'Weights on plywood, bumpy fields': Colts' first training camp primitive fight to survive

The weight room was primitive, a tent situated outside on a massive piece of plywood with monstrous electrical fans blowing hot air mixed with sweat in a cyclone as mosquitoes found fresh flesh to suck. The practice field was bumpy, and the two-a-day workouts were carried out in full pads, under the sweltering summer sun of the auto factory town of Anderson.

There was a commander overseeing it all with a scowl on his face, a 5-foot-9, 55-year-old drill sergeant named Frank Kush who had an intimidating, merciless demeanor that could incite behemoth men to do anything he wanted them to do just by a look with his piercing blue eyes.

Stalag Kush is what newspaper reporters called the Colts training camp in Baltimore the season before, referring to German prisoners of war. Players would joke that they had "survived" the Kush camp. Fullback Randy McMillan even threatened to have T-shirts printed that said, "We made it through."

As the team prepared for its first season in Indianapolis a year later, not much had changed. If anything, Kush was tougher than ever, more iron fisted than ever. He had more to prove in his third season as the Colts head coach, coming off a 7-9 record in 1983 and a strike-shortened 0-8-1 in 1982.

Kush didn't care so much about the amenities for his players at their first training camp in Indiana. He just wanted a place where he could weed out a good chunk of the 150 rookies, free agents and selected veterans who had come to chase an NFL dream.

And for five, long, miserable weeks, players washed, rinsed and repeated with sweat, blood and tears.

"Every day, it was the same. You wake up like the movie 'Groundhog Day,'" said Jon Scott, the Colts longtime equipment manager and now team archivist and historian. "Frank Kush was a hardnosed, blue-collar guy. He did random conditioning just to make sure everyone was able to do it."

That included 100-plus massive guys running through the campus of Anderson College for the mile-and-a-half Kush-created endurance test called the Colts Invitational.

Pete Ward, the team's director of operations at the time, remembers walking to his office, 15 feet from the dormitory bedroom he was staying in and seeing 25 players lined up to get travel arrangements home. They hadn't made the cut and Kush had no qualms about making it clear exactly why.

As the modern-day Colts descend on Grand Park in Westfield on Thursday for the team's first day of training camp, they will be, by all intents and purposes, coddled compared to the training camp of their 1984 pioneering predecessors.

"It was a different world back then, a very different world," said Ward, now the team's chief operating officer. "We went from old time football to today, a very different level."

'We didn't exactly have a roster of choir boys'

Colts owner Jim Irsay said it seems like yesterday that, in the wee hours of a rainy night in 1984, the team and everything that went with them piled into 14 Mayflower tractor-trailer trucks and made their secret move from Baltimore to Indianapolis.

Mayflower's president of moving operations Rick Russell called it "probably the most famous sporting move ever" in an IndyStar story on the 30th anniversary of the Colts' move to Indianapolis.

"I can guarantee you this. There has never been such a move like that and probably never will be again," Irsay, who was the son of team owner Robert Irsay and the 24-year-old general manager in 1984, told IndyStar this week. "And being our fortieth year here in Indy, of course, it brings back so many of the memories of, you know, just getting here and then sitting in Fall Creek School."

When the Colts arrived to the city, after a 600-mile trek, they unloaded at the elementary school at the 4900 block of Kessler Boulevard East Drive, which would become the team headquarters for the next 16 months.

As the news spread of the overnight move, the city of Baltimore grieved as Indianapolis unanimously rejoiced to have an NFL team. But the timing of the team's arrival was a bit of a conundrum. It was almost April and the Colts needed to find a place, and quickly, to have its training camp three months later.

"When we moved, it was so late in the season," said Scott. "It was the end of March and we were behind on everything, including 'Where the heck are we going to have training camp?'"

Ward remembers being assigned as the "training camp guy," stepping off the moving van and hitting the ground running.

"It was really just so incredible," said Irsay. "There is almost no way to describe the uniqueness of bringing a football team to a different part of the country and getting ready for training camp in a few months."

Irsay and Ward, along with Colts attorney Michael Chernoff, made their first stop at Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis) to meet with the college's president, Gene Sease. Ward says the university was welcoming and friendly, but it just wasn't the right fit.

"The facilities there at the time were not ideal for an NFL training camp," Ward said. "We were striking out at other places, too." Including DePauw and Butler.

Then came the call from "Mr. Anderson," former Dodgers star Carl Erskine who had grown up in the city, was on the board of trustees at the college and was his hometown's biggest advocate. "You should really come check us out," he told Irsay.

Irsay and his trio made the trek to the college 50 miles northeast of Indianapolis and found the place the Colts would call their training camp home not only for the next 14 seasons but also in future seasons.

"Anderson gave us a lot of what we had back in Baltimore," said Ward, "and probably a little bit more."

That little bit more was a "big plus" in the form of air-conditioned dorm rooms, which was a dream for players who would come off a sweltering field into the steamy, very un-air-conditioned locker rooms with fans blowing around muggy wafts of breeze.

"There were also brand-new metal lockers at Anderson," said Scott. "And the dormitories had bigger, longer beds for our players. People didn't realize how massive these guys are. How comfortable they were, I don't know. At least their feet weren't hanging off the bed."

Another plus to Anderson that the Colts' higher-ups liked, Scott said, was that "there wasn't a whole heck of a lot to do in Anderson, not much to distract the players." But that was a double-edged sword. Without entertainment, the players would create their own.

"What I didn't realize before we came there was that (Anderson) was the world headquarters for the Church of God," said Ward. "And we didn't exactly have a roster of choir boys."

'They did a lot of turning their heads'

That roster included Chris Hinton, an electric personality who had the kind of people skills and life-of-the-party swagger that could make anything fun, even a training camp seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

"I never found anything fun about training camp," Hinton, an offensive tackle and eventual six-time Colts Pro Bowler, told Colts.com. "It would not have been worth the time trying to do so. We were only about 50 miles from home, but it might as well have been 500."

Ward didn't name names, but Hinton found the fun.

"There was one time where somebody's birthday was celebrated in the locker room on campus and there were a couple of ladies who came by to provide the entertainment," Ward said. "That didn't go well."

A Colts.com article on past training camps tells the story this way: "Players and coaches remember the exotic dancer (Hinton) once arranged to perform for a trainer whose birthday always fell during the camp. The performance was not off-color, but it fell shy of approval of university officials."

Ward describes the relationship between the Christian college and the Colts as having "a few bumps in the road now and then." Alcohol wasn't allowed on campus, which was probably the team's most frequent violation.

"There were a few other times where it was a little bit more serious," Ward said. "There were a couple of times where I would come back from lunch and there would be the college president and the dean and the point person for the training camp lined up outside my office."

Ward would apologize, talk down the offenses and promise the team would do better.

"I know they did a lot of turning their heads," Ward said. "I think they valued us as a partner, and they valued having an NFL team in Anderson."

This training camp, after all, was perfect timing for Anderson. The camp was a way to bring life to a city that two years before had been dubbed the unemployment capital of America.

'Access to the players? Whatever you wanted it to be'

Businesses and shops all over Anderson, and especially along Indiana 109 near the college campus that summer of 1984, proudly displayed Colts banners, some of which had been sold by the city's Chamber of Commerce.

Harts Hair Cottage put up a billboard that read in monstrous letters "Welcome Colts." A Texaco gas station offered a "Tex-a-Colt" special, a free Colts pennant with a full-service fill-up. At a Burger King not far from the college, there were not only signs, but Colts schedules placed on every table.

"We've really enjoyed it," Tony Roseberry, the restaurant's general manager, told IndyStar in 1984. "We were concerned with making the people in town feel at home."

Roseberry's restaurant added an unheard of at the time 32-ounce drink that fans could take back with them to watch the practices. In just two weeks, sales were up at that Burger King 55% from the year before.

While the fan facilities at Anderson were "spartan," Ward said, it didn't deter those fans from coming out to watch their new professional football team even if it meant standing on the hard ground as the sun beat down.

Each Colts training camp practice in 1984 brought an estimated 800 to 1,000 fans, according to the Anderson/Madison County Visitors and Convention Bureau. And those fans were so excited to get to see, many for the first time, actual NFL players in the flesh.

"It was quite the novel thing for a town like Anderson to have an NFL team there," Ward said. And those fans could get as close to the players as they wanted.

Forty years ago, there wasn't any real security and players would walk across a lot where the fans parked to get to and from the field. Fans could wait outside the cafeteria to greet players after a hearty meal.

"The access to the players was whatever you wanted it to be," Ward said. "If you wanted an autograph, you had the players walking right past your car or right past you."

The team may have been strangers from Baltimore, but they felt the love coming from Anderson which seemed to be the quintessential, friendly Indiana town.

"The town and the people and everything else, I can remember it all too well," Irsay said. "Everyone was so excited and that excitement pushed us through and carried us through so many obstacles in the way of pulling off a training camp."

There is no question that training camp, forced in a time crunch to come together on a whim, was at best "semi-reasonable to adequate," Irsay said. "But everyone was so friendly, so helpful, so ready to lend a hand."

Looking back, there might not have been a more perfect place than Anderson College to have the Colts' first Indianapolis training camp, except one thing. Irsay did miss his favorite East Coast delicacy, boiled crab.

And so that first Colts camp in the Midwest got a seacoast flair as Irsay had boiled crab flown in from Maryland to Anderson. Which made that first camp not so primitive, after all.

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow . Reach her via email: dbenbow@indystar.com .

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: 'Weights on plywood, bumpy fields': Colts' first training camp primitive fight to survive