20 September 2020
9:38 a.m.
In the deepest part of the Gate Ten lot behind Lucas Oil Stadium, Ty Matheny flipped strips of bacon over a griddle with metal tongs. The sun was out, but the air was chilly. For several hundred feet of the lot, there were no sounds but the wind and the slight movement of gravel beneath a limited amount of shoes. But under the shade cast by the flags above Matheny’s recreational vehicle, the air crackled and filled with a burnt aroma.
Matheny chose the spot all the way in the back partly because he likes the idea of staying out of the way. The lots behind Lucas Oil Stadium are usually raucous. Large audio systems compete with handheld boomboxes playing a mash-up of music. Matheny’s not much into that. He turns on the pregame show until an hour before kickoff, when it’s time to head into the stadium.
He doesn’t have to worry about that much today. He, his brother Donald and his nephew Jacob are the only ones here before another RV arrives with two people and two dogs 15 minutes later. And come game time, he doesn’t even have a ticket to get in.
“It’s definitely different,” he said, with the bacon crisping behind him.
This is his second stop this season. Last week he was in Jacksonville. Now he’s here for the home opener. The former member of the Marine Corps is a lifelong Colts fan and a season-ticket holder since 2012, giving him access to all the Colts home games. Now he’s going to the away games, too. He retired after 27 years of service last year, bought the RV and budgeted $10,000 for 11,000 miles of travel to see every Colts game this year.
“Wherever I’m (able) to go in, I’m going to go in,” Matheny said. “Whoever can go with me, can go with me. If they can’t, they can’t.”
He has to spend conservatively: He doesn’t intend to work again. He’s limiting himself to $150 tickets on the road. He keeps his stops for gas to about two per day, desperately trying to push his typically 9 miles per gallon vehicle for another mile and a half per gallon of gas. All in all it might cost him $7,000 to $9,000 for the whole season. Below budget. Because sometimes he might not go to the stadiums. But he wants to go anyway. Because traveling with the team — even if this isn’t quite what he was expecting — was always his dream.
10:05 a.m.
Two lots down, Bill Cavanaugh and his son Jacob set up two beach chairs around an open bag of Doritos that leaned on a small Bose speaker and a bottle of 1792 Bourbon. The music shuffled with seemingly no direction, switching between pop and country. Jacob munched on a chip and leaned back into his seat.
They were the only group of people on the pavement in their lot, and even their group is trimmed down a good amount. Usually a group of a dozen, including Bill’s high school friends and “a few others we picked up along the way” for Colts home games. Bill has been coming for the past 20 years. Jacob was too young to remember his first game, when Bill brought him into preseason games as a baby.
They were lucky, their tickets drawn in the lottery for Sunday’s game. Bill suspects it’s because the tickets they have are in the lower bowl. And they’ve been coming here for so long, too. They’ve seen many great moments, but nothing stands out more than the 2006 AFC Championship game against the Patriots, when the Colts trailed 21-3 before a field goal cut just a small amount from the deficit at the end of the second quarter.
“We almost left at halftime,” Bill said.
The defining play was a Jeff Saturday fumble recovery in the end zone after a fumble as the Colts tried to put in the tying score. Like everyone else, Bill jumped around and “went crazy,” high-fiving the people sitting around him — some of them the same people he’s sat around for years.
That’s lost on this Sunday. The camaraderie, the relationships formed with people that he probably wouldn’t become friends with if they weren’t hollering at the same field, “living and dying” by the result each Sunday. Tickets are sold in pockets and everyone is spread apart. Everything down to the postgame meal. Going to Acapulco Joe’s after playoff games became routine in 2006. Today, they’ll go home, get a bite to eat and Bill will watch the rest of the slate of football with his son while keeping an eye on his fantasy team.
10:24 a.m.
John Powell stood on the corner of the block by the lot the Cavanaughs camped in their vehicle. He wore a bright yellow vest over his black hoodie and gently waved the orange flag that motioned passersby into the lots of Gate Ten Parking and Events.
This is just another reason to leave the house for Powell. At 68, he just wants to stay active. He’ll make no more than $10 an hour to work three to four hours. He’s been doing it for the past couple of years after 46 years at the same job as a foreman. The money’s just a complement to his retirement pay. What he really likes is the secondhand enjoyment he gets from watching the fans celebrate the gameday.
“You meet a lot of real nice people,” Powell said.
But today the cars mostly fly by as he waves his flag aimlessly. The few cars that do drive by don’t even change their speed as they approach Powell’s corner.
