Home Game

Hoosier expatriate Cathy Day has moved five times in 10 years–a lifestyle that has cemented her allegiance to the Indianapolis Colts but interfered with her chances at romance.  In 2005, as a 37-year-old single college professor, she felt a profound kinship with the Colts, whose playoff loss to Pittsburgh was as heartbreaking as her fumble-filled life. Day's new book, Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love, scheduled for release this month from Free Press, trace's the team's 2006 football season and the author's concurrent quest for a teammmate.  In this excerpt, she writes of the intangible, powerful hold the men in blue have on her.
By Cathy Day

It’s Sunday, August 20, 2006.

I’ve got four tickets to the Colts’ first home preseason game against Super Bowl runner-ups, the Seattle Seahawks. My dad and I are driving north from Aurora, Indiana, to Batesville to pick up my brother Scott and his wife, Sara. It’s amazingly cool for an August afternoon, and we keep the windows down in his truck. My dad prefers to drive with the radio off, so there’s only the sound of wind and tires on the road. At some invisible point on U.S. 350 North between Dearborn and Ripley counties, in the midst of farm fields and rolling hills and ranch houses with two-acre lawns and Mailpouch Tobacco barns, we leave the Cincinnati TV market and enter the Indianapolis viewing area, which means we pass over from Bengals to Colts Country.

When we pull into his driveway, my brother Scott comes out of the garage. “Just got back from church,” he says. He looks at his watch. “If we wanna get there in time to see the team stretching and stuff, we should leave in about a half hour, forty-five minutes tops.” He holds up his bottle of beer, wrapped in a blue kozy. “Wanna beer?”

Dad and I step into his garage. Half of it is taken up by a 1976 Jeep CJ5 my brother is rebuilding. The other half is taken up by the flotsam of life as a Midwestern man: his workbench, sawhorses, rolling Craftsman tool boxes (the ones with the drawers), kerosene heaters, lawn mower, weed whacker, drill, air compressor, impact wrench, fishing poles, trash barrel, and, of course, an old refrigerator full of beer. There’s a radio on, tuned in to Q95 in Indianapolis, and Bob Seger is still singing about love in the summertime.

You need to know this: everything I learned about drinking, smoking, sports, and shooting the shit, I learned by hanging out in the garage with the men in my family, a decidedly masculine space I preferred over the domestic claustrophobia inside.

My dad and brother start talking Colts: How will the team fare without Edgerrin James? How good is this Joseph Addai? Was Adam Vinatieri worth the money? My back is hurting, so I sit on an upside-down, five-gallon bucket.

My dad gestures at me with his beer. “You know Scott, Cathy’s really picked up a lot of Colts knowledge in the last year.”

My brother eyes me skeptically. “So, what year did Peyton break Marino’s record?”

“I think it was 2004,” I say. “He threw 49 touchdowns in a single season.”

“Yeah, but do you know who caught that 49th pass?” Scott asks smugly.

I smile. “Brandon Stokely.”

“Whoa!” My dad and brother clink beer bottles.

Another thing I learned in the garage: If you want to be taken seriously by guys, memorize some sports trivia. It works every time.

Why do we follow one team over another? Why do we marry the people we do? So much depends on the mundane practicalities of our lives: where we grow up, where we go to college, where we work. We inherit our parents’ predilections in both love and football as surely as we inherit their DNA and political party. And their predilections are a product of the mundane practicalities of their lives and their parents’ lives.

The truth is that I grew up a Bears fan. The reasons are anthropological and geographic; when my dad’s dad bought the family’s first television in the 1950s, it got one station—out of South Bend. So my father grew up in Peru, watching Notre Dame and the Bears, and he taught his children to do the same. Like almost everyone in northern Indiana, my family had followed the Bears for several generations before the Colts defected from Baltimore in 1984. And then, just two years after Indiana got its first NFL team, my family moved to the suburbs of Cincinnati, a Bengals TV market. You couldn’t watch the Bears or the Colts in that town unless it was a nationally televised game.

I doubt that my family would have ever paid any attention to the Colts had it not been for one thing: When my brother Scott graduated from Ball State University in 1995, he got a job in Indianapolis instead of Cincinnati, although he applied for jobs in both cities. He’d followed the Colts in college, in the pre–Manning-and-Dungy days of coach Ted Marchibroda, running back Marshall Faulk, and quarterback Jim Harbaugh. If my brother had been hired by a Cincinnati company instead, I think that his new, still wobbly Colts mold might not have set. In which case, this whole story I’m telling might have turned out very differently.

