Exploring ESPN's 30 for 30: Part 2. The Band That Wouldn't Die

Director: Barry Levinson
Rain Man
Bugsy
The Natural
Good Morning Vietnam
Avalon
Diner


Synopsis
The film follows the leaders of the Baltimore Colts Band (currently Baltimore's Marching Ravens) during and after the the 1984 departure of the Baltimore Colts NFL team to Indianapolis.  On a dark night in March, moving vans emptied all of the Colts equipment from Memorial Stadium and shipped the franchise to Indianapolis, leaving the city in shock.  The film cites former Colts owner Robert Irsay as the leading decision maker behind the move.  The all volunteer Colts Band remained behind and continued to perform on a shoestring budget, representing the hope of the people of Baltimore who wanted nothing more than their own NFL franchise.  The band was adopted by the Baltimore Ravens (formerly the Cleveland Browns) when the franchise moved to Baltimore in 1996.




Thoughts
The Band that wouldn't die has two elements that I really love. The first is the collection of band related anecdotes which really show how close the operation came to failing but also why the people within the band were dedicated enough to will their mission of bringing football back to Baltimore to success. Stories like hiding the band uniforms in a mausoleum and getting the ball which was used on the winning play of the 1958 NFL Championship Game smuggled back to Baltimore inside a bass drum. Perhaps my favorite is that of the Baltimore Colts band standing on the statehouse steps to show that the people of Baltimore had support for bringing an NFL franchise back to the city. If you listen to the commentary on Ocean's Eleven, part of the screen writing involved constantly creating situations where it appeared things wouldn't work, as if the plan all of a sudden hit a brick wall and the team had to find a new way around it.  This kind of action is present in the documentary and it is not only entertaining, but also drives the narrative extremely well.

The second thing I like about the film is the perspective it gives on just how much the band meant to the city of Baltimore.  Seeing a grown man cry when discussing a fight song may seem silly, but consider how many people play their alma mater's fight song at funerals and weddings.  What we know about fan psychology tells us that people tend to value themselves based on the teams success.  The teams we follow become an extension of ourselves and our self worth.  Traditions become a part of our heritage and they bring back memories of all the moments when the teams, and ourselves, found success.  Fight songs elicit pride and bring us back to those moments when we felt the best about ourselves.  When I hear the strains of On Iowa or that long horn blast before the Victory Polka, I get that rush.  Seeing the film portray the emotions with that was perfect and it really drove home why the band, the keepers of the fight song, were so important to Baltimore. 

This film has one, major flaw.  Robert Irsay is the villain, the man who stole the beloved Colts from Baltimore.  Except that isn't the whole story.  Irsay left because of financial difficulties with the franchise which came over a decade.  Furthermore, in an attempt to upgrade Baltimore's Memorial Stadium to include revenue generating luxury boxes and better facilities for the team and management was killed by the Baltimore Orioles, who were sharing the stadium at the time, and more importantly the state legislature who refused to fund several rebuilding projects.  Furthermore, Irsay was being constantly berated in the press, causing even further resentment between the owner and the city (this isn't exactly hard to find information either).

When you take all of this in totality, it must have seemed like, to Mr.Irsay, that the legislature, the city, and the Baltimore Orioles were preventing him from making the same amount of money other NFL franchises were getting from luxury boxes and other sales while the Baltimore press was simultaneously casting him as the villain in all of this.  One parallel to this is the recent stadium woes of the Minnesota Vikings.  A very popular small market team that, for a long time, was fighting with sharing facilities with the Twins and a lack of commitment from the local government when it came to building a new stadium.  The press sided with the Vikings, pressured the local government to keep the franchise, and now it seems like they will get a new stadium and remain in Minnesota.  One wonders if the same would have worked with the Baltimore Colts.

Review
There is a lot of entertainment value in The Band That Wouldn't Die, but I wonder if the perspective of the narrative truly captures the reality of the situation.  Irsay certainly had his personal problems, but focusing on them really doesn't do him any justice and misses the fact that the neglect of the legislature and pressure from the local media really pushed him out of Baltimore.  The film really does a disservice to the audience by neglecting this angle.  We spend the entire time talking about how people loved the Colts, but the filmmaker misses how the legislature seemed to have been denying it for decades.  Imagine the new emotional weight given to the scene on the courthouse steps.  The legislature had spent decades denying that the Colts were important enough to merit the funding that would have likely kept them in Baltimore, and now they were saying that nobody really cared about football in Baltimore anyway and they would not push to get a new club.  Adding the angle of the legislature would have really added to the impact of the film and it would have made that scene on the courthouse steps perhaps one of the greatest scenes in sports history.

No this isn't a story about the legislature, it is a story about a band.  However, neglecting the legislature's role in these events really paints a false picture of the band. Instead of a group who had been jilted by the NFL and Robert Irsay, the real story should have been how the band was really in a civic battle, trying to convince the leaders of Maryland and Baltimore that the pride and passion their citizens had for football was not something that should be dismissed as unimportant.  The story tells us that sports play an enormous role in municipalities and government in this country and the band is a vehicle for demonstrating our conviction that sports are not an unimportant part of our communities.

Still, the film does a nice job of several things.  The anecdotes and emotional value attached to the band really make this a solid piece of film making.  I just wish we got more of the truth.  That little bit would have moved this from a good film, to a great one.