Photo by Jay Goldz

“Can you smell the rain?” Owen Thomas asks. He sits on a couch flanked by two windows, a large, healthy ficus bonsai on the sill of each, shimmering against the backdrop of a brilliant, choppy gray sky. One window is open, and through it the smell of rain drifts, permeating and changing the atmosphere of the room. “There’s a word for that,” Thomas goes on, but it sits stubbornly on the tip of his tongue.

The word is petrichor, from the Greek roots “petra,” meaning stone, and “ichor,” or gods’ blood. The immersive, all-encompassing experience this phenomenon brings into the small, airy studio above Square Cat Vinyl on Virginia Avenue is emblematic of the creative agency and music label Thomas runs from the space with business partner Jared Sparkman—a venture they’ve aptly named Absorb.

Note: Stylistically, the period is included in the name—a carryover from Thomas’ solo album, Languages. {Or: Get Dark & Find Yourself.}, which boasts his playful relationship with language (along with a preponderance of deceptively upbeat songs about heartbreak in his signature contemplative, heartland rock style). The album’s release coincided with Thomas’ transition to running his own company, both coming on the heels of his 10 years as frontman of rock band The Elms, which called it quits in 2010.

The reason for The Elms’ breakup is simple, though at the time, with their fan base and popularity growing, it seemed the only direction for the four guys from rural Indiana and Missouri to go was up. Their last album together, The Great American Midrange, hit No. 18 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. They toured with Peter Frampton, their hit “Back to Indiana” was the official theme song of the 2010 Big Ten Conference, and they performed at Farm Aid alongside Willie Nelson and Neil Young. But, as Thomas states, “It just seemed like that’s what the planets were saying, that it was time for a new chapter.”

So, on they moved. Guitarist Thom Daugherty became a backing musician for Grammy-winning country stars The Band Perry. Bassist Nathan Bennett became a Realtor. Drummer Christopher, Thomas’ younger brother, started a family.

Thomas, who had always handled the identity work and design for The Elms’ shows, albums, and merch, began receiving requests from industry acquaintances to lend his keen artistic eye to their visual materials. The planets were talking again. He partnered with Sparkman, a filmmaker and friend from Seymour, Indiana, to start Absorb., with Thomas as creative director and Sparkman as producer. Twelve years later, the pair is still at it, flying under the radar while booking jobs with local and national acts.

According to Thomas, “The name Absorb. simply encapsulates what I hope happens when people see or hear our work. We hope that they’re truly affected by it and understand it in a clear, multisensory way.” A peek at the part of Absorb.’s website (absorbme.com) showcasing their creative agency work has that effect, with its white-on-black text and grid of still and moving graphics previewing their album art, merchandise, live shows, museum exhibits, and music and lyric videos. It’s hard not to feel like your eyes have been peeled open Ludovico Technique–style. But it’s the heady kind of sensory overload that makes you want to hang around and, well, absorb it all.

It matches Thomas’ kinetic personality. His well of entertainment business knowledge—all self-taught—is deep and gives him the air of someone who belongs in a bigger town, yet he has a distinctly Midwestern warmth. Sparkman is more laid-back. He’s the one with the eye for technical detail, who assembles the ingredients that make the magic real. Before Absorb., he worked in IT, but he says he’s always gravitated to creative work.

Photo courtesy Lissyelle Laricchia

Thomas and Sparkman’s design projects pair with music that runs the gamut of styles, from country to experimental rap, and superbly capture a range of moods and emotions. The art for duo Dream Chief’s hypnotic R&B/pop tune “Love Me Back” depicts the bittersweetness of infatuation through distorted closeups of satin-soft flowers. The bold typeface, monumental collages, and bright primary colors of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum’s 2022 exhibit Roadsters 2 Records conveys the thrill of the Indy 500 in its most innovative era, the 1960s and early ’70s. The Band Perry’s blacked-out 2017 performance of “Stay in the Dark” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, lit only by a circle of black-clad dancers holding bright spotlights, titillates with its suggestion of body parts and silhouettes glimpsed in the low light.

Image by Absorb

Along with the two others on their team, project manager Brianna Aragon and strategic partnerships manager Michael Slonim, Absorb. relies on the help of a slew of collaborators from around Indy and the U.S. “We’re counting on these people to bring in their own creative sensibilities, which we have massive respect for. It makes it easy to let go of control on something that you know they’re only going to elevate,” Thomas says, noting that all his old bandmates have played on Absorb. tracks.

Sparkman points out that Indy is special because people are far more supportive than in other places. “We’ve worked in New York. We’ve worked in LA. We’ve worked in Nashville. The thing about Indy [is that] the doors, when you knock, they get answered much more welcoming than others.”

Photo courtesy Owen Thomas

Indy residents will notice evidence of the local connections in scenes off the streets of the city. Look for landmarks on a driver-for-hire’s midnight journey in the video for Kishi Bashi’s dreamy “Can’t Let Go, Juno,” filmed in and around downtown. The driver’s weariness as he shuttles around fares who party, argue, and make out in his backseat is relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a weekend late shift, but it melts away in an instant as he observes a moment of purity between a mother and daughter. And folks in Fountain Square may recognize the streets Jon McLaughlin playfully soft-shoes down in one continuous take that makes up the bulk of the video for the achingly sweet, piano-driven “Why It Hurts.”

As for the label, which emerged out of the creative agency in 2020, Thomas and Sparkman emphasize that their focus is on developing artists whose desire is to build their careers thoughtfully and to explore and hone their craft before fully stepping out professionally. “They actually get to know us. It’s not only working together as a business, but it’s also a relationship,” says Absorb. artist Frank, who lounges on a couch in the studio next to another mononymous local artist, Bayem. Sparkman and Thomas have worked with both since 2020 and have supported them through transformations both personal and professional.

Frank is bubblier and more approachable than the impression given by her online persona, which is a little bit witchy, a little bit grunge, a little bit Debbie Harry updated with a full sleeve. Her collection of songs boasts various styles, but her most recent ones, the banger “Sick of Yourself” and the dark and angsty “Stupider,” have a raw, ’90s vibe hearkening to Hole or Liz Phair’s most memorable hits. After testing genres and landing where she’s most comfortable, she’s preparing to record her next single, “Stuck in Reno,” as of this writing, with a flight to Nevada to film the video already booked.

Letting an artist dabble in different styles seems counterintuitive when record labels usually expect them to demonstrate they can make the big bucks within a certain timeframe or be sidelined, but it’s exactly what Absorb. encourages. “The artist development process is a lot of feeling around in the dark and just learning who people are as artists and as humans over time,” Thomas says. “You’re not looking for something that’s fully forged out of the gate. Nothing is. No one is.”

While all labels have A&R—artist and repertoire—departments responsible for “developing” talent and preparing them to make albums, Absorb. follows a much slower, artist-directed strategy that values personal passion above hasty profits. According to Thomas, this helps avoid the all-too-common identity crisis many young performers eventually undergo when their sound and aesthetic are determined by the label. “They inevitably reach this point where it’s like, I’m the most famous person in the world, and nobody actually knows me,” Thomas says. “That’s when they begin a self-discovery process that takes a lot of time and can be disastrous on a person’s mental health.”

Next to Frank, Bayem is somewhat reserved, but there’s an elegant alertness behind the calm. While February’s “Regrets” is a throwback to the golden age of neo soul, down to the drippy gold lighting and open-front button-down he dons in the video, his most recent song, “Avalanche,” like most of his work, combines elements of R&B, contemporary pop, and electronic music, often with a heavy dose of synthy ’80s Eurodisco or electropop. This at times unexpected but always seamless integration of styles gives his songs powerful texture. The 2020 single “Pressure,” the perfect summer earworm with its irresistibly buoyant rhythm and video game tones, was featured in an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, while “Joyride” was in Hulu’s original film, Sex Appeal.

Despite being more established in his sound, Bayem didn’t perform live until this past April, when he played two sold-out shows at Lo-Fi Lounge. This measured approach was part of Thomas and Sparkman’s plan. “There was this constant preaching of just taking it a step at a time,” Bayem says. “[That] kind of solidified in my mind that before anything happens, I need to make sure that internally I’m the person I need to be to fully maximize that opportunity or just be a good steward over it.”

Thomas shares that Absorb. didn’t want Bayem to play a show until he had a full set of songs that represented him “in a way that’s the most truthful.” The technique paid off, as others have taken note of Bayem’s mature, unique sound and confident stage presence: His next appearance is this month at The Peppermint Club in LA, which scouted him for Breaking Sound, their regular showcase of up-and-coming artists. The show will be followed by stops in Chicago and Nashville before he returns home to celebrate the release of his next EP by headlining the Hi-Fi on December 14.

As for what comes next, Bayem and Frank are constantly dropping new music. In fact, the two have paired to form a side group, Polychrome, leading to May’s “Sunday Morning.” The art for the track says it all: Frank in a gold sequined bodysuit. Bayem in a purple silk shirt, afro picked out into a shining sphere. It’s disco, baby—another super chill summer anthem, the kind of song you put on a feel-good mix.

Ultimately, Sparkman and Thomas want their artists to blow up so big they fill stadiums and “get the Palm Springs and Paris houses.” But if that happens, “it’ll happen because it’s in a way that’s true to them and true to us as a company,” Sparkman says.

In the meantime, he and Thomas continue building up their ecosystem of staff and collaborators, hoping Absorb. becomes a “de facto contributor to the health of the music scene in town.”

“I don’t want Absorb. to be a household name,” Thomas laughs. “I want our artists to be household names.” 

The post Fully Absorbed appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

Illustration by Shelley Hanmo

WHEN JAKE MILLER GRADUATED from IUPUI in 2006, he believed in the college’s claims that it offered the best of both Indiana and Purdue Universities. Now the founder of a software development and consulting firm, he credits his success to the communication and critical thinking skills he learned as an English and linguistics major. “One of the most important things in any STEM job—or, really, any job—is communication skills,” says Miller. “What surprised me, working with a lot of engineers, is how weak most are in that area. It’s like society thinks we should either be math people or English people when, in reality, we need to be both.”

As of July 1, IUPUI split into separate Indianapolis campuses, a much-hyped endeavor. To seal the deal, state officials sweetened the pot with $60 million in taxpayer money for each university to build new facilities. But in all the hype, you won’t hear much about preserving the balance of skills that has, for example, allowed Miller to build a growing startup that employs 39 Hoosiers. Instead, the focus seems solely on STEM—shorthand for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Press releases boast additions to science faculty and laboratory space but fail to mention similar advances for social sciences, such as psychology, or humanities disciplines, such as history, English, foreign languages, or religion. The schools’ marketing centers around catering to business leaders’ demand for graduates with specific vocational skills rather than promoting themselves as training grounds for citizens of the world who can think and communicate for themselves and seek fulfilling careers and meaningful lives, not just a paycheck.

For Nicole Nimri, a national think tank project manager who graduated from IUPUI in 2018, the decline in funding for humanities comes at a time when our nation needs those courses most. “We’re living in a world today where we are so civilly unsound to each other,” she says, “and instead of teaching people how to think from other people’s perspectives, they’re slashing [those offerings]. That is very disheartening and really unwise.”

Some fear the breakup will be the death blow to a sector that’s already faced a steep decline. From 2013 to 2023, student enrollment in liberal arts at IUPUI declined by nearly half. By comparison, total enrollment at IUPUI dropped by 10 percent in those 10 years (from 28,461 to 25,497). But while funding for liberal arts was cut by 26 percent ($30 million to $22 million), the university’s total budget actually grew by 20 percent ($632 million to $758 million) during that same 10-year period, according to university finance officials. “Obviously, there are many factors that go into an increasing budget that go beyond enrollment,” says Mark Bode, spokesperson for IUI—the new shorthand for Indiana University Indianapolis. Those revenue extras include money from research grants and contracts, most of which go to STEM programs.

Administrators at IUI say they are still “very committed” to liberal arts, but they won’t say yet how the university’s revised funding formula for the 2025–26 academic year will impact their liberal arts programs. The university “will always have humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, the arts, at its core,” says Jay Gladden, IUI’s interim executive vice chancellor and chief academic officer. “That will be a foundation for what every undergraduate student here at IU Indianapolis experiences.”

Faculty members, however, are not so sure. They report that in the last 10 years, the number of full-time faculty in liberal arts at IUPUI dropped from around 260 to about 150 and that the English department hasn’t hired a tenure-line faculty person since 2015.

In a letter to the IU board of trustees last fall, then-IUPUI faculty representative Philip Goff made an impassioned plea for the board not to forget the university’s liberal arts mission on the new IUI campus. “There are no biology courses that can analyze and prevent another January 6. There is no math course that teaches how the electoral college works. Computer science does not teach Socrates, the Stoics, or modern philosophy, all of which help us examine our own lives and how we live them. All of these are good and important majors, but we must ensure the vibrancy of the liberal arts alongside them to breathe life and leadership into our students.”

“It’s an education that ‘frees’ you, right?” says Tom Davis, a professor of religious studies and a former IUPUI dean for academic programs. “If you’re ever going to reach a situation where you’re not circumscribed by your circumstances [in life], you need to know things about yourself, about your community and the world around you, and the liberal arts will help you know those things.”

IUPUI’s general education requirements—six credits in life and physical sciences and nine credits spread across arts, humanities, and social sciences—used to be an important recruiting tool for liberal arts. “We picked up a lot of our majors from people who just came in not knowing what they were going to do,” Goff says. “They took a course, say, in the American Revolution and fell in love with history. Now, we don’t get those new students.”

Making matters worse for liberal arts recruiting, a growing number of students are now able to earn their general education credits at the high school level before they even enter IUI. And under the current funding formula at the university, known as Responsibility-Centered Management, department budgets for this academic year will again be largely determined by student enrollment. Gladden says the university is still calculating those numbers. “If [enrollment in liberal arts] goes up, there would probably be some more revenue there. If it goes down, there’d probably be a little less.”

Declining enrollment in liberal arts is a national trend that experts say shows no signs of reversing. With state support for higher education declining across the country, students are paying more out of their own pockets (or their parents’) and borrowing more money against their future incomes—so, understandably, they’re enrolling in majors touted to offer stronger job prospects and higher pay.

English and history have been hit particularly hard, with graduates of both majors down by a third or more between 2009 and 2020, according to a 2020 study from The Hechinger Report, a national nonprofit devoted to covering education issues. Meanwhile, in the past 20 years, business majors have gone up 60 percent, engineering majors have gone up 100 percent, and the health and medicine field has gone up by 200 percent.

With the expansion of STEM programs, administrators at the new IU and Purdue campuses in Indianapolis say they plan to significantly increase their enrollment, but faculty members say such growth is unrealistic given what has been called “the demographic cliff ” facing universities across the country. A report by nonprofit accreditation organization Cognia projects that by next year, America will hit a peak of around 3.9 million high school graduates. After that, the traditional college-going population is expected to shrink for the next five to 10 years by as much as 15 percent.

To help counter the decline, universities like IUI are trying to engage adults who started but never finished college (some 40 million nationally, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education) and high school students, especially those from historically and systemically marginalized communities.

Liberal arts majors, however, may be a hard sell to students who fear they will not find jobs following graduation—which is the public’s perception of liberal arts–related careers. But academic experts who have looked at the national data say it’s not entirely true that liberal arts students face bleaker job prospects. A study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that at the 10-year mark, the average “return on investment” (the sum of income in relation to what the student spent on college) for liberal arts colleges is $62,000, or about 40 percent below the average return of all colleges. But 40 years after enrollment, or by retirement age, the average return for liberal arts colleges reaches $918,000, more than 25 percent above the average.

Davis says liberal arts majors can and do find satisfying employment after college, but they must start thinking earlier than students in more job-oriented majors about how they will put their education to practical use. An academic approach introduced seven years ago at IUPUI—Project-Based Education—is one good way for students to do just that. “You may be in a philosophy class, or you may be in a religious studies class, but you’ve got a real-world project that you work on,” Davis says.

In 2017, IUPUI also launched a Ph.D. program in American studies that embeds students in local cultural institutions—museums, historic sites, and performing arts organizations— while preparing them for jobs in the fi eld. Davis says encouraging students to build a portfolio of their undergraduate works, “particularly those that highlight their skills in solving problems,” is a growing movement in the liberal arts.

Sarah Bahr, a 28-year-old senior staff editor at The New York Times who also writes about culture and style, is a good example of someone who put her portfolio at IUPUI to good use. A triple major in English, journalism, and Spanish, the 2018 graduate interned with both Indianapolis Monthly and The Indianapolis Star. Her liberal arts background and collection of published articles was enough to land her a job at America’s premier newspaper at the age of 25. “It was great to have this liberal arts background where I knew a little about a lot of different things,” Bahr says. “And from my science courses, I learned how to interpret data and to convey that graphically.”

Beyond preparing students for careers or for taking their place as thoughtful citizens in a democratic society, liberal arts degrees traditionally come with a “useless” component, as well—creating a thirst for knowledge for its own sake.

As the technocrats tell us, today’s fast-changing world demands we all become lifelong learners, and the technocrats are, of course, correct. But many people who study and value the liberal arts do so to enrich their souls, not just their careers, in pursuit of lasting truths to sustain them throughout their lives.

The return on that investment?

Priceless.

The post Oh, The Humanities appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

TODAY, THE RIVIERA CLUB, or Rivi as it’s often called, is a beloved summer retreat for Indy’s north siders, granting its members a country club–like experience where several quiet neighborhoods converge. The club boasts an Olympic-sized pool, an elegant restaurant, fitness facilities, and even pickleball courts. The Riviera Club’s enticing amenities prompt local residents to send membership applications year-round. Anyone can join Rivi’s ranks, assuming they are able to pay the membership fee. “Rivi welcomes everyone … We embrace diversity,” says current club president Barb Fasbinder. “Our foundation has partnered with Indianapolis Public Schools, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Indiana, Fay Biccard Glick Neighborhood Center, and others to bring our learn-to-swim, water safety, and wellness programming to the members of our community with the highest need.” However, this welcoming attitude was not always the club standard. Fifty years ago, The Riviera Club was sued over its discriminatory membership and guest policies.

When people conjure up images of racial segregation in the United States, they think in black and white. Not only the Black and white of different races, but the black-and-white photos and grainy video footage taken during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But in reality, racial segregation was viciously protected far past the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Such was the case in Indianapolis, exemplified in Bates v. Riviera Club, Inc., the 1980 lawsuit that ended the decades-long policy of racial discrimination at the swim club.

The tension between public accommodations and private clubs became the crux of Bates v. Riviera Club, Inc. The Civil Rights Act specified that only “public accommodations” were subject to its anti-segregation measures. This meant that “private clubs,” like The Riviera Club, had a legal loophole to limit their membership for any reason.

Nestled along the banks of the White River, The Riviera Club quickly became a popular recreation destination after opening on January 12, 1933. With its Olympic-sized pool and well-trained swimming coaches, the club founded by James Makin drew in crowds of both casual and competitive swimmers. Despite the low cost of membership bolstering its rolls, The Riviera Club was still inaccessible to many residents of the Indianapolis community. Like many other country clubs of the era, Rivi’s leadership was not at all subtle about who they wanted to join and who they wanted to keep out. A sign on the club’s property read “No Blacks, no Jews” as late as the 1950s.

Recognizing that change would not come from within the club, in 1971, a group of concerned citizens associated with the Indianapolis Urban League formed The Riviera Club Task Force, investigating legal ways to end Rivi’s segregation policy. Legal consultations revealed that among the limited options available, the most expensive and highest-risk way forward would be to file a lawsuit under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So the task force started work on its other options, leaving the lawsuit as a last resort.

As efforts to desegregate the membership were underway, The Riviera Club doubled down on its policy of exclusion. In 1972, the organization instituted a new rule mandating that all new applicants must appear for an in-person interview. The impetus for this policy was a white member submitting an application for their newly adopted non-white child; the club promptly denied the application and refused to renew the parents’ membership. This move not only reinforced the policy of excluding Black applicants; it also effectively forbade interracial families from using the club’s facilities.

