The Band That Wouldn't Die: The Passion of Football Fans in Baltimore

Like every football fan, I've seen that old news footage of Mayflower moving trucks sneaking the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle of a cold March night in 1984 dozens of times. But until I saw The Band That Wouldn't Die, I hadn't given much thought to the guys driving those trucks.

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The Band That Wouldn't Die, Barry Levinson's new documentary about the Baltimore football fans who kept their pep band alive even when they didn't have a team to play for, opens with an interview of one of those moving truck drivers. He still seems haunted by the role he played in ripping the hearts out of football fans of his city.

But what The Band That Wouldn't Die shows us is that once those fans got over the initial shock of having their hearts ripped out, they decided that they wouldn't let a little thing like the team moving away take their band away from them. The men and women of the Baltimore Colts Band were too resilient to quit dreaming of football in Baltimore, even if the Colts were gone.

So the band members hid their uniforms from the movers, kept getting together for practice, and simply refused to stop playing, no matter how long it took for the NFL to come back to Baltimore. One band member even mortgaged his house to raise funds to keep the band going.

Of course, you know how it ends: The Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore in 1996, changed their name to the Ravens, and welcomed the band (now known as the Marching Ravens) back with open arms. After 12 seasons without football, the NFL was back in Baltimore, and the band was back on Sundays.

Art Modell, the owner who moved the team from Cleveland to Baltimore, appears in the movie as something of a savior to the band. That's the part of the film that's toughest to swallow, because Modell did the same thing to the fans in Cleveland that Colts owner Bob Irsay did to the fans in Baltimore.

But if the treatment of Modell is the film's weakest point, the treatment of Irsay is its strongest. It's stunning to see how callous Irsay was about taking the team away from the fans who had supported it for decades, and Irsay's son, current Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, speaks with surprising candor about how his father's alcoholism and the deaths of two of his children turned him into a hard man who was incapable of feeling any empathy toward Colts fans.

Ultimately, the story of The Band That Wouldn't Die is the story of how football, in many respects, means more to the fans than it does to the owners. Levinson's 1982 movie Diner included a famous scene where a man tells his girlfriend she has to pass a test on football before he'll marry her. It's easy to picture the members of the band in Baltimore doing the same.