At the age of 17, Jim Irsay was well on his way to becoming a leader of the Baltimore Colts, the NFL team his father had bought four years earlier and would eventually relocate to Indianapolis.
“It was a moment that connected my youth with the future,” Irsay says. “My dad went in the locker room after the game and took (then head coach) Ted Marchibroda to the woodshed — basically firing him and Ted resigning in front of the team. Bedlam broke out.”
The young Irsay felt compelled to mollify the difficult situation.
“It was almost like your big brothers getting in a fight with your dad,” he says. “There was a lot of yelling and high emotions. I left the locker room and walked out onto the empty field. I just had a calling, a calling to leadership where something in you says, ‘How can I stand up to make this situation better?’”
A few minutes later, he walked onto the team bus.
“I apologized for my dad’s actions and tried to mend the fences,” he says. “I started crying, breaking down a little bit from the pressure of the moment. Ted Marchibroda got up and said, ‘It’s OK, Jimmy, you should go with your dad. It’s going to be fine.’ It was hard; I was tearful, but it was a calling. You hear that calling and you don’t shy away from it.”
Irsay felt something needed to be done and mustered the courage to be a leader on that day.
“Courage is not the absence of fear,” Irsay says. “Courage is being fearful and still doing the right thing. A lot of people think when you’re courageous, you’re fearless, and you’re not. It’s somehow mustering the mettle and having faith deep inside you that you’re willing to stand in those tough storms that blow.”
Irsay makes a distinction between being fearful and showing fear.
“It’s very important: You can’t be a leader and wear a crown of fear,” he says. “Fear is not a good thing. Caution is a good thing.
“People become very fearful when there is a lot of money at stake. Besides your life being on the line, money is right up there. You have to (lead an organization) as a team, as a partnership. You don’t control as much as you think you control.
“A lot of people would like to think that they have this mastery, control over things. The term ‘self-made-man’ is one of the most spiritually arrogant statements anyone can ever make.”
When his father bought the team when he was 12, Irsay knew what he was going to be when he grew up. But that day on the team bus is when everyone else knew it, too.
“They were always very fond of me and looked after me and mentored me as a younger brother,” Irsay says of the players and coaches. “It was a maturation process they could see before their eyes. They didn’t expect me, at 17 years old, to get up before them and address them. That had an impact.”
Irsay began training for the leadership role at the feet of his father and other team executives, moving through nearly every level of the organization. He gained insight and experience and became CEO and sole owner of the franchise when his father passed away in 1997.
At an age when other owners are just coming into the league, Irsay, now 47, has spent 35 years learning about, building and running a National Football League organization. He has learned a thing or two along the way about leadership, success and building a winning organization.