From Colts, Pacers and Unigov, Jim Morris was benevolent wizard behind curtain for Indy

INDIANAPOLIS – Jim Morris was the man you didn’t see, the benevolent wizard behind the curtain, not just one of the nicest people in Indianapolis – though he was – but one of the most important in Indianapolis.

Name a sports team – Colts, Pacers, Fever – and Jim Morris played a role in bringing them here, keeping them here or both.

Name an event – Super Bowl, Final Four, NBA All-Star Game – and Jim Morris was pulling levers behind the scenes to bring it here, make it special, or both.

Jim Morris was someone you didn’t hear from, didn’t hear about, didn’t know. But he advised the most important people in town, and cared about the most vulnerable.

Jim Morris deserves plaques in multiple Halls of Fame and a statue downtown. His impact on sports around here cannot be overstated or even completely understood, because he did what he did when you weren’t looking. He was the consensus-builder working rooms or phones, though he preferred to conduct his business in person. He’d grab a table at University Club just north of Downtown or at Meridian Hills Country Club on the northside, where servers knew his name and he knew theirs. They’d bring Morris his bowl of French onion soup, and he’d thank them by name. And they’d respond in kind:

You’re welcome, Mr. Morris.

He deserved this story long before today – Saturday, July 13, in the year of our Lord 2024 – but he wouldn’t let me write it. Not while he was alive. He didn’t want the attention.

Not his style.

Pacers, civic leader Jim Morris dies:'No one loved Indiana & Indianapolis more than Jim'

How Jim Morris changed my life

Jim Morris, who died Saturday at age 81, changed my life. That makes me one of, oh, tens of thousands of people around here.

Most of the lives Morris changed, they’ve been lived by people who don’t know his impact, probably don’t even know his name. Morris didn’t drive the bulldozers that helped build those outdoor basketball courts around town, and he didn’t want his name on a sign next to the picnic areas where people rested after games. But he urged city leaders to OK the permits, and he rallied the financial support to pay for them.

Morris didn’t prepare or deliver meals for Second Helpings – more than 4,000 a day, sent to 85 not-for-profit groups around Central Indiana. But he wrote big checks to help pay for them.

Morris wasn’t just a sports hero in this town, but a hero. And not just in this town, or even this state. Think larger.

Think: United Nations World Food Program, headquartered in Rome. Morris was the executive director there from 2002-07, leveraging his access to important people – think: Popes and U.S. presidents and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan – to try to combat famines.

Morris has spoken before Congress and been interviewed by CSPAN and met with local people around town, inviting them to lunch, even in his later years when he wasn’t healthy enough to drive. His beloved wife Jackie would drop him off, then pick him up later.

Morris met with me several times. His idea. Why? He said he wanted to get to know me. Real reason? He wanted to recruit me into his army of Indianapolis ambassadors. Understand, he never said those words. Never even suggested it. Jim Morris was sly like that, sneaky, wonderful. He’d sit down, order his French onion soup, drink his water, ask about yourself, fend off questions about his own magnificent life, and somehow drop just enough morsels of what the human spirit can accomplish – slowly, with no eagerness, like someone was extracting one of his teeth – that you wanted to copy him.

Have lunch with Jim Morris, and you left more in love with Indianapolis than you thought possible, and wanting to change the world. That was his gift, his brilliance, his quiet leadership that helped build the U.N. World Food Program, created in 1961, into an organization that was awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. Morris was long gone by then, back in Indianapolis, advising folks big (think: Indiana governors) and small (think: Indiana sports writers), inspiring them, inspiring us, inspiring me.

Jim Morris has a leadership program named in his honor, the International Center’s James T. Morris Global Leadership Series.

Last time I spoke with Jim – he let me call him that – it was a month ago. I was writing a story about the Aspire House, a beautiful community initiative on the near-northwest side, a neighborhood where drugs are sold and guns are fired and people are homeless. The Aspire House is the brainchild of former Butler volleyball coach Sharon Clark, the winningest coach in Butler volleyball history and a fierce community activist. In both those roles she came to meet Jim Morris.

Jim was drawn to people like Sharon Clark, a flame seeking the most beautiful moths, their connection one I found out after asking Sharon about her community activism. She mentioned having a mentor.

Oh? I remember asking. Who’s that?

“Jim Morris,” she said.

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Jim Morris helped

To his dying day, Jim Morris was advocating for IUPUI, now called IU Indy. He helped create the school in 1969. He also helped create Unigov, the unique city-county partnership between Indianapolis and Marion Country, in 1970. To the end Morris was trying to raise funds for a new gym for IUPUI.

He was a vice president of the Pacers, a trustee at IU, the U.S. representative to UNICEF. He was a political conservative, chief of staff to Indy Mayor Richard Lugar from 1967-73, but was so reasonable – so influential, so respected – he was given the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award by Democratic President Barack Obama in 2016. But he loved all causes in Indianapolis, the smaller the better.

Last time we talked, I called him about Sharon Clark. Toward the end I asked him: How many people do you know? How much time do you have? This is a man who helped the development of Market Square Arena in 1974, who helped create the Indiana Sports Corp. in 1979, who helped get the Indianapolis Zoo going at White River State Park in 1988.

Note that word in there, a word I’m just now realizing I wrote three times:

Helped.

Jim Morris helped. That’s how he saw himself. If he saw himself as a leader, he never said that. He just wanted to help.

“Beyond Jim’s truly amazing record of selfless service and transformative accomplishments, I’ll most remember his kindness, civility and relentless efforts to bring all kinds of different people together,” says former IU athletic director Fred Glass, a civic powerhouse in his own right. “Like so many, I was fortunate to have Jim as a friend and mentor.”

When I called Jim last month to ask about another of his mentees, to ask about Sharon Clark, I finally asked those two questions of a man who had worked for UNICEF, the World Food Bank, the United Nations, a mayor: How much time do you have? How many people do you know?

He turned the conversation away from him.

“We’re blessed to have so many people who love this city,” he told me, and proceeded to name names. Leaders of food banks and outreach programs and churches and homelessness initiatives. City politicians on both sides of the political aisle. High school coaches. University presidents. He wasn’t talking about himself, but everyone else.

Jim then told me about his church, Second Presbyterian, and the young pastor there, Chris Henry.

“You’d really like him,” he told me. “You should set up a meeting with him.”

That was Jim, connecting people to the end. When I sent an email to Chris Henry – when Jim Morris gently suggested a leap of faith, I said: How high? – he wrote me back:

“Jim – God’s gift to us all, and the most persistent connector of good people I’ve ever known – also sent a note after your conversation in the hopes that we might be in touch,” Henry wrote.

That was Jim Morris, making suggestions on one end, following through on the other, helping to achieve goals as large as Super Bowl XLVI at Lucas Oil Stadium and as small as a meeting between two strangers.

“Every city could use more people like Sharon Clark,” Jim Morris told me last month, during our final phone call.

Every city could use more people like Jim Morris, too. But Indianapolis was the only city on earth to get so lucky.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.

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