Three years later, in 1998—Peyton Manning’s rookie year for the Colts—Scott changed jobs and moved from Indy to Shelbyville, Indiana, a town about an hour and a half from my parents. The Colts went 3-13 that year, and it wasn’t such a hot year for my brother either. During the week, Scott went to work, came home, and watched TV or spent time in the garage, rebuilding a 1979 GMC Jimmy. On Saturdays, he watched TV or worked on the Jimmy. But Sundays were all about the Indianapolis Colts. Most weeks, my parents and/or my sister would drive from Aurora to Shelbyville to watch the game with him. They made that drive because they loved him, because they knew he was lonely, and because they knew that these games, these gatherings, were what he looked forward to all week.

In 1999, when I came home for Christmas, I was invited to take part in the Sunday ritual. Understand: this was a Very Big Deal, this invitation. That year—that glorious year—the Colts were on a roll. By the time I showed up, week 16 of the regular season, the Colts were 12-2 and they hadn’t lost a game since early October, way back in week 5. Scott was euphoric, but worried that my presence might ruin the Colts’ chances. Every week, he did the same things, wore the same clothes, drank the same beer, watched the game with the same people—and they’d been winning, week after week. When I arrived in Shelbyville with my family, Scott told me, “I love you, Cathy, but if they start losing, would you mind … I don’t know … going for a walk or something?” The Colts defeated the Browns that day. It was a close game, 29-28. I missed a lot of it, banished to the garage or the kitchen every time the Browns surged or the Colts struggled. I thought it was kind of weird, and I huffed and puffed a little every time he ordered me out of the room, but I did it.

Why do we follow one team and not another? Yes, it’s about mundane practicalities, about geography and TV markets, but it’s also about love. That’s how my family and I became Colts fans. My brother loves them. We love my brother. And so, we love the Colts.

My brother drives us up I-74 to Indianapolis in the late afternoon sun. We pass by a few cars flying Colts flags from their rear windows, and we honk. Sara is sitting in the back seat with me, and I’m telling her about my last trip to the Hoosier Dome, I mean, the RCA Dome, in 2000. Scott had gotten four tickets to a Christmas Eve home game with the Vikings, and Dad, Mom, Scott, and I went. It was a single-digit day, and we ran through the parking lot, past the parka-clad tailgaters huddled around their charcoal grills. It was my first NFL football game. I walked out of the gray-and-white Indiana winter, up the concrete walkway, and into Technicolor green warmth. I didn’t know much about the Colts then, but the game itself thrilled me. I cheered and shook my fists and stomped. It was like dancing drunk at a wedding, like being wrapped up in sound and light and color and movement.

That season, almost everyone had written off the Colts’ playoff chances, but if they won their last three games, they had a shot. They’d won the previous two, and that day, they won the third—and decidedly. 31-10. Edgerrin James’ parents sat two rows behind us, and we took their picture, like they were movie stars. The crowd stuck around that day long after the game to celebrate the Colts’ ascension to the playoffs. They lost their next contest, a wildcard game with the Dolphins, but on that day, December 24, 2000, anything was possible.

I’ve come all the way from Pittsburgh for this game. We’ve got amazing seats in the 12th row right behind the Colts sideline. My brother walks down the aisle as far as he can to take pictures of the players warming up. I’ve got that goofy fan feeling; oh my god, that’s really Peyton Manning stretching out his triceps. There’s Dallas Clark and those are his amazing thighs. That’s Tony Dungy, and those are really his shoes!

By the time the Colts take the field, the RCA Dome is almost at full capacity, and the crowd goes crazy to welcome them. This is the first time they’ve run onto this field since they lost to the Steelers here in January, and everyone seems to want to buoy the team with their support. Then it hits me: everyone around me is wearing blue and white. Everyone around me is a Hoosier. Everyone around me loves the Colts. It’s the way I felt when I first arrived in Indiana from Pittsburgh, relieved and joyful. I’ve spent most of my adult life living in self-imposed exile, an Indiana expatriate, but at this moment, I’m home. I feel connected—albeit tenuously—to tens of thousands of people, all occupying the same space. We’re wearing the same thing, singing the same songs, screaming the same cheers. I belong to something. I am not alone. It’s not a family. It’s a tribe, and I never realized until now how much I needed this. Sometimes, during the last year in Pittsburgh, I’ve seen a car go by with an Indiana license plate, or I’ve seen someone wearing a Purdue University sweatshirt, and I’ve resisted the urge to walk right up to them and say, “Hi! Are you from Indiana? Me, too!” How is this possible? All I wanted at 17 was to escape Indiana by any means necessary, and twenty years later, I’m in a very large room with 50,000 Hoosiers, and I don’t ever, ever want to leave.