For two long days, the boss stalled. Jim Irsay put it off and put it off, trying to push away the pain, muttering expletives under his breath, dreading the conversation he knew he had to have.
He had to break the news to one of his all-time favorite players that he was no longer an Indianapolis Colt.
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“One of the toughest things I’ll ever have to do,” Irsay told close friends that week.
He knew how it had to go, knew a phone call wouldn’t suffice. This needed to be done in person, face-to-face, by the owner himself. Edgerrin James deserved that much.
“Had to be man-to-man,” Irsay insists 15 years later. “With him, I wouldn’t do it any other way.”
It was the 2006 offseason. The Colts were chasing a championship. James, their running back of seven years, was about to become a painful salary-cap casualty, a 27-year-old Pro Bowler on the back end of his prime who happened to be one of the most consequential players in franchise history. Like Peyton Manning, like Marvin Harrison, James had helped lift the team from league laughingstock to the brink of a title.
What burned Irsay most: He wouldn’t get to hoist the trophy with them.
The owner knew the team couldn’t pay James what he’d command on the open market, not if they wanted to keep the rest of the core — Manning, Harrison, Reggie Wayne, for starters — intact. So after two days in Miami, Irsay finally reached out, asking James to meet him at the resort where he was staying. Edge showed up in style, right on time, escorted by the rapper Trick Daddy.
“How do you think it’s going to go?” Edge asked a Colts staffer as he strolled into the lobby, noticeably more nervous than usual.
“You’re gonna have to talk to the big man,” he was told.
“Hang here,” Edge told Trick. “Won’t be long.”
But an hour later, he sent word down: Trick could leave. This was going to take some time.
The swagger. The charisma. The vibe. Few had it like Edgerrin Tyree James.
He claims to have purchased his first car, a Chevy Caprice, with his winnings from a dice game. Trick Daddy gave him rides to class at the University of Miami. After he signed his first pro contract, he bought a 38-foot Sea Ray and named it “Stress Free.”
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In 2001, holed up in his house after a devastating knee injury, James scribbled a list of goals on a notepad, then vowed to a friend he’d cross each off by the time his career was finished. Among them:
1) Play in a Super Bowl.
2) Celebrate by splurging on a brand new Lamborghini before said Super Bowl.
3) Make the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
He’d accomplish all three. (One small issue with the Lamborghini: At first, James couldn’t figure out how to drive it.)
During his playing days, James would log most of his offseason workouts around 3 or 4 a.m., often accompanied by the homeless and drug addicts that lingered on the streets of Miami late at night, whom James would recruit for $20 and an early morning breakfast at Denny’s. Sometimes, he’d do so after an evening out at a club, where he’d lounge for a few hours and sip on cranberry juice, his way of fooling the rival NFL players who were there, throwing back liquor, assuming James was doing the same.
For most of his career, Edge declined to show up for the Colts’ spring workouts, choosing instead to train alone in Florida. One year, after then-head coach Jim Mora called him out in the press, the running back bristled.
“I only went to college for two and a half years,” James famously told Sports Illustrated, “but I think I know the meaning of the word ‘voluntary.'”
He once showed up to training camp in the backseat of an airport taxi. James’ license had been suspended — too many speeding tickets back in Florida — so instead of a limo, he hired a cab driver to haul him and teammate Reggie Wayne the 75 miles from Indianapolis to Terre Haute.
What they all found out later, and got a good laugh out of: the cabbie’s license had been suspended, too.
Once yanked to the turf in a game by the long dreadlocks that dangled beneath his helmet, James went home that night, grabbed a pair of scissors and trimmed them himself.
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“That’s never happening to me again,” he told a friend.
Asked by a reporter about the fresh-cut a day later, James replied with two words and a smile.
“Business decision,” he said.
And before the Colts’ 2005 preseason game in Japan, the veteran rusher made it clear he had no intentions of making the trip, citing a fear of long flights.
The team insisted.
James stood his ground.
“The closest I’m coming to Tokyo is Benihana,” he quipped.
His conversation with Irsay that day in 2006 lasted three hours.
The kid from poverty-stricken South Florida who didn’t know a thing about the state of Indiana until April 17, 1999 — the day the Colts stunned him, not to mention the rest of the league, by drafting him fourth overall — had become tight with the eccentric owner. Edge remembers their first meeting, right after the draft, his apprehension eased by the free-spirited Irsay, who gifted Edgerrin’s young daughter a Colts onesie and rambled on and on about hip-hop.
The boss was different, James remembers thinking. He liked that. He was different, too.
“I think we all know about our intuition when we meet people, we get a certain feeling about them,” Irsay says now. “It’s not what they say or even how they say it or how they look or how they dress. It’s just that feeling you get when you’re in a room with someone like that, a special person who is going to do special things and you just say, ‘Wow, now I know we were right with that pick,’ and the rest is history.”
Edge still had his concerns. At a party at the Indiana Roof Ballroom that first summer, gazing out at the city skyline, he turned to a friend and asked if he’d ever be truly embraced in a place like Indiana.
“How they gonna take me here?” Edge asked sheepishly. “I got dreads. I got gold teeth.”
His friend smiled.
“None of that is gonna matter the minute you score your first touchdown.”
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That friend was right. Ten 100-yard games as a rookie, nine more a year later. Twenty-six touchdowns in two seasons. James wasted no time becoming one of the most popular players in team history — he ran with power, with speed, with impossible lateral quickness. He caught like a wideout, blocked like a tight end and finished like a fullback. Two seasons in, James had piled up a pair of league rushing titles and more yards in that span than any back since Eric Dickerson.
We don't talk enough about how SICK Edgerrin James was for the @Colts.
via @nflthrowback pic.twitter.com/f7I5eDziXs
— NFLonCBS (@NFLonCBS) April 6, 2021
“You won’t find one Colts fan who doesn’t think the world of Edgerrin,” Irsay says now, and he’s right.
The owner grew to love James’ on-field grit, the menace to his game, and after bumping into Edge’s grandmother after a game one season, the owner started to learn where the fire came from.
“Why’d you take my boy out the game?!?” Edge’s grandmother barked.
“Well, it was a coach’s decision,” Irsay tried to respond, adding that the Colts were up big.
“I don’t care about that!” she griped back. “You don’t take him out!”
The Colts won 41-9 that day.
“Jim Irsay’s my man,” Edgerrin says now, asked why of all the people he could have picked to present him for his Hall of Fame induction this weekend, he chose Irsay. “Always taken good care of me. Always been super cool, from Day 1. I thought it would only be right.”
But that doesn’t mean that goodbye in 2006 was easy. After Irsay told him the team wouldn’t be able to re-sign him, James slogged out of the suite, head down, mind adrift, and asked for a ride. A Colts’ staffer drove him out of the city.
Thirty minutes passed. James barely said a word.
Finally, he asked to be dropped off in front of a strip mall in a spotty section of town.
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“You sure we’re OK out here?” the driver asked, more than a little worried.
“You’re good,” Edge replied. “You’re with me.”
With that, the Colts’ all-time leading rusher disappeared into the distance, weighing life beyond the only NFL franchise he’d ever known. He would sign a three-year, $25 million deal with the Cardinals that spring, and play in a Super Bowl with them after the 2008 season, but he’d never again be the player he was in Indianapolis.
Back in his hotel room, Irsay slumped in his seat. It was the right move. That doesn’t mean it hurt any less.
“That sucked,” he told friends that night, over and over. “That just sucked.”
James’ first job was harvesting watermelons under the stifling South Florida sun in the dirt-poor town he was raised: Immokalee, Fla. Back then, little Edge made $20 a day.
Mom worked at a cafeteria, never raking in more than $17,000 a year. One uncle had been shot and killed. Another died in prison. Christmas often came and went without any presents.
In his mind, the real gift arrived on his birthday every year, Aug. 1 — the day the Pop Warner season started. Life was hard, money scarce, but football? Football was easy. Football was simple. Edge learned early on that all he had to do was outwork the kid across from him.
So that’s what he did for the next 20 years.
He’d sneak in early-morning workouts on a strip of grass outside the run-down apartment complex he grew up in, training in solitude before sunrise, pretending he was Walter Payton. The inspiration came from an old VHS tape he had back at the apartment called “Pure Payton.” He’d watch it over and over and over.
