The Dome Remembered ... From a Personal Point of View

Sept. 24, 2008

DOME PHOTO GALLERY

posted by Will Roleson, Associate Commissioner, Communications and Multimedia

At 10:30 this (Wednesday, Sept. 24) morning, an historic (and in some corners, sad) event occurred in the grand history of sports in the city of Indianapolis.Amid a ceremony with local dignitaries, that's when the button was pushed to start deflating the eight-acre, air-supported fabric roof on the RCA Dome that had highlighted the city's skyline since 1983.

It's the first outward sign that the football stadium/basketball arena/concert hall/monster truck venue will soon be just a memory on the Indy landscape, replaced last month by the mammoth Lucas Oil Stadium one block to the south.

By this coming spring, the western corner of Capitol Avenue and South Street will be nothing more than an empty lot. In its place by 2010 will be an enlarged convention center that will rank among the 20 largest in the country. Plenty memories will remain, however, including 24 seasons of Colts football, four NCAA Men's Final Fours and an NBA All-Star game.

Beyond the great games in the Dome that have been well-publicized - the Colts' come-from-behind victory over the Patriots in the 2007 AFC Championship game and the high school record crowd of more than 41,000 that watched Damon Bailey play in the state basketball title game in 1990, among others - my memories are much more personal.

So, take a stroll down memory lane with me as we bid farewell to the RCA (nee Hoosier) Dome...

I saw my first event at the Dome on January 25, 1992. Of all things, it was a quarter-midget sprint car race ... high-powered mini vehicles screaming around the concrete floor that sat below the old artificial turf. I remember the date specifically because only a couple hours earlier, I had gotten engaged to my long-time girlfriend, who had won the tickets earlier that week on a local radio giveaway.Romantic? Perhaps not, but it apparently didn't cause her any second guesses as we celebrated our 15th anniversary earlier this summer.

Four years later, in the fall of '96, I returned to the dome with my wife and my brother to watch our hometown high school (the undefeated Franklin County High Wildcats face Fort Wayne Wayne in the 4A state football championship game. It was a momentous occasion for the town of Brookville, whose football team had struggled as the now-defunct Brookville High the previous decade. (In fact, the ol' Greyhounds had won only nine games in my four years as a member of the marching band in the late `80s.)

Alas, the unbeaten season was over virtually from the kick-off as FC starting quarterback Wes Gillman suffered a broken leg on the Wildcats' first series of the game, and Wayne went on to win 28-8.

I wouldn't return to the Dome again until after I took the job at the Horizon League in the summer of 2004. In my first year at the League office, I was co-local media coordinator for not one, but two NCAA national championship events in a span of 2 ½ weeks in March and April of 2005.

The NCAA men's first and second rounds saw the NCAA Basketball Committee load the Dome's eight-team bracket with Midwest powers Kentucky, Cincinnati and Big Ten champion Illinois, all of whom brought gigantic crowds that filled every seat with even a glimpse of the court (and some others probably with none!).

The Fighting Illini went on to finish as national runner-up, falling to North Carolina and former Indiana prep standout Sean May in the championship game two weeks later in St. Louis.

Indianapolis hosted its first Women's Final Four just two weeks later, marking the first time the event had been held in a dome. Perennial title contenders Tennessee and LSU were there, as was upstart Michigan State, but it was Baylor, the small Baptist school from Waco, Texas, that took home its first national championship in women's hoops.

One short year later, the Men's Final Four returned to the Circle City for the first time in six years. Entering the national semifinals, the story of the tournament was George Mason University, the Cinderella squad from the Colonial Athletic Association that become the first `mid-major' to reach the Final Four since the tourney was expanded to 64 (now 65) teams in the mid-80s. But the Patriots' history-making season ended in the semifinals at the hands of the Joakim Noah and the University of Florida, which claimed the first of its back-to-back national titles two days later with a victory over UCLA.

Since then, I've been in the Dome for a couple of monster truck shows and two Colts preseason games, but most notably last fall for a football scrimmage between the Hawkeyes and Hoosiers of the Greenwood Bantam Football League. Arranged by a friend of mine, the spirited practice saw my older two sons Noah and Jonah and the rest of the first- and second-graders on cloud nine as they ran up and down the field where their heroes Manning, Harrison, Sanders and Addai had done the same just days before. And, truth be told, the players' parents probably enjoyed the opportunity more than their kids, snapping dozens of pictures and sometimes pretending to be NFL players themselves.

More memories are bound to be made at Lucas Oil Stadium. I'll be there in a week-and-a-half for the annual Circle City Classic college football game, this year matching the Alabama A&M Bulldogs and the Tuskegee (of Tuskegee Airmen fame) University Golden Tigers. Then, in early December, it's the Hartford Hall of Fame Showcase basketball doubleheader pitting Indiana and Gonzaga in one game and Notre Dame versus Ohio State in the other.

In March, the NCAA Men's Basketball Regional will bring four national title hopefuls to Indianapolis vying to advance to the Final Four at Ford Field in Detroit. (And, looking ahead, the Men's Final Four returns in 2010, followed by the Women's Final Four in 2011, and Super Bowl XLVI in 2012.)

So, I'll just pack my RCA Dome memories away and prepare to make new ones to share a couple decades down the road.

So long!