Wall Street Journal: The Chain-Smoking Rock Star Who Made Indiana Football Hurt So Good
Wall Street Journal by Robert O'Connell
There are a select few ways to become wealthy enough to join the ranks of college football’s most powerful boosters. The late T. Boone Pickens, the chief benefactor for Oklahoma State, built an oil fortune that he dispersed to the Cowboys. Phil Knight, who bankrolls Oregon, turned Nike into an intercontinental empire that transformed the Ducks into a gridiron behemoth.
Then there is Indiana University. The program that opened the season as the losingest team in Division I football history now stands one game away from its first championship—and it hasn’t gotten there via the pursestrings of one of the world’s richest people. In fact, the Hoosiers’ most prominent booster isn’t a tech genius or hedge fund titan.
It’s the guy who wrote “Jack & Diane.”
In a college sports landscape lorded over by billionaires, none other than John Mellencamp—the 74-year-old heartland rocker—has played no small part in Indiana’s rise from laughingstock to the No. 1 team in the country. Year after dismal year, Mellencamp trudged to Hoosiers games on Saturdays. At a time when nobody saw Indiana football as a good investment, he gave $1.5 million to build the team’s practice facility: the John Mellencamp Pavilion.
The facility’s namesake harbored no illusions that his donation might one day turn the downtrodden Hoosiers into the country’s top team. “It was a bunch of down years,” Mellencamp said. “That’s just the way it was.”
That might be understating things. From 1982 to 1991, Mellencamp changed his stage name —from John Cougar to John Cougar Mellencamp to, finally, John Mellencamp—exactly as often as the Hoosiers managed a winning season.
Not that Mellencamp always minded. What he got in exchange for his support was not a championship run but a curious sort of VIP treatment. He had started going to Hoosiers games as a kid, when he lived in Bloomington and his brother was enrolled at the university, and in the years since had come to appreciate a perk of the sparsely populated contests: He was able to indulge his cigarette habit in the mostly empty stands.
In recent years, the school gifted the Rock and Roll Hall-of-Famer a wooden shack affixed to the top of the stadium. There, Mellencamp—a self-described “anti-social guy”—could take in a game exactly the way he wanted to.
“I set up there, nobody bothers me,” Mellencamp said. “And I can smoke.”Suddenly, though, Mellencamp is outperforming college football’s legendary boosters. Guided by visionary coach Curt Cignetti, Indiana has spent the College Football Playoff walloping blueblood programs like Alabama and Knight’s Oregon Ducks. These days, Mellencamp’s bare-bones box—the farthest seat from the field in Indiana University Memorial Stadium—has become Indiana’s most exclusive vantage.
“It’s tight quarters,” said university president Pam Whitten, “so that he can make sure the only people in there with him are all-in for football.”
Even billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Indiana alum and longtime Mellencamp fan who has donated to the Hoosiers’ NIL coffers, hasn’t scored an invite. “Which I’m fine with,” said Cuban. “I’m not a smoker.”
While Mellencamp is laser-focused on Indiana’s on-field exploits, some of the current Hoosier players could use a history lesson on the rock star. In the moments after Indiana walloped Oregon to reach Monday’s championship game, players were asked if they recognized the name “John Mellencamp.”
“Our indoor facility?” asked sophomore receiver Charlie Becker.
Center Pat Coogan said that “of course” he listened to Mellencamp. “I’m 23 years old,” Coogan explained. “A lot of our guys are younger.”
The team was undecided on how well Mellencamp’s biggest hits—sepia-tinted odes to small-town America—fit today’s college football madhouse cathedrals. “His songs aren’t necessarily ones that would get you, like, super hype,” said lineman Bray Lynch.
Indiana fans would disagree. In the quarterfinals and semifinals of the playoff, as the Hoosiers steamrolled their opponents by a combined 69 points, their supporters belted out “Hurts So Good” in celebration, turning the venerable Rose Bowl into a backyard Indiana party.
Mellencamp doesn’t plan on being at Monday’s championship game personally—and not just because Hard Rock Stadium in Miami seems less likely to indulge his smoking habit. He’s been busy preparing for an upcoming greatest hits tour this summer. If Indiana fans have occasion to dance and sing along to “Hurts So Good” again on Monday, though, Mellencamp’s tour logistics might become even more complicated. The Hoosiers’ most loyal fan could have to add one more gig: a championship parade.