Former Baltimore Colts defensive tackle Art Donovan was always one of my father's favorite former players. It didn't take long before he was one of my favorites as well. The Hall of Famer was hilarious. At 86, he's still going strong. Donovan was part of the Colts fantastic defensive line of late '50s. Donovan teamed with fellow Hall of Famer Gino Marchetti, Gene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, and Don Joyce to help lead the Colts to NFL titles in 1958 and 1959. The 1958 Championship Game against the New York Giants is widely considered the greatest game ever played. In 1977, Donovan saw his '58 Championship ring for the last time. He was vacationing with his wife Dottie at a Hong Kong hotel when the ring was lost, seemingly forever.
In the late 1980s, police said that a jeweler called Donovan and offered to make a deal, but Donovan refused to buy something that already belonged to him. Fast forward to 2011, when one of Donovan's friends spotted the ring listed for $25,000 on Craigslist and called another friend, retired Howard County police officer Peter Wright. He contacted Donovan and the police, who set up a sting, where Wright found the ring, engraved with the defensive tackle's name and uniform number. Police said that the person that tried to sell the ring, identified as Charles Ice II, will not be charged with a crime. Ice told detectives that the ring had been purchased years earlier by his wife's now-deceased husband, and that Ice didn't know that it had been stolen.
Football great and ring, finally reunited, are doing great.
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