Baltimore get one.

“Six or seven years ago,” Steve says, “I did put a group together that would have owned an expansion team in another city. Ironically, it was Indianapolis.

“We dealt with Mayor Hudnut, who is very progressive the way Mayor Schaefer was in Baltimore, and we thought we’d get the franchise.

“As it turned out, Indianapolis didn’t have to wait for an expansion team. Bob Irsay moved the Colts there.”

Steve Rosenbloom is as uneasy with the mere mention of Irsay as most Baltimoreans are.

“If Baltimore people are angry about what Irsay did there, they should blame Joe Thomas,” Steve says. “Joe was out of a job. He went out and found Irsay and brought him to Baltimore.

“My dad didn’t know Irsay. He sure didn’t know what a jerk the guy was.

“Things moved so fast at the end when the franchises were traded. Dad got tired of being hit over the head in Baltimore by people who were angry because he wanted to put the exhibition games on the season-ticket package, by people who were always asking what was wrong with the Colts when they were 10-6. Finally he said, ‘I’m out of here.’

“Irsay has always been an embarrassment to me when I see what the city got after we left. Irsay single-handedly made more Oriole fans than anybody thought possible.

“Irsay messed up Baltimore and now he’s making a toilet out of Indianapolis, which is a shame. I like Indianapolis. I like Mayor Hudnut. There are a lot of nice people out there.”

Since the time when Steve was visiting Indianapolis, advising the people there how to get a franchise, his interest in pro football has waned.

“The game has changed so much,” he says. “The new breed of owners is greedy. The old guard knew something about pro football. At least they cared about the game. All the new owners care about is money.

“The time has come to give the teams back to the cities, back to the fans. The new owners don’t know how these franchises became successful in the first place.

“With us in Baltimore, it was a partnership. We related to the fans. We had the Colt Corrals. Everybody was involved. Everybody lived it. There was a closeness that’s gone now.

“The thing that made the NFL stable all those years was that while baseball and basketball were moving franchises around, no NFL franchise was moved from the time the Cardinals moved from Chicago to St. Louis in 1960 until Al Davis took the Raiders to Los Angeles. Now it’s a this-is-your-team-for-a-week kind of thing.”

As for Baltimore, Rosenbloom says: “I’m glad I was in it in Baltimore when it was fun. It may be better to have the memories than to be in it the way it is now.”