Members of the task force struggled and failed to address Rivi’s discriminatory policies for several years before they were forced to take more aggressive measures. In October of 1974, a white man, the Rev. Robert Bates, who was both a Riviera Club and task force member, brought his Black colleague, Michael Woodard, to the club for a friendly game of tennis. The staff deployed its standard tactic whenever a white member brought a guest of color: The employee manning the front desk sent the guest away after setting out a sign reading, “Sorry, we’re at capacity,” irrespective of how many people were, in fact, there.

By the end of the year, Bates and Woodard filed a lawsuit against The Riviera Club for illegal discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As a result, Lawrence Reuben, a Jewish attorney who himself was not accepted at the club, was hired as the plaintiffs’ lawyer. Reuben then brought his colleague, Edward DeLaney, onto the legal team. Together, they took the legal question central to the case against Rivi forward: Was the club actually private?

Despite filing the suit in 1974, the case languished in legal limbo for years without being heard and was eventually passed over by four federal judges who recused themselves for various reasons. This delay turned out to have tragic consequences.

On Memorial Day, 1979, a trio of Immaculate Heart of Mary students decided a swim was the perfect antidote to the day’s oppressive heat. Two of the boys were Rivi members and tried to bring their Black friend, Dwight Eugene Jones, along as a guest, not realizing the consequences of this decision. Unsurprisingly, when the front desk staff saw Dwight, they immediately turned him away. And so, the group turned to the next best option: the White River, which runs along The Riviera Club’s property. The boys began swimming near the river’s edge, clinging to a log that anchored them to the riverbank. The log dislodged and floated into the center of the river, taking the boys with it. A desperate battle against the current ensued as each boy struggled back to the safety of the water’s edge. It was then that Dwight noticed his favorite hat floating downstream. He left the shore to retrieve his hat and was quickly pulled underwater by the current. Despite his friends’ efforts to save him, Dwight Jones drowned at age 15.

Enraged by this preventable tragedy, the movement to change The Riviera Club’s racist membership policy gained a renewed sense of urgency as the court case loomed. If one child drowned after being denied access to lifeguard attended pools, it could happen again.

Finally, on October 6, 1980, Bates v. Riviera Club, Inc. began its first day in court. The plaintiffs’ lawyers revealed that The Riviera Club accepted over 95 percent of all membership applications, resulting in roughly 10,000 members. Reuben and DeLaney asserted that this, paired with the low cost of membership, meant the organization was not truly operating as a private club. As a public accommodation, they argued, The Riviera Club could not maintain its segregation policy.

One of the defense’s primary arguments was that Black applicants’ intent was malicious and that they wanted to make a political statement by integrating the club, rather than truly wishing to avail themselves of The Riviera Club’s facilities. But this argument failed to hold up against the testimony of roughly a dozen witnesses who recounted the racism on full display at Rivi. The most striking testimony came from Maj. Gil Holmes, who came to court dressed in his Army attire, his chest gleaming with medals awarded for his service in Vietnam. Holmes left a powerful impression on Judge Gene Brooks, demonstrating that the club’s management was so concerned with maintaining an all-white member base that even a decorated war hero was considered unworthy of club membership because he was Black.

After the plaintiffs had called their witnesses, the judge summoned all the lawyers forward. In an unorthodox move, he read a prepared statement. Though Judge Brooks had yet to make any legal decision, he warned the club’s lawyer that based on the evidence provided by Reuben and DeLaney, the club would lose big time should the proceedings continue.

In the end, it wasn’t the years of petitions, sermons, pickets, or even a child’s death that changed the hearts of The Riviera Club’s management. It was Judge Brooks’ stern words that forced their hands.

Terms for a settlement that satisfied both parties were quickly drawn up. Among the immediate changes was the ousting of several members of the club’s membership committee and board of directors. Many people who were previously denied membership joined the club, and some, like Holmes, filled the newly open spots on its various boards. In exchange, Rivi was allowed to keep its status as a private club.

“Learning from past racial and cultural inequalities is the only way to move forward,” insists Jimm Moody, current club general manager. “It’s because of this that Rivi members elected a more diverse board this past February, bringing on Bryan Bradford and retaining Barb Fasbinder and Kat Moynihan Gray, each longtime female members and volunteers who continue to serve Rivi.”

Bates v. Riviera Club, Inc. is a testament to the power of community. No single person can be credited with dismantling the unjust membership policy. The collective efforts of The Riviera Club Task Force, those who picketed, the witnesses who testified in court, the lawyers who demanded justice, and many other supportive community members who refused to allow discrimination to thrive in their neighborhood bear that honor. Although the hard-won victories of Bates v. Riviera Club, Inc. couldn’t erase the damage done by decades of antisemitism and racism, they paved the way for the more just future that The Riviera Club embodies today.

Editor’s note: Lawrence Reuben was the author’s father.

The post Diving Into Equality appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

Tara Moore likes the tennis courts at Fortville’s Memorial Park for her private lessons. One of the two is usually available in this low-key spot where the concrete isn’t cracked and the net doesn’t sag. It lacks some basic creature comforts, like benches, a water fountain, and bathrooms. But there’s peace.

Standing on the court, with her shiny long hair pulled back into a ponytail, Moore feeds balls softly to an adult recreational player and energetically offers positive reinforcement—literal pro tips: “When you hit the forehand volley, give your hand a little bit of squeeze,” she calls out, the trace of a British accent detectable.

The woman groans with faint trepidation at nearly every ball that comes her way, then returns most of them over the net easily. It’s a couple levels above dinking, and it seems thoroughly boring. A boring advanced-beginner lesson on a boring community court in a boring Hancock County town.

Which isn’t to say Moore is bored.

After spending more than 10 years hopping around the world to play professional tennis—an expensive grind of a sport, especially when prosperity and fame dangled just beyond her reach—“boring” now means stability, peace, and a Tesla. At 31 years old, Moore finally values those things. “I’m enjoying the mundane side of being a normal person. Going to work, cooking dinner for myself, playing with my dog, getting ready for bed—it’s nice. I just got a Costco membership,” she says. “That’s my life.”

And yet, this wasn’t supposed to be Tara Moore’s life. She was never supposed to be in Indiana. As a 10-year-old phenom growing up in Hong Kong, she was recruited by famed tennis coach Nick Bollettieri, who had already honed Andre Agassi and Maria Sharapova into champions. Moore attended his tennis academy in Florida and trained privately with him until she was 17. Then she turned pro and built a decent career, if not a distinguished one. It was enough to earn a living and play under her father’s British flag in posh locales such as Montreal, Morocco, and Melbourne. Even Wimbledon, where she took a 6-1 set off two-time major champion Svetlana Kuznetsova in the second round.

Her name might ring a bell to hardcore tennis fans, but apparently not her face, as witnessed by the many avid players who cluelessly pass by her at Pendleton’s Community Sports & Wellness center, where she works as a teaching pro, without the faintest clue that she has beaten some of the top players in the sport. Players like Elise Mertens of Belgium, currently the No. 2 doubles player in the world, and Donna Vekić of Croatia, once ranked No. 19 in the world in singles.

Anyone familiar with inside-tennis, however, knows Moore well, partly due to her association with Bollettieri and her connections in tennis-rich Britain. The British Lawn Tennis Association has supported Moore at times, and Judy Murray, the mother of British tennis star Andy Murray, chose Moore to play for the U.K.’s national team when she was captain. In 2020, she was elected to the players’ council of the International Tennis Federation to represent professionals outside of the Top 100, like her. It was a good fit, as Moore had earned a reputation over the years for being outspoken about player rights, once tweeting, “It’s good to ruffle some feathers sometimes and hopefully we can garner some change.”

She is also known for pulling off one of the greatest comebacks in tennis history. In 2019, at a small tournament in England, she lost every game of her first match as her opponent built the biggest lead possible in tennis—6-0, 5-0, match point. Moore famously managed to turn it around and win. But five years later, that epic comeback pales in comparison to the one she’s facing now, after her career fell off a cliff and she landed in Indiana, a tennis exile.

____________________________________

That terrible fall began in Bogotá, Colombia, when Moore and her doubles partner, who requested anonymity for this story, arrived to play a tournament in April 2022. It was held at the Country Club of Bogotá, a venerable facility with red-clay courts, a postcard mountain backdrop, and several nice restaurants—at which Moore dined alongside fellow tournament players four times. On day six, she wasn’t surprised to be selected for a random drug test after her match. “They tested me every other time I played there,” she says. “I expected it.”

Moore and her partner went on to make the final. It was one of their best results. They were clicking as a team and ranked high enough to enter May’s French Open, one of the sport’s four major events. Like Wimbledon, it carries the most cachet, perks, ranking points, and prize money.

Flying to Paris, Moore’s hopes were higher than the plane’s 30,000 feet. And rightfully so. On Court 4 at the French Open, she and her partner beat Belinda Bencic and Anhelina Kalinina. “Good players,” Moore says. Excellent players, actually—in singles, Bencic was the reigning Olympic gold medalist, and Kalinina was on her way to a Top 25 ranking. Team Moore won a close match and $13,000 to split. The week before, they had won $1,175.

Between the congratulatory texts, Moore saw an email from the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which administers the sport’s drug tests, including the one she took six weeks before in Bogotá. That was normal—the ITIA sent a lot of updates about banned substances, Moore says. She would check it later, after she had taken some time to recover and prepare for the next match, worth an additional $9,000 and a haul of ranking points.

The following night, a tournament supervisor called to deliver disastrous news: Moore had failed the drug test in Colombia. She was suspended immediately. She was out of the French Open. And she was alone—or so she thought.

