City still loves Luck, feeling is mutual
Former Colts QB: ‘I love the game still’
INDIANAPOLIS — The photo from 2017 has been waiting seven years for Andrew Luck, and there he is Friday night, back in Indianapolis, back at the Indianapolis Colts’ complex, where he spots the picture. More like a poster, really, of a family of four — wife, husband, baby son and daughter — at the fifth annual ChuckStrong Gala seven years ago.
Remember seven years ago? Chuck Pagano was still coach of the Indianapolis Colts. Andrew Luck was just 28, still the Colts’ quarterback for the next decade. The husband in that postersized picture — Brian Elliott is his name — was featured at Pagano’s 2017 ChuckStrong Gala, his annual fundraiser for cancer research. Elliott was a myeloma survivor. At some point that evening, Luck approached Brian and his wife Angie and their two little kids. Thought they might all take a picture together. Someone snapped it.
Look at this thing: Luck is holding the little boy, maybe nine months old, by one leg and one arm as the kid stares at the football in his father’s hands. Angie’s holding the baby girl, who’s closer to the football and trying to see what it tastes like. That was 2017.
This was Friday night:
Brian and Angie Elliott are back at the Colts’ complex for the 12th ChuckStrong Gala, on the full-sized indoor football field. After a 13-year battle, Brian’s in full remission. Luck has been in the next room, speaking with local reporters in the banquet hall, charming us with his everyman humility. Luck makes sure we have what we need after our allotted 15 minutes — “Anything else?” he asks before going around the scrum, shaking our hands
and calling many of us by name — when someone tells him about the family on the football field next door.
Luck pops through the door, and now he’s standing with Brian and Angie Elliott, hugs and handshakes all around. They pose for another photo, seven years later.
Nobody’s holding the kids this time. They’re standing up on their own. A lot happens in seven years.
‘It’s time for me to give back to this game’
Andrew Luck doesn’t seem so different at age 34. Still 6-4, still smiling, hairline still receding. Still has that deep chuckle and shares it frequently, nyuk, nyuk.
Luck’s still charming, still saying cheesy words like “cheesy” and talking in italicized bursts of enthusiasm and happiness and made-up words, like the time he was asked why he came back to Indianapolis for this event.
“Yeah,” Luck exclaimed, “I mean, one — this…
“Wha-poof,” he seems to say next, the best he can do to articulate what Chuck Pagano means to him. “Chuck, Chuck … we have a great relationship.”
Next he’s asked about coming back to a city where he’s “part of the fabric of this sports town forever.”
“I certainly feel like Indianapolis is massive part of the fabric of who am,” he says, “where life has gone, the highs and the lows too. It feels very real. Certainly feel the love in a sense from this city, and I hope people know it’s reciprocated.”
That’s about as close as the conversation gets to the night of Aug. 24, 2019, when the Colts were playing the Bears in a preseason game and the news broke that Andrew Luck, who was on the sideline with the rest of the team, was going to retire. The conversation nibbles at the edges of that night, and Luck talks about what he misses about football, the relationships
Iand teamwork – “It scratches a lot of deep itches,” he says of the game – but says he has never, not once, considered coming out of retirement.
“When I retired,” he says, “that part of me was put to bed.”
Five years later he’s putting his children to bed, referring to himself as a “stay-at-a-home dad” who serves as a volunteer coach twice a week at Palo Alto High football team.
“Lower-case ‘c’ coaching,” he says of his part-time duties, “as opposed to capital-letter Coaching.”
He’s not sure what the next “season of life” looks like, as he calls it, because his kids are just so young. They need their dad at home. Luck recently completed his master’s in education at Stanford, and plans to teach and coach someday.
“Football gave me a lot, a lot,a LOT,” he says. “I think part of me feels, and I don’t mean this in a cheesy way, but part of me feels like it’s time for me to give back to this game.”
‘OK, we were mad for a minute’
Jodi Dalton is wearing her Andrew Luck No. 12 jersey for the first time in … well, how long has it been since Luck retired? This is the first time she’s worn the jersey since that night. Jodi and her husband, Jim, were in Lucas Oil Stadium in 2019 when the news broke on social media that Luck was retiring.
