By Chris Schumerth | @ChrisSchumerth
Sports Capital Journalism Program
PASADENA, Calif. — Brad Bainbridge was laid off from his job last July. Now an Indianapolis resident and a longtime Indiana University football and basketball season ticket holder — with the exception of a couple stretches of his adult life living in North Carolina and California since graduating in 1988 – Bainbridge starts a new job on Tuesday.
Between those milestones, there was a football season for the ages, leading to Indiana’s cathartic 38-3 Rose Bowl triumph over Alabama. Bainbridge was here for the College Football Playoff quarterfinal courtesy of flight miles racked up over the years and a former roommate who hosted him in Orange County.
Indiana’s unprecedented 14-0 season helped Bainbridge endure the unexpected time without a job. “ IU football’s been really something I look forward to on the weekends, to be honest with you, because, when you’re looking for a job, you’re applying for two, three, four, five, six jobs a day, and there is no weekend from that, you know what I mean?” he was saying. “You wake up and do that on Saturday, you wake up and do that on Sunday.”
Bainbridge is in the stands on New Year’s Day, waiting for a moment that many loyal Indiana season-ticket holders through the generations thought might never arrive. The emotions are not unlike those of so many thousands of others thinking of absent friends or parents or spouses or classmates who shared all those disappointments and the occasional happy Saturdays in Bloomington.
His voice cracks with emotion as he talks, and not just because of the uncertainty he has endured during the past few months. Bainbridge doesn’t remember exactly which game or year was his first in Bloomington as his family did not have season tickets during his youth, but he first attended a game at Memorial Stadium during the 1970s, and he associates his early games with his father, who he lost in 2008.
”The amazing transition or transformation of the team is well documented,” he says, “but to think about all the years, even back not that long ago where I couldn’t get anybody to go to the game with me, and I would just go by myself, and I would have an empty seat right next to me…The complete transformation of people, showing up to the home games early, staying, most of them staying through halftime until the end of the game, unless it’s a complete blowout versus going to the games when I would be one of the first people in there 30 minutes before the game, and the stadium being half empty if we were in the lead or not after halftime because it wasn’t about football, it was about the social gathering.”
Bainbridge came into Rose Bowl Stadium wearing the same shirt as he’d wore all season to honor his superstitions, but he was far from by himself for this one. He and ten other family members and friends braved the early-morning tailgates with the muddy shoes from the rain to show for it.
As for the game? ”You hear the media that doubts IU all the time,” Bainbridge said. “And I think there’s a little bit of programming in our brains that we might not do it or whatever. And I think we have to think differently about it.”
Dave Platt is a 1973 Indiana graduate and retired Carmel High School teacher and coach who was thinking differently about it. He and his family made the trip west and got to their seats overlooking the corner of one of the end zones early, just as Bainbridge did. Platt was a high school student the last time the Hoosiers played in the Rose Bowl, and he remembers the end of that 1967 season for a very specific family detail. Indiana was playing Purdue at the end of the regular season in the Old Oaken Bucket game. The Hoosiers hosted it that season, but it was Purdue who came into the game in first place in the Big Ten with a trip to Pasadena on the line.
“My dad promised us our family would get our first color television, because back then everybody had black and white, if we went to the Rose Bowl,” Platt explained. “And we beat Purdue, went to the Rose Bowl, and got our color TV.”
Platt didn’t need a color TV this year, but there was a surprise from that 1967 team on the plane. “IU’s star quarterback, Harry Gonso, that year, was on our flight coming down here for this trip, so it was great to, you know, chat with him for a couple of minutes,” Platt said before IU earned its rematch with Oregon, 23-0 winner over Texas Tech in the Capital One Orange Bowl. Platt plans to be in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta for that one, too, next Friday night.
Gonso was not the Platts’ only celebrity omen. “Mendozas were right next to us!” Dave’s daughter, Maggie, said. “Seated…right across the aisle.”
It had been Maggie who, having been disappointed and deterred by the price of secondary-market tickets for last year’s first-round playoff game at Notre Dame, took action right after Indiana beat Ohio State, 13-10, in the Big Ten Championship on December 6. “While the team was celebrating on the field,” Maggie explained, “I booked the Airbnb that I knew I wanted. I had already scoped out every single city (for the potential playoff run) and which AirBnb I wanted.”
Also at the game with Maggie and her father were Maggie’s sister, Jody, and Jody’s husband, Dustin Smith. The couple earned master’s degrees from Indiana but don’t get to football games in Bloomington as often because they now live in Northern Kentucky. Maggie makes the trip from Indianapolis. To make this trip, the Smiths relied on childcare from Smith’s parents while they attended the Rose Bowl.
Jody wore her mother’s red IU jacket that used to occupy another of the four family season tickets. While the family all agreed Bev would have definitely made a Rose Bowl trip had she been given the opportunity, she passed away in 2017 with the family missing the home game against Wisconsin that season because they were with her in the hospital.
How did the Platts and the Smiths avoid the secondary market for this year’s Rose Bowl? “We (had) to apply,” Maggie explained. “Once (Indiana) knows who all has applied, it goes by priority points. Priority points are gained throughout the years from being season ticket holders, making donations, all sorts of different ways you get priority points, so then what we understand is then everybody is seated based on priority points.”
Though the Platt family cheers for Indiana during the winter, too, as their grandfather, Joe Platt, was a team captain of the 1938 men’s basketball team and a member of the 1935-36 Big Ten champions, the family’s priority points have mostly been built up from their football allegiance. “It’s much easier to get to the games,” Maggie says, “especially when we were little kids growing up. You can’t get to a Tuesday night basketball game nearly as easily. It wasn’t a very good, like, monetary investment. Football tickets were always pretty cheap.”
Maggie, who chose to attend Anderson University, has been joining her father for games in Bloomington since 1987 when she was two years old. For the Rose Bowl game, she wore a red-and-white shirt and an IU hat, a combination that is required for Maggie even in the heat of early-season contests, as she navigated through her own successful battle with melanoma before her mother’s passing.
“My dad made me go to a doctor because of being at an IU game and seeing a spot on my arm,” she remembered.
A Rose Bowl victory? Sure, and on the other side of financial stress, family loss, and a cancer diagnosis. The stuff of life, with the unexpected bonus of a sunset reflected on the San Gabriel Mountains.