PACERS AND COLTS FINALLY GETTING RESPECT (4-2004)

I’ve never been a big sports fan. Most sports just don’t 
interest me much, and never have. 

Oh, I played some intramural basketball in college. I was 
pretty good at tennis in those days, too. But I’ve 
generally not been athletic enough to play nor interested 
enough to watch.

But I do enjoy watching the Pacers and the Colts whenever 
they’re winning. And the Pacers have been winning quite a 
bit this season. So I’ve been watching. I even went to a 
Pacers game for the first time in 20 years.

Early in my teen years, I often watched NFL football on TV. 
My favorite teams were the Bears, Cowboys, and Packers. But 
I never got into watching basketball. I don’t even think it 
was aired much in those days. And, although I played Little 
League (Once I even got a hit!), I’ve never liked watching 
baseball. It’s just way too boring.

I do remember the old ABA Indiana Pacers and their coach, 
Bobby Leonard. They were tops in their league back in the 
late 1960s and early 1970s. However, there were only eight 
teams in the ABA.

Then, in 1976, the ABA merged with the NBA. Four of the ABA 
teams, including the Pacers, became NBA teams. Indianapolis 
had become a major-league city. But the Pacers struggled in 
their new league.

In fact, they almost didn’t make it past their first 
season. The team was on the verge of folding, but the city 
pulled together and buoyed the Pacers up by selling several 
thousand season tickets during a very unique telethon.

The telethon was hosted by Channel 8 sportscaster, Chet 
Coppock. He was an enthusiastic host who said of the 
grassroots effort, “Something like this just couldn’t 
happen in Chicago.” 

Of course, a few years later, he went on to become a 
sportscaster on a Chicago TV station. Coppock currently 
hosts a national radio sports program.

But the telethon saved the Pacers and they haven’t been 
that close to folding since, even though they had a serious 
dry spell throughout the 1980s. During some of those years, 
they had to bring in popular rock bands to play gigs 
following their home games in order to sell tickets. Nobody 
wanted to buy a ticket to the game just to watch them lose.

But many Indy sports fans were getting interested in the 
new kid on the block. Indianapolis’ status as a major 
league city was enhanced when the Baltimore Colts snuck 
into town in the middle of the night on March 28, 1984. 

But, like the NBA Pacers, the new Indianapolis Colts 
struggled for a long time to put together a winning 
combination. A national sports announcer once quipped that 
“Colts” was actually an acronym for “Count On Losing This 
Sunday.”

But we fair-weather fans of the Colts and the Pacers are 
happy that those days seem to be over, at least for now. 
The Pacers are again in the play-offs, after posting their 
best season in team history and finishing with a record 
that placed them on top of the league.

The recently-announced Colts schedule puts them in front of 
a national TV audience six times, which means they are 
finally starting to get some respect from the networks and 
the NFL. And if the Pacers can do what they are capable of, 
they will also seal their reputation as one of the great 
NBA teams.

Perhaps this is their year to become the world champions of 
basketball.