Contributing Author: Carrie Daklin
They started marching. For twelve years, they marched at other NFL games, parades, civic events. For twelve years they appealed to the NFL and their legislature. For twelve years, they played the Colts fight song to pretty much anyone who would listen. For twelve years they paid their own transportation, paid for their own equipment, and financed their own band so that their message would not die.
Bring football back to Baltimore.
When the Baltimore Colts packed their Mayflower moving vans and left in January 1984, the citizens of Baltimore were stunned. More to the point, they were heartbroken. “When the Colts left for Indianapolis, a big part of our heart was taken away,” states John Zieman, in the ESPN film by Barry Levinson, The Band That Wouldn’t Die, a documentary about the Baltimore Colts Marching Band and their unending efforts to bring football back to their hometown.
The documentary was originally aired in October and airs again December 25 at 5 P.M. on ESPN Classic. It is a charming, poignant story of, as Barry Levinson describes it, “Twelve years of fanaticism.” When the Colts team hastily packed for Indianapolis, they forgot one thing: the marching band uniforms. Fearing the team might return for them, band members “obtained” them from the dry-cleaners where they were stored (no one wants to say exactly how) and hid them in a mausoleum.
Then they started marching.
The film is eerily prescient of events that could unfold in Minnesota in the next couple of years. There are just twenty five home games left before the Vikings lease is up. Twenty five opportunities to see your team, a Minnesota institution for the last half century, before they depart.
And if Baltimore and Cleveland and Houston have taught us anything, it is that, yes, even in the town that brought back the first ever NFL championship victory, even there, after thirty years of stunning football history, a team will leave.
Football, like all entertainment, is a business. A business, I might add, that any fan can enjoy free on any Sunday afternoon from fall through winter. Free. That means that if you have a TV. (and the majority of us do) and you have electrical current in your home (and the majority of us do), you can tune in and watch the game. You don’t even need cable. All games are aired on local channels. It is a ritual we have grown accustomed to.
And it is something we, and Baltimore and Cleveland and Houston, have taken for granted.
And is something we could easily lose.
–Carrie Daklin
(Home page photo courtesy of Baltimore Sun photo by Gene Sweeney Jr. / November 26, 2006)