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Community Sports & Wellness president Bryant Beard, a Pendleton tennis coach who was the center’s tennis director in 2022, happened to be vacationing in France with his family that May. He went to the French Open to watch Moore and her partner, whom he knows. The partner’s parents had relocated to Indianapolis when she was young, and she and Moore occasionally trained at CSW, sometimes for extended periods. “I used to joke that if you need a place to settle down and figure out the next steps, we’re here for you,” Beard says. At the time, Moore had every reason to believe her next steps would be on bigger courts. She was the top-ranked doubles player in Britain, after all, and she was winning a lot of matches.

Between the congratulatory texts, Moore saw an email from the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which administers the sport’s drug tests, including the one she took six weeks before in Bogotá.

But overnight, she found herself back in London in a state of utter disbelief. She never could have expected this to happen to her. Neither could Judy Murray of the U.K.’s national team, one of the most respected leaders in tennis. “I have spent enough time with her to know she is an honest and fair competitor,” Murray says.

Moore, who had never failed a drug test before, contacted the Women’s Tennis Association, the governing body of the women’s pro tour, which only forwarded the same email from the ITIA stating that Moore had tested positive for the banned performance enhancers boldenone and nandrolone. As a result, she was suspended for four years. Four years. The news sent Moore into a spiral of confusion, unsure what her next moves should be or how she would get herself out of this situation. “There’s no manual. There’s no help,” she says.

The veteran player was suddenly thrown out of the arena, forbidden to be on court with any WTA player (including her own doubles partner) or any WTA-accredited coach. She couldn’t attend a tournament, show up to an official training site, or train any junior player who might one day want to go pro. “You go from main draw French Open, thinking you’re going to play second round, and then you don’t even want to play tennis at all,” Moore says.

She knew one thing: She needed a job to pay her lawyers. To appeal the drug test, she opted for high-priced representation, which she estimates will cost her $250,000 when all is said and done. “I could have paid a lot less, but I knew I’m innocent,” she says. “Lawyers are one of those things that you get what you pay for. I didn’t want bog standard.” Neither did she want to stay in London, where her high profile made it hard to shake the accusation.

Somewhere in this fresh chaos, Moore remembered Beard’s open invitation for a CSW job in little Pendleton, Indiana. After considering coaching options in Michigan and Florida, she chose CSW because it made the most practical sense. “It was nice to have a lot of hours guaranteed,” she says. “I wanted to build on my coaching abilities, and I was given the opportunity to start over without anyone really knowing who I was.” She moved in September 2022 and bought a house in Fishers, just 15 miles from Pendleton’s brand-new facility outfitted with top-notch extras such as cameras for streaming or recording matches on each court and advanced analytics on two courts. Even in Chicago, it was rare to find a public tennis facility as nice as this one.

Moore settled into coaching adult clinics and high school players. Says Beard, “What she loved about [coach] Nick Bollettieri was when he would touch you on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, you can do this, kid.’ That man made you believe you could run through walls.” Moore’s experience in the limelight helped Beard, who coaches at Pendleton Heights High School, understand the pressure kids play under these days. “They’re genuinely afraid of competition. The ramifications are always so severe because of social media and because the level of embarrassment is so high. We don’t spend enough time realizing the impact,” he says. “Tara helped me see that it’s a mentally tough sport. How do we help these kids and make it so organically fun that the competition comes afterward?”

And yet no one could understand what Moore was going through at that time. “A wrongful suspension for an athlete is devastating, and the stigma associated with a positive test is lifelong,” says Howard Jacobs, a lawyer in California who has handled many high-profile Olympic doping cases. Indeed, the process has taken a toll on Moore. Once happy-go-lucky, she says, “I’m a lot more fearful of a lot of things than I used to be.” Like eating red meat. She hasn’t touched it in two years.

Following her suspension, Moore often woke up in the middle of the night, wracked with confusion. She coped by turning over rocks, researching boldenone, a strength hormone, and nandrolone, a recovery substance similar to testosterone. It didn’t take long for her to land on contaminated meat of cows injected with steroids as a possible culprit. She thought about all the meat she had ingested at the club restaurants and other spots around Bogotá shortly before being tested. Could that have triggered a positive result on her drug test? It has been known to happen—the Colombian Olympic Committee has even gone so far as to warn its athletes about the possibility of contaminated meat in the country.

In recent years, athletes as diverse as Columbian tennis star Robert Farah; 90-year-old Bristol, Indiana, cyclist Carl Grove; and Olympic runner Shelby Houlihan said their positive steroid tests were caused by tainted meat. While many are skeptical about their claims, Travis Tygart, CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, says they’re worth considering. Advances in testing technology mean previously indiscernible levels of some drugs are now detected. “Labs can see so much farther down that the likelihood of capturing something increases,” he says.

When Farah tested positive for boldenone in 2020, he fought his suspension, won the case, and was reinstated to play within a month. But he was the No. 1–ranked player in the world in doubles at the time. Moore would wait much longer for a hearing. As her doubles partner moved on and found new teammates, Moore’s ranking points gradually disappeared by May 2023.

Meanwhile, Moore’s certainty in her innocence propelled a dogged determination to fight for justice. She filled the void of uncertainty by digging deep into the science of cattle farming in Colombia. She contacted Colombian farmers in broken Spanish, and some were helpful and sympathetic, explaining what the steroids do and how much time could elapse between an injection and meat consumption. “You expect your lawyers to do a lot of the research. But there’s no harm in reaching out to ranchers on Instagram. Every little thing, you don’t know if it’s going to count or be a big deal,” she says.

Finally, she received an appeal hearing with an independent panel in December 2023. She attended virtually, starting at 4 a.m., for a few days. “You don’t understand a lot of things, and you’re just sat there, praying, hoping the truth will come out, and you’ll be set free,” she says.

Moore’s legal team had to show that meat contamination was a plausible cause for the positive drug test. They shared evidence that all the country club restaurant’s meat comes from Colombia, that both drugs are authorized for cattle breeding in the country, and that the steroids can enter the food chain a short time after injection. Also, three of the 21 players tested at the Bogotá tournament tested positive for boldenone, substantially higher than the average test results worldwide.

The ITIA countered that contaminated meat wouldn’t produce the amount of the drugs in Moore’s test sample. Also, because a minority of Colombia farmers use those steroids, it’s unlikely the players ate contaminated meat. But if they did, they should have known that tainted meat was a risk in Colombia and had acted negligently by eating it. In essence, the players were guilty either way.

In just a few days, the panel ruled for Moore, saying meat contamination was a plausible source of both steroids in her system. The panel was troubled by the statistical anomaly of three players testing positive for boldenone at the tournament. The report noted another disturbing suggestion: the possibility that a steroid implant placed in a cow’s ear had wound up in the beef mince of a Bolognese sauce Moore had ordered.

She contacted Colombian farmers in broken Spanish, and some were helpful and sympathetic, explaining what the steroids do and how much time could elapse between an injection and meat consumption.

The panel chastised the ITIA for trying to have it both ways with its argument. “It does not lie very comfortably with the ITIA to argue so forcefully, on the one hand, that meat contamination is a very unlikely explanation … whilst, on the other hand, arguing that the Players should have known that there was a risk of that very contamination which the ITIA has argued very probably did not happen.”

Moore was immediately reinstated to compete—if she could figure out how to do so without a ranking.

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Moore has been in such a predicament before. Five years ago, her ranking plummeted to No. 479, and she thought that was the end for her. Being unranked is a lot worse. “If you’d asked me to do this before [the suspension] happened to me, I would have retired,” she says. “I would have thought, I’m not going to start from zero again.”

By the time she was exonerated, Moore felt differently. “Toward the end of my career, it was so monotonous. Nothing surprised me. Now I get this second chance and look at it from a different perspective,” she says. So after spending some time training with friends in Florida, Moore packed her rackets again in April and flew to Italy to play her first professional match in almost two years, partnering with a college player. They won their first match and lost the next to the eventual winner. The flight alone was $1,400, and Moore’s prize money was $98. She returned to Indy to assess where to go from there.

Ranking-wise, the only place to go is up. But as the legendary sports journalist Mary Carillo says, “There are comebacks, and then there are come-all-the-way-backs.” Moore doesn’t know if she can win her way into the Top 100 in doubles again—or even be competitive in singles. Right now, she feels motivated to try while her body is still cooperating.

Moore caught a break in mid-May when the WTA changed its policy for players cleared of a failed drug test, which might have been spurred by the high-profile case of Simona Halep, a former world No. 1 who was banned from competition in 2022 and had her sentence cut in half earlier this year. Moore can use her old doubles ranking of No. 88 to enter 12 tournaments, but she didn’t get her ranking points back. She’s still starting from zero.

Regardless of the restored ranking, Moore lost two years of competition, earnings, and momentum. She expects the $15,000 she raised on GoFundMe after winning her appeal to cover just two months of traveling and training expenses, and she is still paying lawyers because the ITIA might fight the judgment in Moore’s favor at an undetermined time in the future. She has no idea if she is always teetering on the edge of another cliff. “It’s still a stress every single day,” she says. She continues to research boldenone and nandrolone. “I have hundreds of tabs opened on my phone now.”

Moore hopes to receive ranking-unrestricted invitations called wild cards to enter tournaments in England, including Wimbledon, during the grass-court season leading up to the famous championships. Grass is her best surface, and she might have enough goodwill left in Britain to garner those favors. Plenty of tennis heavyweights are in Moore’s corner, including top coaches like Sven Groeneveld, who coached Monica Seles and Maria Sharapova among many other Top 10 players, as well as Patrick Mouratoglou, who rose to fame as Serena Williams’ coach in the last stage of her career. One of Moore’s closest allies is her former coach John Morris, who’s now a top agent representing Top 10 players Andrey Rublev and Daria Kasatkina.

But A-list friends can’t offset the difficulties of competing in the basement of pro tennis. “People don’t understand how uncertain tennis is,” she says. “There are so many sports that don’t compare because you are on a team. If you have a bad day, you can be subbed out. They plan all the travel for you. They plan when you practice, when you go to fitness, your nutrition, your budget for that year. You just turn up and play your sport. The majority of tennis players are just by themselves. I plan everything. What if I lose my luggage with my rackets inside of them? How do I go to the next tournament where there will be a different surface and different tennis balls? Will it be good on my body? Can I switch over the next week?” Being unranked means every match and every point counts. “Everywhere I go, I have to make the right decisions,” she says.

