Andrea Kremer talks Real Sports access to Jim Irsay: ‘When he said he was all in, he wasn’t kidding.’

HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel is coming to an end after 29 seasons, but the show is going out in strong fashion. On one of the featured segments on Tuesday’s episode (debuting at 10 p.m. ET/PT on the linear HBO channel and also available to stream on Max), correspondent Andrea Kremer has a rare long-form interview with Indianapolis Colts’ owner Jim Irsay.

This piece is a remarkable interview on several fronts. It includes Irsay being exceptionally candid about his battles with addiction, his complicated relationship with his father (who also struggled with alcohol addiction), and the 2013 death of his girlfriend from an overdose. It also has some very candid remarks on how he feels about a 2014 driving under the influence charge, with him commenting on that with the surprising line of “I am prejudiced against because I am a rich white billionaire. If I’m the ordinary guy down the block, they’re not pulling me in.”

That’s understandably drawn much of the pre-run attention for this feature. But the piece as a whole is worth consideration, and what Kremer accomplishes with it is impressive. She spoke to AA Tuesday on this, and described how she had been trying to land Irsay for a longform interview since at least 2011.

Kremer said this actually came back to mind while she was reviewing her Real Sports files (she’s been a correspondent there since 2007) ahead of the show’s end. And that led to her finding a 2011 email on this and reaching back out to Irsay. She said the Colts’ PR team had always passed on her requests to Irsay, but that hadn’t led to anything until this point, partly thanks to the challenges of the amount of access needed for a Real Sports feature.

“They never said no, they just always said it isn’t the right time. And every time Jim would say something, with the Dan Snyder thing or anything that would come out, I would always shoot them off an email of ‘Is it the time? He’s talking.’ But what we need for Real Sports is vastly different than making a comment to a local writer or some national writer about some issue that’s going on in the league.”

Kremer said that led to her making a pitch to meet with Irsay himself during one of his music tour stops (involving him playing in a band with celebrity musicians, bringing along his incredible music collection with more than 400 guitars and other notable pieces of music history, and offering tickets to it all for free) near her.

“What really happened, after me just staying on it for a while, I said ‘Can I just meet with Jim myself?’ And the Jim Irsay Collection, his tour, his band, was in the city near where I live, and I got them to agree to let me meet with him in person. And obviously I’ve known him all this time. But I always just feel that when trying to get a booking, nobody’s going to feel as passionate about it as you are.”

And she said Irsay proved incredibly receptive once she was able to talk with him in person.

“So I go meet Jim at his concert. I go in basically with the attitude of ‘What can I answer for you? I’m not looking for anything definitive from you today, but what can I answer for you that may be a concern, and let’s talk it out.'”

“I go in the room, and Jim greets me very warmly, and he’s basically like ‘I’m all in.’ I’m like ‘You don’t have to give me an answer’ and he’s like ‘I’m all in, I’m all in, whatever you want, you can ask me anything you want, I’m all in.'”

“And I’m looking at his sort of aide-de-camp, his No. 2 guy, like ‘Is this for real?’ And after we leave the room, I say to Pete Ward, ‘Is this going to happen?’ And he’s like ‘If he says it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.’ So that’s how it actually came to be.”

She said she thinks Irsay agreed to that because he’s at peace with who he is and where he’s at.

“And without actually speaking for him, I think he’s in a place in his life where he really does believe, where it’s more apparent to him than ever how surprising it is that he’s even alive. And he’s going to live his life, and he’s going to say the things and do the things that he wants to do. And he’s not going to be concerned with public pressure, what people might think. He’s going to speak his truth.”

Kremer said this also feels like Irsay living out what he and the Colts are trying to do through a “Kicking The Stigma” initiative.

“He and the Colts started this initiative called ‘Kicking The Stigma,’ and it’s a campaign to try to destigmatize substance abuse issues, mental health issues. And I think he’s trying to walk the walk, like ‘I’m going to talk about my issues, I’m not embarrassed about them.’ I think that’s part of it as well.”

And she said the level of access Irsay provided Real Sports was incredible, including time at his house, time at the ice rink he built there, time around the Colts’ facility and at a game, and time at his concerts, with footage from those starting and concluding the show.

“I’m just glad that it came to be,” Kremer said. “But when he said he was all in, he wasn’t kidding. I give him an immense amount of credit for that, because we got extensive interview time with him, time at his house, time at the facility, time at a game, time at his concert. We had a lot of different scenes with him, and we really appreciated all of his cooperation.”

Beyond the access, Irsay is remarkably open on a number of fronts. That includes discussing his father Bob and his “Ready, fire, aim” reputation that saw him painted as a “loose cannon” by other NFL figures, and the “life during wartime” aspect of becoming the Colts’ GM at 24 under his father (who fired him multiple times, with Irsay saying “****, if I had a dollar for every time I was fired, man,”).

Irsay also talks about how his sister died in a car crash at 14, how his brother was institutionalized thanks to mental health challenges, and how his mother would tell him he should have died rather than his sister, and how his father wouldn’t go to his brother’s eventual funeral. He also talks about someone else’s comment of “Your dad had to die for you to come of age” with “No question. He taught me how to do it and he taught me how not to do it.”

After that, Irsay gets into some of his own messy personal history. He talks about going to rehab at least 15 times, and accidentally overdosing one time and stopping breathing. He says he hasn’t had a drink since 2002, but he describes the challenges he has still has. And he talks about his relationship with Kim Wundrum, who died in 2014 from an overdose in a condo he’d bought her. There, Irsay says “God bless her, she tried and she tried. She said ‘I just can’t wrap my arms around what it takes to be in recovery.'”

And the feature sees Irsay talk about that DUI plea later in 2014 when he was pulled over in Carmel, Indiana. He says he was unable to walk a straight line thanks to hip surgery rather than impairment, and he only pled guilty to a misdemeanor “to get it over with.” That leads to the maybe the most notable comments in the piece, with him saying the aforementioned  “I am prejudiced against because I am a rich white billionaire.” And that sees Kremer ask him if he’s aware how that sounds, and he responds “I don’t care what it sounds like, it’s the truth.”

Kremer had some notable comments to AA on that. First off, she said that while those comments were stunning, she’s experienced stunning moments in interviews before over her long and prolific career.

“You’re talking to someone who’s sat with Bikram Chowdhury, who looked me in the eye and said ‘One drop of my sperm is worth a million dollars.’ And then, when I just looked at him, he repeated it in case I didn’t understand him. So let’s just say I’ve been in those situations where people say things that you just kind of can’t believe.”

She said her decision to ask Irsay if he was aware of how that would be received was a risk, in case he tried to walk it back or end the interview. But she felt it was a risk worth taking to get it on the record that he was making this comment even aware how it might go over.

“In this case, with Jim, I’ve learned over the years that when someone says something that could be considered controversial, when you repeat the words back to them, you take the risk of having them hear it and pull back on it, trying to walk that comment back. But with Jim, it was just more about not questioning that he really believed that, he was very vociferous about that, it was just more along the lines of ‘Do you really understand how this is going to play out?'”

“And clearly he did, because he doubled down on it in our conversation. And it was the one time in our interview that he was really angry. And he was really angry, not at me, but at the recollection of the whole issue. He said it over and over again, really, this was just how he felt. So again, when this is what somebody believes, what they’re saying, and it’s their reality, you’ve got to take them at their word.”

Kremer said overall, she was somewhat surprised at how open Irsay was. But she said it was somewhat unknown how he’d handle this kind of feature, as it was new territory for him.

“A little bit, but that’s because, in all the extensive research we’d done, he had done things for print, but he’d never really done any intensive longform TV newsmagazine. And our experience is what you say in print can be oftentimes vastly different than what you’re going to say when the cameras are on and around you. But that’s not the case with Jim. I think we were a little surprised with some of the things that he chose to say, but I think we asked the appropriate questions.”

“And I think, to his credit, he gave as honest answers as he could give. And again, whether you, the audience, the listener, find that surprising, he says it over and over again, that’s his reality, those are the facts, and he’s sticking to them. But you’re always sort of surprised.”

Kremer said this piece stands out to her for how candid and honest a billionaire NFL owner was willing to be.

“I think the bottom line for me is for someone of his stature, I was very surprised, pleasantly so, that he was that open. You tell me another owner, particularly in the high-profile National Football League, who’s going to speak that openly on camera.”

And she said Irsay came off the same way regardless of if cameras were rolling or not.

“And the other thing that stuck out to me was that I’ve worked with a number of different subjects, and that camera’s on and they’re one way, and the camera’s turned off, and they’re not that way. The way that they are off camera is vastly different, and the way that they treat people. And Jim was just the same; camera on, camera off, camera following him, he’s just the same.”

“And I value that; especially when you spend that much time with someone trying to profile them, if they seem really different when you’re not quote unquote off the record, what are you supposed to make of that? And that was not the case with Jim.”

Another remarkable part of this feature saw Kremer playing Irsay a 1987 interview she conducted with him for NFL Films. She said finding that was incredible, and his reaction to it was amazing. But she was a little reticent to have it put out there in the final product for several reasons, including her very-1980s look. However, lead producer Maggie Burbank and producer Stephen Lorenzo convinced her it was worth it, and she appreciates how it turned out.

“That hair, right? That 80s hair,” she said. “And truthfully, I never anticipated that they would put that in the story, they had to almost convince me. It was like ‘Oh my god, I know we’re approaching the end of Real Sports, but this is going to be the end of my career,’ just joking around and everything. But it turned out to be a pretty seminal moment; from a narrative perspective, it really helped us, but also from a walk down memory lane, he really got emotional.”

Kremer said she only stumbled on that interview recently.

“What ended up happening was, when we’re preparing for a story, we look at anything and everything that we can get our hands on. And I’m sitting there, and I go, ‘Wait a minute, I profiled him. It was one of the first things I ever did on the air for NFL Films.’ So I called them and was just ‘Can you track down this piece for me?'”

“And when I watched this, I couldn’t believe it. And I sent it to my two producers, and I think the subject heading when I sent it to my two producers a couple months ago was ‘This is going to make your day.’ And I just have to laugh at it, right? We were both so young, and starting out so much. But talk about a time capsule, right? The music and the weightlifting, those are two key elements of his story 36 years later.”

She said the reaction it drew from Irsay was amazing.

“When we sat in that room and I showed it to him, he had no idea, he started to cry. His three children, when they were little girls, were all in it. He just started getting very emotional. He couldn’t believe that we found it. …The juxtaposition of what he looked like then and now, I think that’s hard to see. These 36 years have really, really taken a toll on him in every way.”

Kremer said Burbank and Lorenzo deserve incredible credit for the finished piece, as this one was hard to cut down from all the footage they got.

“We had so much material, and that’s a blessing and a curse. Because you need to take the material and turn it into a story. And that was challenging in very many ways. He’s a challenging interview, as you probably note.”

One theme that runs through the piece is music. That includes the opening and closing scenes from Irsay’s concerts, with a perfect concluding track of him playing Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” And his last line in the piece is “Like Elton John, I’m still standing. This train keeps rolling, man.” Kremer said the music discussion was a natural way to tie this all together.

“Music is something that is literally the thread throughout his life,” she said. “We see him as a kid, relatively, playing music in his basement [in the 1987 piece]. And the juxtaposition of that to now ‘You’re on stage with the iconic rock figures, like John Cougar Mellencamp, and Peter Wolf [from The J. Geils Band], and Ann Wilson [from Heart], and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, all these people that now they’re in The Jim Irsay Band, and you’ve got 25,000 people in your concert audience.”

But something that perhaps hits even harder is not on stage. Instead, it’s where Irsay is playing acoustic guitar for Kremer and the Real Sports team. She asks him for a song that sums up his life, and he plays Bob Dylan’s “Shelter From The Storm.”

“It’s really just this thing that’s kept him together. I really thought that one of the more poignant moments was where he’s sitting there playing the guitar for us, and I just said to him ‘What song would typify your life,’ and for him to play Bob Dylan’s ‘Shelter From The Storm,’ boy, that typified his upbringing. From a narrative perspective, I think that typifies the story in a really good way.”

The piece also includes a notable interview with Peyton Manning about his relationship with Irsay over the years, from time with the Colts and beyond. There’s a good line there from Manning of  “Jim can give a run-on sentence as well as anyone in the world.” It also covers Irsay’s extensive music and history collection, including a first edition of the original 1939 Alcoholics Anonymous book, which sees Irsay saying “I am dead in the ground if not for this book.”

And the piece has many more interesting aspects, and is well worth a watch in full. And, as Kremer told AA, it was a good way to end her Real Sports run.

“It’s a meaningful piece because obviously it’s the last Real Sports show with original stories. It was a very very bittersweet day with everybody in the studio; we shot the year-end show, which will air on Dec. 19, and really it’s not only just the end of an era, but I think that as we prove with tonight’s show, the show’s as good as ever. It’s difficult for people to come to grips with the fact that it’s being cancelled, it’s the longest-running show on HBO, but we’re happy to go out as strong as ever.”