“It’s kind of slow,” Powell said. “You’d be lucky to have anyone in here today.”
Yet Powell’s flag keeps waving. The Gate Ten employees around the corner hope that it’s still just early. More people will come closer to gametime. But this time last year, the lots were in a different place. And Powell had a lot more people to meet.
10:44 a.m.
Abdiel Naggy panned his iPhone in a circle in front of the Peyton Manning statue, catching video of the surroundings of the stadium they were about to enter.
Abdiel and his wife Elizabeth are Minnesota Vikings fans living in California. They try to go to two games each year, and when they saw that Indianapolis would have fans inside the stadium, Abdiel acted immediately. He bought tickets, but they were canceled after capacity was reduced. He went on Vivid Seats and purchased four seats for the two of them.
It cost him $1,400. But the timing works perfectly. The Vikings play in Minnesota next week, so Abdiel and Elizabeth will stay in Indianapolis for a few days, travel to Minnesota for the game next week and then go back home to California.
They’ve seen lots of heartbreak in their time as Vikings fans, Elizabeth joked. But it’s helped them get around. They’ve seen games at Lambeau Field, the old Coliseum in Los Angeles and now Lucas Oil Stadium. Before they headed inside, they took one last look at the statue and snapped a photo.
10:57 a.m.
Two blocks down from the North gate of Lucas Oil Stadium, Marty Bacon thrust through the heavy doors of Slippery Noodle Inn and observed the three sets of tables where diners set up in the hours before the game. The wind that broke through the open doorway knocked over a cardboard cutout.
The inside of the restaurant is dark, and there are X’s across unusable tables in three separate, nearly-empty inside rooms.
“We got our answer to the million-dollar question,” Bacon, Slippery Noodle’s general manager, said. “People are watching the game from home.”
The bar has been open only for a little while since closing in March due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Since then, they’ve been “walking a fine line between being responsible and being profitable.” They reopened doors when live music was allowed back, and for a while it looked fine until demonstrations downtown caused damage to the restaurant.
The owner had them covered by insurance, and the restaurant received a Payment Protection Plan loan and an additional $8,000 for aid to music venues. But between the regulations and the setup of his restaurant, he can’t operate this way and continue to stay open. Slippery Noodle Inn doesn’t just have to follow restaurant regulations of 50% capacity outside, but it also needs to keep its live music outside and its bar area at 25% capacity.
Restaurants can turn over tables in 90 minutes. At Slippery Noodle Inn, people come for the music and camp out at their tables until game time — or longer. The best chance of a successful day is by filling the place with as many people as is allowed, which on a game day last year would require some standing room only.
This morning offered hope at an outlier among the past couple of months, and around 11 a.m. there’s still a possibility that in the next hour his bar could be flooded with more people. Even so, it’s not looking good.
“We can’t make a living on this,” Bacon said.
Bacon leaned back in his chair. He’s not trying to be negative, he’s just being realistic. He’s a large man, about 6-3. He sipped on his iced tea sunk down in his chair, making himself smaller. He took off his jacket, revealing a thick blue undershirt. An employee bent down next to him and asked how many kegs he should fetch from upstairs.
“All of them,” Bacon said.
In 15 minutes, the musician will start playing. Perhaps then the beer will start flowing.
11:11 a.m.
After he was done setting up all of the wires connected to his amplifier, Gordon Bonham cracked open his black guitar case, revealing what looked more like an over-sized violin. This is how the electric guitars used to be made, he explained. It elicits the sound as the design of the instrument intended.
“I’ve had this for about 15 years,” he said.
Bonham will perform the Blues for Sunday’s festivities on the short black stage in the far-right corner of Slippery Noodle Inn. He’s a long-time friend of Bacon’s and a popular name in Blues music around Indianapolis. His last gig was March 11 at this same bar. In the meantime, he joked he wore out the porch swing outside the front of his house by spending much of his time off out there plucking his guitar.
He’s gotten by fine, he said. Bacon interjected, cautioning that his friend is more positive than he is. Bonham didn’t make any money during the pandemic closures, after all. He did write about 15 songs though, producing them in his home studio (his living room) on a recorder fashioned from the digital component of a movie camera.
His wife wondered when the pandemic didn’t offer much hope of him booking a gig what he would do during the time off.
“Honey, it’s just another day at the office with the Blues,” he said to her.
“What a great title,” she replied.
So, he wrote it. Now, he’s playing in front of a group of people going about their game day experience far from the usual. He’ll try to mix the new song in, the lyrics all too familiar.
Ain’t got no work
Can’t see my friends
I’m out of money, feels like the end
Won’t let me out, I’m running low on booze
It’s just another day at the office with the Blues.
11:20 a.m.
Just a section over and adjacent to the door right outside of Slippery Noodle Inn, the mood is far more cheery. Dwight Young works for GE, and through connections with suppliers he met a friend with a set of 14 tickets, eight of which he got to keep with the reduced capacity. Young let him know he wanted to go to the game this weekend, and he brought along two friends: Chris Thompson and Shawn Pippin. It’s Thompson’s first time at Lucas Oil Stadium. It’s Pippin’s first NFL game, period.
“My man’s taking care of me,” Pippin said enthusiastically.
None of them are Colts fans. Though Pippin roots for the Vikings. Young’s a Raiders fan and has come to Lucas Oil Stadium several times, including last year when Oakland finally won. Thompson doesn’t have an NFL team he roots for, he just likes Lamar Jackson, the Ravens quarterback and former Heisman trophy winner from the three friends’ hometown university, Louisville.
While sipping beers, they wonder: Will they pump crowd noise into the stadium? It’s a little unnatural, Thompson argues, but Young said it adds some normality to a big play.
“At least we’re watching sports,” Thompson said. They all agree. They continue to sip their beer and laugh.
11:38 a.m.
A group smirks and call out for “Spidey” as they pass a man in a Spider-Man suit standing on the corner of the sidewalk across the street from the stadium’s North gate. He introduces himself as “The Amazing Spider-Man,” but beneath the cloth bodysuit, Gralan Lax scrunches his face.
He’s a street performer trading photos for tips outside the stadium. Nobody’s dropped anything in his white bucket with a printed-out five-dollar bill taped to the front. He’s only been here 15 minutes, and the most interaction he’s had was with the group who found his act amusing but didn’t stop their stride.
He doesn’t mind. He wouldn’t charge them anything anyway. He just takes what people can give, if they have what it takes to give it. He’s been doing this for eight years and is a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran. It’s easiest in his hometown of Indianapolis where the only rule is he can’t cross over the street onto Colts property, but he travels all over.
He mostly hits area colleges like Notre Dame, Purdue and Indiana. Saturday he was in Louisville, where the area around it typically draws a sellout crowd heading into the stadium. Days like that he can snap photos with “a couple hundred people.” He also travels to Chicago (for MLB and Lollapalooza), Cincinnati and St. Louis (for MLB and NFL), and locally he’ll hit the auto racing venues, too.
Sometimes he’ll attend as a member of a group. He has a friend who dresses as Iron Man. There’s a Thor. A Batman. This is a smaller event, but something like the Big Ten Championship this winter might cause the “Avengers” to assemble.
Sunday, Lax is not looking for anything in particular. But the area does seem a lot more quiet.
“I just want a lot of fans to come out,” Lax said. “I gain nothing personally from it.”
4:11 p.m.
After the game, Joanna Jockish waited near the door of the Huntington Lobby area with her brother, Chris, beaming a smile beneath her mask. The Colts won, for one. And Jockish wasn’t even supposed to be here. Her ticket wasn’t picked in the lottery this week and she expected her 300-game home game streak to come to an end. But when Colts owner Jim Irsay heard of her story in IndyStar, he invited her and her brother as his guests, and seated them in a suite with about 10 others to keep her streak alive.
It’s only Jockish’s second time in a suite. Her usual seats are in section 613, high enough where she can see every corner of the stadium. The suite didn’t give that same vantage point. You’re closer to the action, so you see how fast the players are, how big they are. But up higher, you see the full play. “I sometimes had to ask, ‘Did he catch that?’” she said. But there’s a social aspect to being in a suite. And, of course, there’s the food, which Chris tried to sample most of.
She chatted with a parent from her school and a few others, but only during the breaks in action. She didn’t want to miss a play.
They still don’t know if their tickets have been picked for next week. But Jockish would likely still tell people that her streak is alive even if they’re not. She would be there if she could be. And she’s anxiously hoping that she will be. But none of that is in her control. She strode out of the stadium with her brother by her side.
“I know how fortunate I was to go, and I don’t want to take anyone else’s opportunity away,” Jockish said. “So we’ll see. We have our fingers crossed.”
Follow IndyStar reporter Michael McCleary on twitter @mikejmccleary.
Source: indystar.com