“The whole stadium went quiet,” says Jim Dalton, CEO of Damar Services, which helps adults with autism and other behavior and/or intellectual disabilities. “And then it was like: ‘What the? What the?’”
Jodi didn’t throw away her Luck jersey — she’s wearing it right now, the same one from Aug. 24, 2019 – but she did stuff it into the back of her daughter’s closet. The kid found it one day and started wearing it from time to time, but not Jodi. She wears Jonathan Taylor’s No. 21 to games these days, but when says she wasn’t mad at Luck five years ago for retiring, she’s not convincing.
“OK,” Jim Dalton concedes, “we were mad for a minute.”
The anger is gone. A lot can happen in seven years. Along the way the Daltons started coming to the ChuckStrong Gala.
“I was more excited than ever for this one,” Jodi says, “because Andrew is coming back.”
She sounds genuinely happy, so you ask: Will you be wearing Luck’s jersey to games this season?
“We’ll see,” she says, but the way she’s smiling as she wears that No. 12 jersey Friday night, I think we both know the answer.
Chuck Pagano, Andrew Luck come back to Colts
Know why Andrew Luck agreed to come to Chuck Pagano’s annual fundraiser Friday night?
Because Chuck asked. He did it by text.
“I’m in,” Luck texted back. Chuck celebrated by text, too.
“A big woohoo!” Pagano’s telling reporters. “You can do that on text.”
Pagano knows things were emotional in 2019, knows the loudest part of the fan base was stunned to anger, but trusts everyone understands better now.
“That guy gave everything he had to the organization, his teammates, the Irsay family, this city,” he says of Luck. “Blood, sweat and – nobody sacrificed as much as him. He gave everything."
So did Pagano, of course, still trying to coach while the leukemia was trying to kill him in 2012, finally getting himself checked out and getting the nightmare diagnosis and leaving the team for 12 games. By the time he returned to the Colts’ facility for the first time on Christmas Eve, “ChuckStrong” signs were in stadiums all over the NFL and the Colts were in the thick of a playoff race and Andrew Luck was becoming the city’s beloved heir to Peyton Manning.
“The whole thing was like, ‘You can’t make this up,’” Pagano says.
Even after being fired on New Year’s Eve of 2017, Pagano still holds his gala with the Irsay family, with the Colts, because he loves this city and the feeling is mutual. Doctors at the IU Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center saved his life 12 years ago, you can’t tell him any different, and his gala has raised more than $14 million for the center. When Kelvin Lee, director of the cancer center, shows up during Pagano’s interview with reporters, Pagano stops what he’s doing to hug the man and tease him about his love for the Buffalo Bills and invite him to stick around, say a few words. These are some of the few.
“For the 300 researchers at the cancer center,” Lee says, “Chuck has been an inspiration. They’re so impressed by your dedication.”
Pagano leans toward Lee between those last two sentences and says quietly, “I appreciate that.”
That’s what this whole night is about: Appreciation, gratitude, inspiration, dedication. Chuck Pagano is trying to end cancer once and for all, so people like Brian Elliott don’t have to fight myeloma for 13 years before declaring themselves in full remission.
And Andrew Luck is here to help in that fight, back in the city he visits so regularly that both his daughters were born here, and one responds to every drive to the airport by asking: “Indianapolis?” This trip is different, though, with Luck joining a room full of Colts fans whom, like Jodi Dalton, were stunned by the news of his retirement five years ago.
Luck will tell them what he told us, that he’s able to enjoy football again after taking a hard break from the sport for a couple years.
“Part of me realized that at some point in my life I needed to reintegrate football,” he says. “I love the game still.”
That probably means coaching more someday, maybe even capital-letter Coaching, but for now he’s content to volunteer a few days a week at Palo Alto High and take his girls to Stanford games. Lucy is 4. Penelope is 20 months old. They know he played football, that’s about it, and that’s enough.
“I am a little proud,” he says, “when Penelope sees anybody in a football helmet she says ‘Da-Da.’ Yeah, that’s right. I did it. There are worse things to be associated with, nyuk, nyuk.”
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar .