Published: August 23, 2008 05:03 pm            

TRIBUNE-STAR EDITORIAL: A passion for blue in Terre Haute

Community, Colts are a good match

TERRE HAUTE — Without even suiting up, Peyton Manning validated Terre Haute’s status as a summer destination.

The Indianapolis Colts’ quarterback — the world’s most recognizable pro football player — sat out all three weeks of the team’s summer training camp at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Yet those preseason practices and scrimmages drew a total of 22,308 fans to that scenic engineering campus on Terre Haute’s east side. The turnout was the second largest in the Colts’ 10 summers here. The only camp with a larger overall attendance was 2007, when more than 26,000 people visited to watch the Indianapolis team that had won the Super Bowl just months earlier.

Obviously, the Wabash Valley’s passion for the Colts has grown deeper since 1999, when the NFL club moved its training camp to Terre Haute from Anderson. The sight of No. 18 zipping passes to Marvin Harrison had been the main attraction of those first nine local Colts camps. This time, Manning could not participate, because he was healing from surgery to repair an infected bursa sac in his left knee.

Instead, Indianapolis backers came out to see the team’s less iconic players prepare for the 2008 season. That proves fans here are savvy. They’re anxious to assess not only headliners such as Manning and Harrison, but also the talented cast around them — Reggie Wayne, Joseph Addai, Jeff Saturday, Dwight Freeney, Dallas Clark, Bob Sanders, the other veterans, draftees and even the longshot free agents, not to mention Coach Tony Dungy.

The Colts and Rose-Hulman have two more years on the current camp contract. We think another well-attended camp proves this is the perfect location, and a city with an increasingly sophisticated NFL palate.

        

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