MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
Growing up in Cumberland in the 1960s, nearly everyone here was a Baltimore Colts fan.
There were Washington Redskins fans, too, and one or two Pittsburgh Steelers fans (though, truthfully, not many more), but when the Colts played on Sunday, Cumberland was a ghost town. Either you went to the Colts game in Baltimore or were inside watching it on television or listening to Chuck Thompson make the call on radio.
“Go to war, Miss Agnes!”
(For the sake of historical accuracy, I was not joking about the one or two Steelers fans, for I had never seen more than one Steelers fan in the same room in Cumberland, Maryland until Saturday, Dec. 23, 1972 when the great Franco Harris performed the Immaculate Reception. Suddenly, this place was crawling with them.)
I lived and died with the Colts of those days – Unitas, Moore, Berry, Mackey, Matte, Orr, Bubba, Curtis – but into the early ‘70s I began to become disenchanted by the doings of the nut former Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom had swapped ownership of the Colts with in exchange for ownership of the Los Angeles Rams. True story. To this day, it’s still known as “Rosenbloom’s Revenge.”
Robert Irsay was clearly not right, and he proved it years before he moved the team to Indianapolis by trading John Unitas.
Really? Trade the greatest quarterback of all-time? (Why not? The Steelers cut him.) Mr. Colt? Along with Brooks Robinson, Mr. Baltimore? Irsay had no regard for the city or for Colts fans. He was a paranoid (with good reason), drunken, angry man who hated everyone, including himself.
I loved the Colts, but I always liked the Redskins in those days, too. They weren’t very good but they had great players such as Sonny Jurgensen, Charley Taylor, Bobby MItchell, Jerry Smith and Sam Huff.
Then when Vince Lombardi took over for a season before being stricken with the cancer that would eventually kill him, he discovered a running back named Larry Brown, told Sonny to lose the gut, and the Redskins had a winning season – 7-5-2. But the Colts still beat them that year, as they did just about every time the teams played during that era.
In 1971 George Allen took over as head coach and general manager and the Redskins immediately became winners, going to the Super Bowl the following season. They were easier to follow then than the Colts were, mainly because of the chaos Irsay was inflicting. Yet the Colts still beat them when they played.
That began to change when Joe Gibbs arrived in D.C. in 1981, as by then the Colts weren’t beating anybody and the Redskins weren’t losing to anybody, or at least to many.
By that time, I was at Maryland, which is nine miles from the District, and then worked there for three more years before returning home to Tara.
So, you know … when in Rome?
Or, in the case of the Colts, when in Indianapolis? The swine.
I enjoyed being a Redskins fan, as going to a Redskins game at RFK in the day was a life-changing experience, and living in the D.C. area during the team’s first Super Bowl season was a lifetime highlight film.
Things tended to get a little funky toward the end of Jack Kent Cooke’s tenure as owner, as we saw when the team trained at Frostburg State, though he was still easily one of the greatest sports team owners of all time; and then, of course, things went absolutely haywire for 24 years of Dan Snyder hell.
Yet when Baltimore got another football team (despite Mr. Cooke’s best efforts with Laurel), I had to go back, because as much fun as I had living in D.C. and rooting for the Redskins, Baltimore has always been the one.
Now, of course, it’s the Baltimore Ravens and the Washington Commanders, and their four-year reunion takes place Sunday in Baltimore, with both teams in first place of their respective divisions, and with Washington the top-scoring team in the NFL, just eight points ahead of second-place Baltimore.
Not unlike when the Orioles and Nationals play in interleague baseball, maybe it’s not a rivalry, but there is usually a little extra juice involved when the cities meet in football, because anything Baltimore-Washington constitutes some kind of edge. They are big-city neighbors after all.
M&T Bank Stadium will be hopping loud, though, because Baltimore does not like anything D.C. even a little bit, and I don’t mean maybe. That was never more evident than during the 12 years Baltimore did not have a team when rooting for the professional football team just 30 minutes down the parkway might as well have been prohibited by law, because I never met anyone from Baltimore who did.
That’s Baltimore – stubborn.
On Sunday, the Baltimore secondary had better be even more stubborn. Otherwise, Bawlmer, hon could be in for a very long day.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT