BLOOMINGTON – Chris Hawkins needs a ride.
Actually, to be more specific, Chris Hawkins needs a flight, if anyone has one, between Vermont and Pennsylvania, on Nov. 8. See, he has a wedding in the Green Mountain State that weekend he can’t miss, but a few hundred miles south, the football team he’s followed home and away for 10 years might be playing in one of the biggest games of the Big Ten season.
Indiana’s early November trip to Penn State means something to Hawkins beyond the possibility the Hoosiers might yet again be in the Big Ten title picture so deep into the season. Because when we say Hawkins has gone home and away with Indiana for 10 years, it’s meant literally — the southern Indiana native now living in Carmel has attended 105 straight IU football games.
A streak that started a decade and a day before that anticipated kickoff in State College, when Iowa beat Indiana 35-27 in Bloomington on Nov. 7, 2015, might be in peril unless someone can cover the distance between Beaver Stadium and that wedding.
“If the Cigfather hears this on the day of my sister-in-law’s wedding and wants to grant that wish of a private jet …” Hawkins told IndyStar, laughing, referencing IU coach Curt Cignetti.
Hawkins’ enduring loyalty to IU football started growing up in the area. He split his childhood between Bedford, Bloomington and Martinsville, and while his family weren’t diehard football fans, they were Indiana people, so he was too.
A child in 1989, when Anthony Thompson narrowly finished second to Andre Ware in the Heisman Trophy race, Hawkins took that as hard as he bit into his fandom during the Antwaan Randle El years. Taking classes at nearby Ivy Tech, he’d sometimes sneak over to watch the end of team practices during the Cam Cameron era, and even managed to get tickets through players he met there.
The task was slightly more difficult then. Hawkins — who actually graduated from Purdue — surfed couches and bought tickets on eBay.
That’s where he got the seats to a game against Ohio State in 2001 that tested his resolve. If IU upsets the Buckeyes in Bloomington, he told himself, I’ll make the drive to Wisconsin the following week.
But Ohio State won, 27-14, and because the Wisconsin game wasn’t nationally broadcast, Hawkins resorted to listening to one of the most lopsided conference road wins in Indiana’s recent history, a 63-32 thumping at Camp Randall Stadium, on the radio. That’s the last IU road game he failed to attend.
Re-live Indiana football’s memorable run to the College Football Playoff with our commemorative book
Never again, he promised himself, would he skip one if he could help it. When IU beat rival Michigan State for the Old Brass Spittoon later that season, Hawkins joked that he “felt like an ornament on a Christmas tree” using a friend’s ticket to sit in the Spartans’ student section through a 37-28 victory.
“I’ll never forget the high of walking out of that stadium,” he said.
In truth, IU football could be an easy follow, if sometimes a hard watch. Indiana didn’t normally move the needle on the road, making tickets easier to secure than, say, Ohio State or Michigan. And even in the lean years, the Hoosiers often played exciting football, all gas, no brakes, so even the losses were aesthetically pleasing.
“Even though we didn’t win,” Hawkins said, “we scored a lot of points.”
Hawkins actually built a streak comfortably into double digits before it was interrupted midway through that 2015 season, when he missed a 52-26 loss at Michigan State. But he was inside Memorial Stadium for the next week’s shootout with Iowa, and hasn’t looked back since.
Even as the last decade — which has seen five postseason appearances, three winning seasons and a College Football Playoff appearance — has offered more relative success for Indiana, perfect attendance was never Hawkins’ goal at the outset, and Indiana’s performance in many ways stopped being his motivation.
Over time, he realized his childhood love of IU football had expanded to an appreciation for the culture of college football in the Big Ten and around the country. Yes, it’s always better when the Hoosiers win, but he and his wife (a common companion on these trips) have come to enjoy exploring new towns and acquainting themselves with different fans’ customs as well.
“The culture on the road, seeing those visiting environments,” Hawkins said, “college football is so steeped in tradition, it’s awesome.”
Which means he comes with recommendations. Iowa City, he insists, is the unappreciated jewel of the Big Ten, while he rates Nebraska fans the league’s most welcoming.
Lincoln also homes one of his favorite college bars, Barry’s, while Hawkins will admit in a whisper his favorite haunt across the conference remains the legendary Harry’s Chocolate Shop in West Lafayette.
But his criteria are consistent wherever he goes. Collegiately rules over all.
“I want jerseys on the wall,” he said, using a Bloomington comparison to make his point. “I want a Nick’s Hoosier Room feel. I don’t think there’s anything quite like that.”
Through all that, though, IU remains the central thing. The driving force.
It was when his streak reached the 50s and 60s that he started to realize how long it had gotten. It was interrupted at 55 by the closed-door COVID season, which for Hawkins’ purposes probably shouldn’t count (though if you ask him, he may have a quiet story about laying eyes on a game that season; who can say?).
But he was in the building for the ugliness in Iowa City the next year, for Curt Cignetti’s 42-13 rout of UCLA in IU’s first Rose Bowl appearance in 56 years last fall, and for the Hoosiers’ CFP loss to Notre Dame in December.
The streak, he acknowledges, doesn’t come without sacrifice.
He turns down a lot of invitations in the fall. It means committing large tracts of his schedule to a program that historically does not always love its fans back, though it certainly is right now. And it’s required Hawkins to get creative, like the time he fractured his right ankle before Indiana’s 2019 trip to Penn State and drove left-footed all the way to State College to witness a 34-27 loss in person.
“My wife wishes she had noticed this was happening at about game 15,” he said, laughing, “so we didn’t get into this spot.”
But Hawkins’ streak remains intact. You can find him wherever IU is on autumn Saturdays, often wearing the IU hat passed to him by Jane Hoeppner, via his father. It once belonged to Jane’s husband, Terry, whose infectious enthusiasm as Indiana coach once rallied Hoosier fans the same way Cignetti’s success does now.
Hawkins won’t pretend his faith hasn’t been shaken. Like the infamous 2009 trip to Virginia that ended in a 40-point loss, after which players and coaches blamed a teamwide flu outbreak for poor performance. Or the Old Oaken Bucket game in 2017, with Indiana 5-6 and bowl eligibility on the line, only for the Hoosiers to come out flat and fall behind 31-10, before rallying to a more respectable one-score defeat.
The highs make it worthwhile.
In the waning minutes of IU’s win over Washington last season, with ESPN College GameDay in town and Memorial Stadium filled to bursting, Hawkins found himself moved to tears at the scene unfolding around him.
Doesn’t this bother you, his sister asked, these Johnny Come Lately fans who probably never would have invested the time and emotion in this program you have? Not at all, Hawkins replied.
“I had believed, with very little evidence, that this could happen, and it was finally happening,” Hawkins said. “I said, ‘Absolutely not.’
“How much better will this thing be for the rest of my life because people are having these core memories like I did when I was a kid?”
Chris Hawkins has seen very nearly everything, across the last decade (plus a lifetime) an IU football fan can. He’ll be in the crowd for Old Dominion, Aug. 30, stretching his streak to 106, and he has no intention of stopping after that.
If only he can just hitch a ride to State College in November, he’ll be set.
Want more Hoosiers coverage? Sign up for IndyStar’s Hoosiers newsletter. Listen to Mind Your Banners, our IU Athletics-centric podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the latest on IndyStar TV: Hoosiers.