There has been a lot of Bill Polian-bashing in this column over the years; it's the understandable reason we've had less than a handful of one-on-one conversations in the past decade. I never blamed him for not wanting to talk to me. Heck, if I was Polian, I wouldn't talk to me, either.
The point being, I'm not here to pile on six days after Bill and Chris Polian were fired from the front office by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay.
I'm here to praise.
Bill, at least. And to a lesser degree, Chris, because he played a role in the team's run of success.
Because for all of Bill's quirks and deficiencies, he was and still is one of the greatest NFL team builders of all time. He did it before the salary cap in Buffalo, did it when the cap system was put in place with expansion Carolina and did it during the cap age here in Indianapolis.
He won, he won, he won.
He belongs in the Lucas Oil Stadium Ring of Honor, assuming he feels comfortable returning at some point.
He belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Hall doesn't make a lot of room for executives, but if you're going to put one in there, it's Bill Polian. As a talent evaluator, a franchise builder and sustainer, he was without equal. If there's a franchise out there looking for a general manager, they couldn't do much better than the guy the Colts just let go.
The city owes him a debt of gratitude because he not only brought Indy a Super Bowl victory and another Super Bowl appearance, but he produced more than a decade of consistent excellence -- and generally did so with players who represented the team and the city quite well.
People ask me, "What happened with you guys? What's this all about?" And I wonder exactly how it started, too, but as Sports Illustrated's Peter King told a Colts staffer when I arrived in 2000, "At least three days a week, you're going to be saying, 'That (bleeping) Kravitz.' "
My memory might be foggy on this, but shortly after I arrived, Polian warmly greeted me on the field before a preseason game and we spoke at length.
The next morning's column was on the sham of preseason football. So it didn't get off to a good start.
To his credit, Polian tried to move past his distaste on a few occasions. He talked to us on the radio show, although that's mostly because he liked the co-host, Eddie White. He did a handful of one-on-ones with me in the early years.
But then, in the course of doing my job the way I think it's supposed to be done, I made him angry -- just as I did with Polian's friend, former Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight, when I covered him in college.
Conflict is an inevitable part of the relationship between source and journalist, whether it's the mayor's office and Star columnist Matt Tully or Polian and yours truly. When you throw together two hard-headed New Yorkers who know they're right all the time, it's going to get heated.
I made some mistakes, wrote some dumb, over- reactionary columns, brought a newspaper-war mentality from my last stop to a completely different atmosphere here. There were some cheap shots. They seemed fun and funny at the time, and now I regret them. (Most of them, anyway.) I should have been better than that.
And he made mistakes. Would he acknowledge those mistakes? I'm not sure. It ultimately doesn't matter.
When the Polian news came Monday, my friends all had the same reaction, "Man, you must be thrilled."
I'm not going to lie. I wasn't heartbroken. But I didn't feel particularly comfortable with the emotion I was feeling. I high-fived somebody in the media work room and then felt like a complete heel. I had never done that before.
I don't plan on doing it again, either.
Did it get personal? Clearly, it did.
But I never questioned the man's talents. I questioned this move or that move, but big picture, there wasn't much to criticize. How could you? His teams won 12 games every year.
With him, it was the other stuff. The Dopey Report Card comments. The lashing out on radio. The way he treated callers, the way I knew he treated staffers -- including several marketing types who were called on the carpet and lambasted for all the Tennessee fans who filled the RCA Dome in that 1999 season playoff loss.
This doesn't mean I want to sit and have beers with him any more than he wants to hoist a few with me. It's just to say that, like Knight and other men with whom I've squabbled, I respect him immensely for the way he does his job. (That is not a two-way street, and I'm at peace with that.) But only a complete idiot would conclude anything other than that Polian did an amazing job in Indianapolis.
Irsay was right to say "it was time" when explaining the hard decision to blow up the front office. But in the extraordinary time Bill Polian was here, he did great things for this franchise, good things for this city, and that should not be forgotten.
Bob Kravitz is a columnist for The Indianapolis Star. Call him at (317) 444-6643 or email bob.kravitz@indystar.com. Follow Bob on Twitter at @bkravitz.
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