In a lot of ways, football became his drug. His refuge. Eventually, his ticket. Asked once why he never fell victim to the vices that were so prevalent in his hometown, James scoffed.
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“I never got into gangs,” he said. “Gangs are for followers.”
He had one way out. He knew it.
“I didn’t have a Plan B, a Plan C, a Plan D. I didn’t have anything but a Plan A. I was gonna get my mom out of that cafeteria.”
The decision that would spur disbelief in Indianapolis, including a host of calls to local radio shows encouraging fans to boycott the team, arrived 10 days before the 1999 NFL Draft.
That’s when general manager Bill Polian settled on Edgerrin James over Ricky Williams.
“We were dissatisfied with Ricky’s interview, dissatisfied with his workout, and after we did some more film work, targeting their acceleration in the hole and their ability to avoid linebackers at the second level, it was really clear to us,” the Hall of Fame executive says.
“Edgerrin was far and away the better player. But we were the only ones who knew it at that point.”
To the furor of their fanbase, the Colts passed on the Heisman-winning, record-setting Williams, the All-American out of Texas. Privately, Irsay was always on board, having pored through hours of film himself. After the pick was in — the Colts took James fourth after quarterbacks went 1-2-3 — the owner grew giddy in the draft room. He now had James, a gifted runner who could do anything asked of him — move the chains, catch passes out of the backfield, stand up to a linebacker in pass protection, juke a safety 20 yards down the field — to pair with his star quarterback, Manning, and his star wideout, Harrison.
“New Orleans offered us their entire draft for the pick, and we wouldn’t do it,” Irsay says now. “We had our triplets.”
(The Saints would eventually find a buyer, trading all six of their picks in the ’99 draft plus two a year later for the chance to trade up and take Williams fifth.)
Meanwhile, James was stunned. So was most of Indianapolis.
“This wasn’t a popular situation from the beginning,” he says now. “I wasn’t a popular pick, and the team wasn’t killing it.”
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The Colts had won six games in two years. Who was this kid from Miami with the dreadlocks and the gold teeth, picked before college football’s all-time rushing leader, a Texas back coming off a 2,124-yard, 27-touchdown, Heisman Trophy-winning season?
The city was about to find out.
“It was just a matter of somebody having enough guts to pull the trigger,” James said confidently that day.
One afternoon, James was strolling through the Colts’ practice facility when he stopped to mingle with the team’s equipment managers. It was Edge being Edge, nothing more — he was a friend to all, in a hurry only when he was carrying the football.
“How come you guys have a bathroom in here, but no shower?” Edge asked the group.
They all shrugged their shoulders. They’d never really considered it.
“Sure enough, two days later, we had a shower being installed in there,” says Jon Scott, the team’s equipment manager for almost four decades. “And wouldn’t you know it, there was a big 32 decal on the mirror.”
When they tried to thank him, James brushed them off. No big deal, he said.
There was just one caveat, though: Edge got to use the shower whenever he wanted.
“Done this for a really long time,” Scott says, “and he’s always been a favorite. There was only one Edgerrin.”
The thought hung in Jim Irsay’s mind for months after he returned from Miami. It was the winter of 2007. At long last, after years of playoff heartache, his Colts were world champions, and when he weighed the long climb it took to get there — and those who made it possible — he started with the running back he’d had to say goodbye to a year before.
“He was a part of that victory,” Irsay says now. “He helped build the horseshoe. He helped build Lucas Oil Stadium.”
So Irsay decided on a token of appreciation: He’d send James a Super Bowl ring, the same one every member of the team earned for their 29-17 triumph over the Bears that February.
| Player | Rushing yards |
|---|---|
Edgerrin James | 9,226 |
Lydell Mitchell | 5,487 |
Marshall Faulk | 5,320 |
Eric Dickerson | 5,194 |
Lenny Moore | 5,174 |
James couldn’t believe it.
Still can’t, really.
“That’s home,” he says of the Colts. “That’s home base. To this day, we’re family.”