The small tournaments she is relegated to pose more challenges. The tournament she attended in Italy was held at a resort. Rain put them a couple days behind schedule, and the hotel then gave its guests priority for the courts over the tournament participants. “I’m not in the Ritz-Carlton sipping champagne. I’m getting bumped off practice courts by vacationers who don’t know how to hold a tennis racket,” Moore says.

Given the obstacles, even her biggest fans aren’t holding their breath for Moore to bounce back. “It will be very tough for her now,” Murray says. “To miss over two years at this stage of her career is incredibly difficult to come back from physically and emotionally. She has lost time, her ranking, her career, her finances, and her reputation.”

But for Moore, coming all the way back isn’t the only way to win. Proving she’s a clean athlete is a victory. Giving herself the best chance with the cards she has been dealt is another. Protecting the life she has built in Indianapolis, too. But she’s torn: Is pursuing her second chance worth giving up the stability and a job she has come to appreciate?

“I don’t want my life to go away,” she says. “I’ve earned my house, my car, all of this stuff. The challenge is finding the right balance—because the things I have earned make me happy.” 

The post British Tennis Player Tara Moore Bounces Back In A Small Indiana Town appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

Indiana’s natural spaces aren’t all that natural anymore. Our rivers teem with foreign fish that pose a danger to boaters; innocuous-looking decorative plants have escaped suburban gardens and now multiply unchecked in our forests; and insects capable of wiping out entire tree species have hitchhiked to the Hoosier state on everything from firewood to cargo pallets. Stopping or even slowing the incursions is tough. Battling the complacency surrounding the problem is even tougher. “If caught early, this is something that is imminently preventable,” says Aaron Stump, habitat programs manager for the Indiana Wildlife Federation, “but some species have invaded to the point where we’ll probably never get rid of them. A lot of it is just lack of awareness, lack of information, and, a lot of times, lack of public interest.” The following pages offer just a sample of what’s out there. The complete picture is much bigger.

And more intruders are on the way.

FLORA INVADERS

Callery Pear (aka Bradford Pear)

This Asiatic invader’s story reads like the plot of Jurassic Park. Imported from China, the smallish tree became the darling of developers seeking low-maintenance flora to tart up office parks and residential subdivisions. It was originally sterile. But to quote Jeff Goldblum, “Life, uh, finds a way.” To make it less vulnerable to wind damage, it was crossed with other pear varieties, inadvertently producing weedy hybrids that are as fertile as they are fast-spreading.

“If you take a drive down I-69 in March, it looks like a blizzard has come through,” Stump says. “In the forested roadsides, you’ll have all these white flowers from the Callery pears.”

If you’ve got one on your property, cut it down (if the wind hasn’t already dispatched it) and replace it with a serviceberry tree. They’re about the same size and shape as the Callery pear and produce beautiful spring flowers, but they don’t spread aggressively.

Wintercreeper

This Chinese native was imported to the United States for use as an ornamental ground cover in shady areas. And it certainly excels at that. Unfortunately, it also thrives in pretty much all light and soil conditions. It has colonized our entire state, smothering forest floors, climbing trees, and squeezing out native plant species, including ones that local herbivores eat to survive.

Wintercreeper isn’t the only imported ground cover to run amok. Indiana is also plagued by Vinca minor (aka periwinkle), which looks like wintercreeper and causes the same mayhem. To add insult to injury, people who plant it in their yards hoping it will control weeds are usually sorely disappointed.

“To me, this sort of ground cover just creates a huge maintenance issue,” says Pat Sullivan of Sullivan Hardware & Garden. “Do you know what will grow up right in the middle of it? Weeds and grass.”

Asian Bush Honeysuckle

This all-conquering abomination was supposed to provide cover for wildlife (it doesn’t), help control soil erosion (also no), and serve as a lovely ornamental plant for yards and gardens. Which it sort of did. Unfortunately, it almost immediately escaped those yards and gardens and trampled across the countryside.

Though the most invasive honeysuckle varieties are illegal to sell in Indiana, the damage is already done. Nowadays, you can find them pretty much everywhere, from Broad Ripple alleys to the darkest corners of the Hoosier National Forest. They crowd out native plants, with some varieties even releasing growth-inhibiting chemicals that poison the ground around them.

Asian bush honeysuckles grow so densely they shade out everything on the forest floor, often leaving nothing but bare soil, according to the Invasive Plant Species Assessment Working Group. Unsurprisingly, conservation folks would like you to terminate any specimens of this loathsome interloper you might find on your property.

Poison Hemlock

For some inscrutable reason, this European plant was peddled in the United States as a fancy garden addition. Its white, delicate flower clusters strongly resemble those of Queen Anne’s lace, but with one rather important difference. Poison hemlock (you’d think the name would have been a tip off) is extremely toxic. So toxic, in fact, that the Greek philosopher Socrates committed suicide by drinking a cup of its juice.

The plant reproduces prolifically via windborne seeds and lurks in every Indiana county. The proper methods for safely disposing of poison hemlock can be rather complicated, so reach out to your county’s Purdue Extension office for advice if you have it on your property. Until then, leave the plant alone and keep pets away from it. From the flowers down to the roots, it’s dangerous to humans and animals. Even prolonged skin contact can make you sick.

Kudzu

Nicknamed “the vine that ate the South,” kudzu was imported from Japan in the late 1800s. Unfortunately, no one seemed to notice (until it was too late) that it grows ridiculously fast and can quickly cover an entire forest in impenetrable, 5-foot- deep piles of matted vines. Now it’s invaded the southern half of Indiana and come within striking range of Indianapolis.

“We’ve been working on eradicating kudzu when we can here in Indiana because we’ve seen all the damage it’s created in the South,” says Megan Abraham, director of the Division of Entomology & Plant Pathology at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

Wish them luck, because destroying a heavy infestation can involve anything from controlled burning, to serious herbicide applications, to bulldozing. Weirdly, every part of kudzu, from the roots to the leaves, is safe for human consumption. Their flowers are even used for jams and jellies. But Hoosiers can’t nosh their way out of this problem. Kudzu vines grow roughly a foot a day, making them an all-you-can-eat buffet from hell.

FAUNA INVADERS

Asian Carp

The term “Asian carp” is a catchall moniker for four types of carp that made their way to the United States from Asia. All of them breed quickly and outcompete native fish, doing incalculable damage to the ecosystem. They also leap out of the water by the hundreds when startled, potentially hurting unwary water-skiers and anglers.

“Imagine going 20 miles an hour and getting hit by a 50-pound fish,” Stump says. “I hear stories all the time of people being injured this way.” Asian carp have thoroughly infiltrated Indiana’s major rivers, including White River. Recently, experts decided to give them a more palatable name, Copi, in hopes of encouraging anglers to catch and eat them (they’re reportedly quite tasty, if somewhat bony). It’s just one part of a furious, multi-front struggle to keep their teeming hordes from invading and possibly laying waste to the Great Lakes.

Feral Hogs

State law says unequivocally that it’s illegal to import, possess, sell, transport, barter, trade, or release wild pigs in Indiana. But apparently somebody didn’t listen.

“These can be an introduced species, meaning somebody thought, ‘I’d like to go hunting this kind of hog, so I’m going to bring one in and let it go,’” Abraham says. “However, there are also feral pigs that simply wandered away from farms.”

Either way, they take to the Indiana countryside like pigs to slop, rooting around streams and ponds and feasting on corn and soybean crops, baby birds, rabbits, and anything else they can find. So far, they’ve made their homes mostly in Southern Indiana, and the DNR has made progress eradicating them. But since a new horde could be clandestinely imported or trot off a farm tomorrow, constant vigilance is required.

Mute Swans

Originally brought to this country as ornamental pets of sorts, these highly aggressive birds now prowl Indiana’s wetlands, making a mess of ponds and other waterways with their heavy-handed foraging. They also injure and kill other aquatic birds, along with pets and people.

“During the nesting season and rearing of young, mute swans have been known to aggressively drive off people and pets that enter their territory and have even knocked people from their boats and drowned them,” the DNR reports.

Control programs are in place, but literally thousands of mutes still call Indiana home. In part, this is because they sometimes congregate in out-of-the way places and the people who live nearby either don’t know they’re an invasive species or don’t care. “Maybe somebody’s been feeding those swans,” Abraham says. “Some people love life of all kinds, but their good intentions can make bad things happen.”

Zebra Mussels

This innocuous-looking, roughly dime-sized mollusk with a striped shell (hence
the name) has made it big in America. Or rather, made itself a big problem in America. Originally native to the Black, Azov, and Caspian seas, it likely made its way here in the bilge water of a cargo ship. It’s since pervaded most of the eastern United States’ major waterways, including Indiana’s.

These mussels breed rapidly and are infamous for colonizing the water intake pipes of everything from hydroelectric dams to nuclear power plants (gulp). Even worse, they also attach themselves to the shells of native shellfish and vacuum so many nutrients from the water that there’s little left for less-competitive mollusks to eat. Not much can be done for the areas already infested, so a lot of effort is instead devoted to blocking their further spread. For instance, boat owners plying infected bodies of water are advised to inspect their hulls for stowaways before they move to another lake or river.

Sponge Moth

Formerly known as the gypsy moth, this Eurasian import is one of the most damaging insect invaders in the United States, infesting numerous tree and shrub varieties but saving its most vicious attacks for oak trees. It has overrun Indiana’s northern portion, where experts have fought in a 30-year holding action to keep it from advancing south. “We’ve set ourselves the goal of keeping it confined to the top third of the state,” Abraham says.

Unfortunately, the sponge moth isn’t the state’s only insect interloper. The emerald ash borer beetle, which lays waste to ash trees, traveled across the state on firewood, infesting all of Indiana’s 92 counties. Then there’s the spotted lanternfly, another tree and bush killer that’s recently shown up in a handful of Indiana locales.  

The post The Invasive Species Threatening Indy’s Ecosystems appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

CAITLIN CLARK isn’t just another terrific basketball player. She’s not just a young woman who won back-to-back national Player of the Year awards while taking her school, the University of Iowa, to consecutive NCAA final games. She’s not just the leading scorer in the history of college basketball, outpacing both men and women. She is, in a word, transcendent. She is among the greatest college players ever in the women’s game, comparing favorably with Diana Taurasi and Maya Moore. A shooter with unlimited 3-point range and the kind of passing ability that makes everybody around her exponentially better, she has forced those who follow the sport to search for grander superlatives. For example: “We are witnessing a transformational moment in sports that we may not experience for generations,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said the night of the women’s basketball draft. “Our sport has never been stronger.”

Clark, the No. 1 overall pick in the WNBA draft, is heading to the giddy Indiana Fever, where she is poised to become the ultimate change agent in a town that has already painted a downtown mural in her honor. She will not only help turn the Fever—a once-proud team that hasn’t made the playoffs since Tamika Catchings’ WNBA reign—into an elite franchise, but she will also boost business for the WNBA and women’s sports in general.

Because, to put it bluntly, Clark can bring in the crowds. Her Iowa team consistently sold out at home and often on the road in the Big Ten. She plays a feisty, energetic game, and you can’t take your eyes off her on the court. She’s also terrific with fans, who flock to her for autographs after games. In fact, Clark’s popularity is so great, the women’s NCAA final drew more eyeballs to its TV broadcast than the men’s final between Purdue and UConn.

Almost immediately, home and away game tickets for the Fever’s 2024 season flew out of the box office. Clark jerseys sold out in one day. Road teams are accommodating Clark’s arrival in their cities by moving their games to larger venues. Just a day after her introductory press conference in Indianapolis, she signed an eight-figure contract with Nike. Two nights before the WNBA draft in Brooklyn, Clark did a short “Weekend Update” skit with Colin Jost and Michael Che on Saturday Night Live. “I was so nervous,” Clark says with a smile. “I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest.”

Fever fans know that feeling.

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL has had star power over the years, but no one compares to the 6-foot guard from West Des Moines, Iowa, who has captured the imagination of the country. This isn’t just a sports moment. It’s a cultural touchstone.

And it’s a dream come true for Clark, who as a third grader, wrote down a wish list for her future that featured being drafted by the WNBA. (She also wanted to win the lottery, but, hey, you can’t have everything.) “At times, it doesn’t feel real,” Clark says. “There are so many people who would kill to be in my shoes. I’m lucky to get these moments. I know it can all be taken away in a second, so I just enjoy every single second of it.”

It’s also a dream come true for the Indiana Fever, who’ve seen their business take off in a way they couldn’t have imagined. In the latest sign that everything has changed in the Indy market, WTHR and WALV will telecast 17 Fever games on local, broadcast TV. Meanwhile, the Pacers are stuck on the wonky Bally app (at least for now).

“I can’t think of a better place to start my career, in a place that loves basketball and supports women’s basketball, with an organization that does things the right way.”

Clark could have stayed at Iowa for an additional season—she still had her Covid year—but she chose to make the jump to the WNBA, where she will be the top draw in the league for years to come. She was thrilled when Indiana won the draft lottery and received the first pick. And why not? Her boyfriend, Connor McCaffery, works for the Pacers. As a Midwesterner born and raised in Iowa, she loves the fact that Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa, is just a five-hour drive away and that traveling to Des Moines takes seven. “I was hoping Indiana would get the first pick; it would make my life a lot better,” Clark says. “I can’t think of a better place to start my career, in a place that loves basketball and supports women’s basketball, with an organization that does things the right way and has a championship pedigree.”

Her new team won the WNBA title in 2012 but has struggled mightily on the court since 2016. The Fever averaged a second-to-last total of 4,067 fans per game last summer. And yet, in April, more than 6,000 fans, many of them younger girls, descended on Gainbridge Fieldhouse for a Fever draft party—a turnout that boggles Clark’s mind. “Wow, 6,000 people just to stare at a screen,” Clark muses. Would anyone expect anything less of the biggest draft addition in Indianapolis since Peyton Manning arrived in 1998? And while Manning clearly had a massive impact on the city, Clark’s fan club extends far beyond state lines. There are stars in the WNBA, but none have joined the league with more focus and fanfare than Clark.

Lin Dunn, the Fever’s general manager, grew up before and during the early days of Title IX, back when women were not considered capable of competing in big-time sports. Now, she glances at the TV ratings for the women’s final between Clark’s Iowa team and eventual champ South Carolina—18.7 million viewers, almost four million more than the men—and it touches her heart. “I never thought I’d live to see the day that the women’s game would get better ratings than the men,” says Dunn, who is 76 years old. “Never imagined it.”

The moment Dunn heard Clark was going pro and that the Fever would be the lucky franchise to acquire her, she says, “I fell off my couch.” On draft night, someone asked her how long it took to put Clark’s name in for the first selection. “Fifteen seconds,” she responded at the time, smiling.

THE EXPECTATIONS for this team and for Clark herself may be out of this world, but Clark has lived with pressure all her athletic life, and she has delivered consistently. “Caitlin’s game translates immediately in terms of her range, her ability to hit shots, and her vision,” says ESPN women’s hoops analyst Andraya Carter. “People talk about her scoring, but her passing is next level. She makes the right decisions. She plays the right way. She makes the right read. She gets the ball where it’s supposed to go.”

“And one of the things that’s special is she’s staying in the Midwest; it’s a perfect fit. The hero of the heartland.”

The challenge, Carter says, will be the physicality of going against grown women. “That’s going to be tough. The hits will be harder, the checks will be harder, and the players are going to be faster. Everybody who goes from college to the next level talks about the speed of the game. Any star who comes into the league, teams are going to want to challenge her defensively. But she’ll handle it.”

Says former UConn and WNBA star Rebecca Lobo, now an ESPN analyst, “There’s no comparison [to Clark] that I can find on the women’s side, and I’ve been in this league since the very beginning. We haven’t seen a player drive ticket sales like this, drive ratings like this. And one of the things that’s special is she’s staying in the Midwest; it’s a perfect fit. The hero of the heartland. In terms of attention, we’ve never seen anything close to this.”

Indianapolis is ready for the Caitlin Clark show to roll into town. The crowds are already going wild, and all they have seen so far is the pregame warmup. Clark is a game-changing, business-altering figure, and she’s become one without scoring a single point yet in the WNBA.

The post Fever Dream appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

CUSI BALLEW describes the ritual he observes every time he goes foraging: “Before we go out, we lay down sema, and then we talk about our intentions,” he says. Ballew is a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, whose territory ranges through Northern Indiana and parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. And sema is tobacco, a powerful medicine for the Potawatomi, given as a gift to enable humans to communicate with the spirit world. Offering sema is the first step in any communication with the spirits, including the plant spirits. “When we harvest plants, we also lay down sema and talk about our intentions and tell the plant why we’re harvesting them and what we need,” Ballew explains.

Ballew, who was taught to forage from a young age, treats his interactions with the natural world as “a relationship in the deepest of senses,” founded on gratitude and reciprocity. “Think of [plants and animals] as the ‘old ones,’ those who paved the way for us humans, who made a place for us and who have given so much and continue to give,” he says. In other words, he acknowledges the sacrifices nature makes to sustain him, and he takes action to sustain nature in return.

Raised to view the forest as full of things that “could be climbed, smelled, touched, and eaten,” Ballew can recall knowing common plants from his earliest memories. He felt no sense of danger in wandering the woods of the Ohio River Valley as a child. Instead, he was taught to identify the plants and animals that could harm him so he could easily avoid them or know what to do when he came across them. “Everything is dangerous if you don’t know how to do it … I encountered some copperheads and ticks with Lyme disease, fell out of trees, and had run-ins with stinging nettle. But all of this was treated as normal and not a reason to restrict my access.”

Ballew credits his parents, grandmother, and other members of his family and community with turning the outdoors into a classroom—but the forest itself was also his teacher. While what he learned on his early foraging trips was relatively limited compared to the wealth of information he now possesses, the most lasting lessons came from discovering on his own and developing a sense of comfort and closeness with the natural world. “What my parents gave me, most importantly, was the confidence to explore the world with an understanding that I was connected to all of creation and was as safe as I was likely to be anywhere,” he says. He now shares everything he has learned with his own children and through his work as the Pokagon Band’s cultural sustainability lead.

THE GENERATIONAL PASSAGE of knowledge and the method of learning through careful exploration and observation are rooted in enduring Potawatomi customs. Ballew explains that, historically, among the Potawatomi, an ogema, or leader, was appointed for each wild staple their community subsisted on. For example, the job of the mnomen ogema, or the ogema of wild rice, was to be aware of the rice all year long.

“They would be surveying the whole lake, and they would tell people when to harvest and when the harvest was done,” Ballew says.

The ogema’s skill in reading the signs of the rice—what kind of year it was having and how much could be taken—was passed down through generations, because understanding the plants’ health and knowing when to stop harvesting was as important as knowing when to begin. The Potawatomi have long abided by the principle of taking 20 percent and leaving 80—a practice European settlers called lazy. But this was a part of the core “mindset of abundance” with which the Potawatomi approached their relationship with nature, not simply extracting whatever they could get away with, but encouraging their natural surroundings to thrive.

“Yeah, we probably could have taken 50 percent, and the rice would have sustained itself,” Ballew says. But the point isn’t to take as much as you can get. “We concerned ourselves with how little do we need, so that we don’t take more than we need.”

Ecologists often refer to this sort of low-maintenance curation of the natural environment as “forest gardening,” and there is evidence that it was a common practice across the pre-industrial world, with notable examples in places like the Pacific Northwest, Sri Lanka, and Central and South America. Michelle Evans, Domestic Trades manager at Conner Prairie, tells of the scores of hazelnut shells found underneath the floorboards of William Conner’s homestead, left there by mice centuries ago: evidence of a large number of hazelnut bushes that once covered the area. Evans believes they may have been so bountiful due to the effort of the Miami or Lenape communities who lived along White River.

But scientific terminology doesn’t capture the depth of the Potawatomis’ fellowship with their environment. Ballew emphasizes that what he is doing is communicating with and sharing gifts with a loved one. While an analytical approach can reveal data that helps us understand our world and adjust how we interact with it for the better, it lacks reverence for how profoundly our lives are tied to its balance. “I sometimes worry that science is too invasive. If you want to know what’s in the heart of a loved one, you listen to them. You ask them questions. You pay attention to them. You don’t cut them open and look in their heart,” Ballew says. “There’s so much that can be gained just by listening and just by watching and observing. In the end, science often misses the whole picture. They don’t see the forest for the trees.”

WHEN YOU CONSIDER THE EXTREME THREAT so many animal and plant populations on our planet are at and how depleted our resources are becoming, the sacredness of the practices the Potawatomi still observe makes sense. Collapse based on the overexploitation of resources is a tale as old as time.

Ballew points out that there’s a reason the Potawatomi developed their mindset of abundance and that the rituals symbolizing its importance, like offering sema, endure. “You’ve probably seen quotes throughout the years of—not just Potawatomi—but of Native people telling colonizers, ‘If you keep going on this way, you’ll see that the fish stop running abundantly, and the waters become poisoned. A lot of times, if you’re not part of the dominant culture, your significant stories, be they spiritual or physical, get cast off as mythology. But I think that sometime a long way back in our past, we found out the hard way.”

Indeed, the impact of human activity on the earth—and of agriculture and industrialization in the lands the Potawatomi call home—is undeniable. When European colonists first came to the land many indigenous people knew as Turtle Island—what eventually came to be called North America—they marveled at the abundance, not realizing that, in many places, this abundance existed because the indigenous people were cultivating it. “They didn’t know what they were looking at,” Ballew says.

And so, in the face of all that abundance, a campaign to capitalize on the land and its fruits ensued, with settlers spreading across America. As a result, forests were cleared, wetlands were drained, and animals like bison and passenger pigeons were over-hunted. The impact in Indiana alone was so severe that it resulted in the decimation of the country’s largest freshwater wetland, the Grand Kankakee Marsh, which once spanned 500,000 acres—large enough to earn it the nickname “Everglades of the North.” The Potawatomi relied on this wetland, only remnants of which exist today. Another fact for Hoosiers to chew on: While our state may be known for its sprawling fields and wide-open sky, it was once 90-percent covered in hardwood forest. There were so many trees that Indiana was the country’s leading producer of lumber throughout the 1800s—a thriving industry that, along with agricultural clearing, accounted for the loss of 80 percent of those woodlands.

BECAUSE OF HABITAT LOSS, Ballew says wild rice is hard to come by these days. So, too, are cranberries. Bison have made a comeback through conservation efforts, but the last passenger pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

Despite the devastation of their ancestral landscapes, Ballew and other Potawatomi continue to practice the rituals passed down by their forebears. Ballew describes how he plants ginseng often but never harvests it because it’s so scarce. This year, many Potawatomi forwent maple sugaring season because unusually warm winter weather exhausts the trees. “When you’re overworked and tired, and stressed, and hungry, and thirsty, you don’t have a lot to offer, and you don’t want anybody to ask anything from you,” Ballew says. He encourages this empathetic approach especially with plants that are at risk, like ramps and ginseng. “Just remember how alive they are, and what they’re giving, and that they have needs.”

Ballew also chooses not to wage war on invasive species. While our fear of invasives is more than reasonable, controlling them often leads to herbicide treatments—which Ballew says might be winning the fight, but not in a good way. He also points out that invasives flourish in disturbed soil. “And our lifestyle as a society disturbs a lot of soil. That’s why we have so many of these invasives that are so tenacious. We’re not going to beat these plants if we’re just continuing as a society to live the way that we do. Plants have so much to teach us. So, it’s kind of a kill the messenger thing. These plants are a messenger of the imbalance and the problems of our society,” he says.

He seems to have this calmly measured attitude toward all things—wisdom gained not just from a childhood spent absorbing the teachings of his elders and of the wilderness, but also from years spent rebelling as a young adult and his subsequent reflection and growth.

By the time Ballew hit high school, he was struggling academically and had increasing problems with discipline. He dropped out at 16. Yet, he still spent most of his time in the woods—not applying the lessons of his early years by foraging but “doing things with friends that we didn’t want adults seeing us do.” In the woods, Ballew and his friends felt they could escape adult rules and judgment, but he eventually came to a stark understanding: “No longer in school and no longer defining myself in opposition to it, I realized that all I had in common with my friends was doing drugs and getting in trouble.”

Ballew began to understand that while he didn’t thrive within a traditional schooling environment, that didn’t mean he had to accept or lean into being defined as a “bad kid.” This started him down the path of embracing his connection with nature in earnest. “I hadn’t dropped out to stop learning,” he says, “but rather to stop being constantly disciplined and judged as a bad kid. So I spent all my time in the forest, who had always sheltered and held me close. I got a Newcomb’s field guide, picked up garbage, made shelters and hideouts. Through the years, I have learned from many people both human and other than human. Despite having cut short my formal education, I continue to learn always.”

WITH THIS THOUGHTFUL point of view, Ballew gives guidance on how foragers—or anyone, for that matter—can promote greater harmony between ourselves and the world around us. While he acknowledges how disruptive our increasingly detached and tech-dependent way of living is to the environment, he also recognizes the power of technology to build cohesion in the foraging community, urging people to take advantage of email, texting, apps, and social media to create networks and foster cooperation. It’s no secret that many foragers keep their spots to themselves so they don’t have to share supply. Many also keep locations a secret to try to protect those locations from becoming depleted. Despite these intentions, good or bad, there is no way to know or guarantee that other foragers won’t come along and harvest the same spot again. To combat over-harvesting, Ballew suggests creating trusted foraging networks in your community, notifying others when areas are harvested, and collaborating on keeping those areas thriving.

He also advises cultivating your own yard, especially with plants that help repair the ecosystem, like milkweed. Milkweed is edible (when harvested and prepared properly; otherwise, it can cause mild illness) and is a significant cultural food for the Potawatomi, but Ballew also importantly mentions that monarch butterflies, whose population has declined by 90 percent in just two decades, depend on it. He also advises planting other plants that feed both you and wildlife, like wild strawberries and sunflowers, as well as bushes and shrubs that grow berries, like chokecherries, because they require little watering. In general, native pollinator gardens and rain gardens—which rely on runoff from your roof—are excellent ways to combat grass monoculture, foster abundance of local plants, and build relationship with the earth—which will gift you with edible plants right in your own backyard.

And remember: They are gifts. Don’t take them lightly.

Finally, to help with this, Ballew advises building a ritual around foraging wherever it is you do it. “Just go out there, and stop, and breathe, and listen,” he says. “Figure out a way to talk to plants. Even if you might feel silly or whatever. Because it’s a start. It’s a way to move into a new mindset.”

The post The Natural Connection That Arises From Foraging appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson

IT WAS just after 5 p.m. on February 14, Valentine’s Day, when reality hit Stephen Wilson Jr. like a jab square on the jaw. He was in Manhattan, Studio 8G in the legendary 30 Rockefeller Plaza, getting set to tape the musical performance for that night’s episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers. It was Wilson’s network TV debut.

He had played in front of thousands of people at festivals and on tours of the United States and Europe in support of artists like Caitlyn Smith and Brothers Osborne, and his debut album, Søn of Dad, was named one of Rolling Stone’s Best Country and Americana Albums of 2023. Even so, when Meyers introduced Wilson to a packed studio audience and the camera that would broadcast his music to hundreds of thousands of households, the singer-songwriter was initially stunned. “The energy was palpable and kind of terrifying. The adrenaline … I’m still shaking,” says Wilson by phone six days later. “When Seth Meyers announced me, it hit me all at once: That’s my name. That’s my dad’s name. Oh my God. This is happening. This is a real thing.”

Viewers tuning in later that night (including Wilson, who had already flown back home to Nashville) saw a slightly dazed singer staring wide-eyed through wire-rimmed glasses and long black bangs into the camera as he launched into the opening lines of “Cuckoo,” a workingman’s rant against a world he can’t control:

“Bank owns the house. / Bank owns the land. / Boss owns the truck and the hammer in my hands. / Ex got the kids and half of my check. / Other half goes to the IRS. / Cuckoo!”

After a few seconds, Wilson closed his eyes for a moment, as if to collect himself. He quickly glanced at his fingers dancing on the neck of his acoustic guitar and then down at the pedal board at his feet. He was grounded, still humbled, but no longer overwhelmed by the moment.

Later, Wilson explains that in that instant, his mind instinctively returned to Indiana. The studio spotlight transformed into the overhead ring lights at the Tyndall Armory in downtown Indianapolis. The stage became a boxing ring. And the middle-aged musician was suddenly a teenage fighter with his father in his corner, competing for the state Golden Gloves amateur boxing championship. “As freaked out as I was on the show, it was nothing compared to fighting in the Golden Gloves,” says Wilson. “Late Night was scary. But not that scary.”

—

“The fight is won or lost far away from the witnesses, behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” — Muhammed Ali

WILSON’S EARLIEST memories are smells, not sounds. Rubbing alcohol, stale sweat, leather boxing gloves, all under a hanging cloud of cigar smoke. His father, Stephen Wilson Sr., was a second-generation auto body mechanic by day, but his passion was boxing, and he would take Wilson along on the hour-long drive from Seymour to the dank and dark gyms of Indianapolis to watch him train. By the time Wilson was 7, he was lacing up the gloves himself, sparring with his younger brother, Nic, and anyone else close to his size. “My first stage wasn’t a stage,” says Wilson. “It was a boxing ring. I had to be brave enough to perform.”

Wilson’s father always thought of boxing as performance. He idolized Muhammed Ali, the ultimate showman, and to Wilson’s father, it was always important to put on a show for anyone watching. Even if you lost, you could still ingratiate yourself to the crowd by entertaining them.

