By Wade Coggeshall
BROWNSBURG — Bill and Nancy Shupe know football.
Just how much? Bill played at Ben Davis. They have a son who played at Arizona State and with the Denver Broncos for a short time. He’s now a referee in the PAC-10 conference.
“We’re a big football family,” Nancy said. “It goes way back.”
Bill and Nancy also have been Colts season ticket holders since the organization came to Indianapolis in 1984. That has included both good times and bad. With the latter, Nancy can remember games where her brother-in-law would wear a brown bag on his head.
“We’ve sat through all the football coaches,” she said. “It’s just so exciting to finally be winning after enduring those 1-15 seasons.”
But endure they did. Indeed, the Shupes are no fair-weather fans.
“We would go to the Ben Davis game on a Friday night (to watch our son play), hop a morning plane and fly to Phoenix to watch our other son play,” Nancy said. “His games were always at night, so we’d catch a red-eye flight back to Indianapolis to watch the Colts game Sunday.
“We only did that a couple times. We were much younger then.”
That may be, but the Shupes don’t consider themselves too old to go to the Super Bowl this year. They never thought the Colts would make it in 2007, the year they defeated the Chicago Bears for the title. In fact, the Shupes had already made plans to visit their middle son in Hong Kong, where he was living at the time.
“We did stay home and change our tickets by two days so we could watch (the Super Bowl),” Nancy said.
Even being a season ticket holder, Super Bowl tickets are tough to come by. Because their original season tickets were in friends’ names, the Shupes don’t have the seniority they actually deserve. Their current seats only go back 10 to 12 years. That gave them about 40 chances for Super Bowl tickets in the lottery the Colts conducted.
“Out of zillions,” Bill clarified.
Instead they got Super Bowl tickets on Stub Hub.
“We decided we were going to go,” Nancy said. “It’s something we’ve always wanted to do.”
Bill was confident the Colts could make it to the big game this season.
“The first two games when they came back and won in the second half, it was obvious they were well-disciplined and ready to go,” he said.
And his prediction for the Super Bowl?
“Colts win.”
wade.coggeshall@flyergroup.com