At its best, football is a game that pulls together different players from different backgrounds, forging bonds that will endure the rest of their lives. Peyton Manning was the privileged and polished son of an NFL quarterback, groomed to be a star from his prep days in the swanky section of New Orleans where he was raised. On the surface, Edgerrin James was everything Manning was not — raised in a poverty-stricken South Florida town, overlooked, undervalued, booed on draft day, the kid with gold teeth and long dreadlocks from The U that Indianapolis didn’t know what to make of at first.
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But between the lines, they were perfect for each other. Few sought greatness the way Manning did. Edgerrin James was one of them.
“Kindred spirits when it came to Sundays,” James would later write in The Players’ Tribune.
“Soon as I got there, we connected,” he adds now. “And we just went to work.”
So in awe of his new teammate, Manning would later admit, he would skimp out on certain drills just to get a better view of James running the football. “My coach used to get mad at me because I wouldn’t carry out my fakes on certain run plays,” Manning wrote in a letter to longtime Colts beat writer Mike Chappell that was used for James’ Hall of Fame candidacy. “My reasoning was I wanted to watch Edgerrin James run the ball. You hear about players wanting to watch others play — there’s a famous clip of Randy Moss on the sideline getting up on the bench because he said he wanted to watch Brett Favre play.
“Well, I wanted to watch Edgerrin James play. I had a front-row seat. That says a lot about how special a player he was.”
For most of his career, when Peyton was asked by his father who the best teammate he ever had was — be it in high school, at the University of Tennessee or with the Colts — he didn’t hesitate.
“That’s easy,” Peyton would say. “Edgerrin.”
And when James finally got the call and finally earned his spot in the Hall of Fame, Manning was one of the first teammates he texted.
“Man I am so happy my friend,” Manning wrote back. “I knew you were a Hall of Famer the first time I saw you run the ball. Congrats, an honor to play with you.”
Drafted a year apart, they’ll enter the Hall of Fame within 24 hours of each other. Kindred spirits, connected again in Canton.
One daughter is in law school. Another is finishing up her bachelor’s degree. He’s got four more children, including sons who are being recruited in basketball and football by major programs.
Edgerrin’s goal is to see each graduate college.
“He’s devoted his life to his kids,” says Amp Harris, an Indianapolis-based music producer and longtime consultant to pro athletes who’s known James for 20 years. “He watches them play. He runs his businesses. He lives like he did back when he was playing, and that shows you how much he’s taken care of his money.”
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Money won’t matter this weekend. It’s Edge’s moment. The party’s going to be wild.
His goal is to drive this custom ride in the Hall of Fame parade, then auction off the car and donate the proceeds to charity. He wants Irsay to let it flow — to speak honestly and openly — when the owner stands on the stage in front of thousands and presents him for induction on Saturday night.
Edgerrin James' ride for his Hall of Fame induction in August is perfect. (via @EdgerrinJames) pic.twitter.com/GIOpZenFYV
— Zak Keefer (@zkeefer) September 22, 2020
Then it’ll be Edge’s turn, his chance to reflect on the football journey that’s taken him from that strip of grass outside the run-down apartment complex he grew up in, mimicking the moves of Walter Payton before sunrise, to Canton, to the Hall of Fame, to football immortality.
Or, as Edge likes to say: From gold teeth to a gold jacket.
What was the secret?
He kept it real, nothing more.
“Everybody tries to mimic something else, and they kinda get away from who they are,” James says, looking back on his career. “I realized you can be yourself and still accomplish all the things you want to accomplish. I didn’t have to put on some funny face or dread going to work. If more people can be themselves, you’ll find happier people.”
He was real and raw, as authentic as they come. He cherished the game. Respected it. Revered it. He ran over linebackers. He stuffed defensive linemen. He made Peyton Manning skimp on the fundamentals. He sparked an offensive explosion. He helped build the horseshoe. Helped build Lucas Oil Stadium.
He spoke his mind.
He had fun.
He changed a franchise but never changed himself.
Harris, Edge’s longtime friend, calls him the Frank Sinatra of the NFL.
Why?
“Because, more than anything,” Harris says, “Edgerrin always did it his way.”
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photos: David Madison; Al Messerschmidt; Transcendental Graphics; Sam Riche / Getty Images)
