It was 40 years ago today -- and Indianapolis Colts owner
Jarran Reed Jersey Jimmy Irsay remembers it vividly: the last day in the life of the musical icon he reveres among all others, and the sudden and wrenching end of an era.When John Lennon was a sa sinated outside his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 1980, Irsay was a 21-year-old student at Southern Methodist University. Like so many Americans,
Shaun Alexander Jersey he learned the horrible news while watching -- and four decades later, the memory still gives him chills."I was in Dallas with an acoustic guitar in my hand, and my wife was upstairs pregnant with our first child -- and Howard came on and delivered the news," Irsay recalled Tuesday in a Zoom interview. "And everything changed -- the world changed -- in an instant, right there. The music really did die; the innocence died. It was so crushing. It was just like a steel sword through the heart."Irsay, one of the world's foremost collectors of musical memorabilia, conducted the interview while sitting in front of one of his prized po se sions: The upright piano on which Lennon composed , and
David Moore Jersey other cla sics for the Beatles' album. Atop the piano stood a pair of circular-rimmed metal gla ses once owned by the famed singer, songwriter, guitarist and social
D.K. Metcalf Jersey activist. Irsay also owns several guitars once played by Lennon (one of which he purchased privately from Lennon's first cousin during the Colts' 2016 trip to London to play the Jacksonville Jaguars) and other valuable Beatles memorabilia, including Ringo Starr's drum kit and the Gibson SG that George Harrison played at the band's final live concert (at San Francisco's Candlestick Park in 1966).To Irsay, who is in the proce s of planning a museum to house his collection of music, sports and culturally significant keepsakes, these aren't just artifacts; they're emotional connections to a pivotal time marked by an explosion of creative genius and a confluence of seismic social and political shifts
Richard Sherman Jersey that still resonate. Lennon's murder, to him, represented the killing of a movement.