Boxing was never about winning or losing to Stephen Sr., anyway. It was always about the training and preparation. That’s probably why he used the sport as a way to teach and discipline his sons. And as a single father, it was one of the few ways in which he could communicate with the boys. He hung a heavy bag in the basement and set up a ring in the barn, where he summoned Wilson and Nic, a year younger but always a little bigger, out to spar as he refereed. “He wasn’t easy on us,” says Nic. “We weren’t just hitting pads; he made us fight. It made us tough as nails. A lot of times, he put me to the test on my mental toughness. Part of the grit Stephen has is because he was tested early in life. You’ll get some adversity in your life. You have to come out swinging.”

Neither son resents their father for this trial by fist. In fact, they speak lovingly about those experiences and the self-reliance it taught them early on. But boxing is a solitary sport, and while it brought the three together as a unit and made them part of a larger community as they traveled the state to compete in Golden Gloves and other amateur tournaments, it also alienated them from the rest of small-town Seymour. Nic overcame this with his natural athleticism and outgoing nature, but Wilson was more of an introvert, interested in science and, by the time he was a teenager, music.

Wilson remembers riding the school bus more than an hour from his rural home to Seymour and being steeped in country music on the radio. Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, George Jones. In particular, he recalls overhearing Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl,” a song that suddenly made him think about his mother living far away in Tennessee. “It made a mess of me in about two minutes,” says Wilson. “I was immediately struck by that wizardry: What the fuck happened to me? I’ve listened to songs before. How did this song do this to me?” He was also impressed by the artistry of fellow Seymour native John Mellencamp. “He’s a painter in his music,” says Wilson. “He was painting my town to a T and crushing it. I was living in that painting. I could validate it. I believed every word he sang.”

Wilson’s dad took note. While the old man appreciated music and always seemed to have a song in his head, he didn’t speak the language. So, he bought his 16-year-old son a cheap guitar and left it in his bedroom, where Wilson spent hours pressing his fingers against the strings, determined to develop the calluses necessary to be a serious player. By then, Wilson was immersed in the grunge rock that dominated teen culture in the mid-1990s. His friend gave him a book of tablature for Soundgarden’s alternative opus Superunknown, which featured guitar parts in untraditional tunings, offbeat time-signatures, and unorthodox arrangements. Wilson engaged his scientific mind and the training ethic his dad had instilled in him and learned every song. “That guitar became my superpower,” he says. “It helped me make friends. I just put myself out there and started playing. My crew found me.”

—

“It’s not about how hard you can hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” — Rocky Balboa

WHEN WILSON eventually left Indiana for Nashville, Tennessee, where he wrote songs and played lead guitar in an indie rock band called AutoVaughn, he became even more appreciative of the resolve his father taught him in the boxing ring. “There are so many incredible musicians here, it’s a lot harder to impress people,” says Wilson. “When I moved here, I thought I didn’t have a chance. You’ll experience more rejection in one week of this business than most people will in their entire lifetime. I just wanted to quit.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t Wilson’s only gig. After finishing up a degree in microbiology and chemistry at Middle Tennessee State University, he worked contract jobs in research and development for Mars, Inc. food company. His bosses knew he wrote songs while in the lab but didn’t seem to care as long as he got his work done. In fact, the only time a higher-up saw fit to intervene was to talk Wilson out of accepting a full-time position that would keep him from chasing his dreams. Scared of the “golden handcuffs” of the corporate world, Wilson set out on his own to be a songwriter.

It took two years to get a publishing deal. And even then, success was a slog. This was 2016, and country music was in the middle of an identity crisis of sorts. The classic commercial formula of Music Row had become volatile due to infusions of country pop, rock-based alt-country, hip-hop-influenced bro-country, and roots-grounded Americana. While Wilson’s work was steeped in elements of all those sub-genres, none of his songs fit neatly into any of them. He picked up credits on recordings by the likes of Brothers Osborne, Old Dominion, and Caitlyn Smith. Tim McGraw even recorded a Wilson song, bringing Wilson’s love for the artist full circle, though the track was never released.

Each time he was knocked down, Wilson returned to his faithful cornerman, his father, who was ready with a pep talk and a plan for moving forward. Stephen Sr. urged his son to get back out there, take control, and perform his own songs instead of giving them away to other artists. “I told him the same thing I’d told everyone else who asked, ‘I don’t sing the songs, I just write them,’” says Wilson. “Someone else sings them.”

The ongoing argument ended abruptly in September 2018, when Stephen Sr. died of a sudden pulmonary disease. He was 59. Reeling from this blow, Wilson wanted to stop working altogether but was talked into playing at a songwriters’ festival in Deadwood, South Dakota, by a friend who was the event’s promoter. Wilson sang a cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” which had given him comfort as a kid. “I sang that song like I was singing to my dad,” says Wilson. “It was more a plea than a song. I swear it was almost like he was a kid on my shoulders. It made me want to sing more and more and more. That’s when my artist was born.”

Wilson’s newfound singing voice is the most distinctive and polarizing aspect of his music. It’s like the snarl of a wizened truck driver, dipped in a Southern Indiana twang that drips thick from the corner of his mouth. You might even imagine it as the voice of a cartoon version of that stereotype—if you hadn’t also heard him speak in the same nasal tone for the duration of a 90-minute phone interview.

It can play like an affectation in songs like the foot-stomper “American Gothic” (“Mellencamp, Springsteen, marijuana, seventeen”) and the bro-country-adjacent rocker “Year to Be Young 1994” (“I must admit I felt the flame / Kurt Cobain, a Fender Mustang”). It provides a down-home contrast to the deeper tones and thunderous rhythms of “Mighty Beast” and “Calico Creek,” which feel like Soundgarden.

But when Wilson gets tender, especially about the father/son dynamic, that same voice carries wisdom, power, and authenticity. “Henry,” for instance, is a sweet letter to his stepson (“You don’t have to call me daddy, / But you’ll always be my boy.”), and “Grief is Only Love” speaks to the core of anyone who has ever loved and lost (“Grief is only love that’s got no place to go.”). And of course, there’s the standout song “Father’s Son,” the title track of his album:

“I’ve never known better, / ’Cause every bone’s tethered.  / You wanna change my name, / Gotta drain my blood. / God damn, I am my father’s son.”

“He found the voice I didn’t think he had until four or five years ago,” says brother Nic. “He’s turned his voice up to make Dad proud. [Before] my dad passed, I ran Wilson Auto Body with my dad. Now I’m running it. You don’t know you’re ready until it gets thrown in your lap and you don’t have him to fall back on, only the lessons he taught you.”

Even with his hectic performance schedule, Wilson remains a member at a Nashville boxing gym where he goes to work out twice a week and find inspiration in the fighters he sees there. He draws on their discipline and their commitment to what they do, win or lose.

This is what makes sense to Wilson, a grown man who still summons his father’s ringside wisdom as he tries to navigate fame. He doesn’t sound quite confident that he’s ready for what lies ahead. But he also knows that, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if you succeed or fail.

The fight is the point. 

The post Stephen Wilson Jr. Is In The Fight appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

I WAS never partial to eclipses. Not that the subject of outer space didn’t fascinate me. As a schoolkid, I watched Star Trek and Lost in Space, read The How and Why Wonder Book of Planets and Interplanetary Travel, and collected Gordon’s Potato Chips space coins. I searched the night sky for planets, and satellites, and falling stars.

I wanted to like eclipses, too, but the kind we got in Franklin, Indiana, never lived up to their billing. Indy newscasters would geek out over a coming partial eclipse, and I would stand outside at the appointed time only to see the sky turn dingy gray for a couple minutes before resuming regularly scheduled programming. So when I heard that a total eclipse would sweep through Kentucky on August 21, 2017, I had no interest in joining the pilgrimage. Fool me twice, shame on me—especially if I have to drive three-and-a-half hours to get there.

But a couple days before the celestial event, my attitude got a radical reordering. Some astronomer on the radio was endorsing the approaching sky show in terms I couldn’t dismiss: “A total eclipse is the most spectacular sight you can witness from Earth!” Suddenly, I grasped the significance of the word “total,” something I missed in my youth. As Darth Vader once said: Never underestimate the power of the dark side. But with two days to go before the event, my trip to the shadows was already gearing up to be more like a DoorDash delivery than an eclipse excursion. With two gimpy cars in the driveway, the best I could do was rent an SUV for my wife, Marcella, and myself. And there wasn’t a pair of viewing glasses to be found in metro Indy.

On Eclipse Day, we left home with three hours to spare, expecting to reach Kentucky in enough time to eat a bucket of Extra Crispy before we caught the eclipse. But the slowness of the rental car agency burned 20 of our minutes, and a smooth first hour on the highway terminated in a sudden slowdown—incredibly, one of the two southbound lanes had been barricaded for road repair, with nary a worker in sight. With all the speed of a Little League parade, we snaked down to Evansville to find traffic creeping at an even slower pace across the Ohio River bridge ahead of us. By the time our tires touched Kentucky pavement, we were inside our last hour.

We’d brought an information sheet with a map showing the zone of totality and how long it would last in various towns. The map said we were still 40 minutes away from the edge of the zone. But if you want to fully experience an eclipse, it’s not enough to reach the zone’s edge. Since the moon is roundish, it casts a shadow that’s smaller at the top and bottom than in the middle. Thus, people who stand at the inside edge of the zone may experience totality for only 1 or 2 seconds, which is like flying to Hawaii just long enough to wave at the hula dancers.

It came down to this: There were two major thoroughfares into Kentucky’s interior, and I didn’t trust either of them. See, superslabs like I-69 and U.S. 41 attract swarms of neurotic tourists who choose itineraries as if their maps depicted pictures of grotesque creatures and the warning, “Here there be dragons,” everywhere else.

I needed a third option, a route that was straighter and faster than the local squiggles, yet obscure enough to be too scary for the tourists. Moments later I got one: ALT U.S. 41, an earlier version of the current 41. Sure, it offered only two lanes with sharper curves through the countryside. But we’d essentially be taking a major highway that no one considered major anymore.

Just as I’d hoped, ALT 41 was wide open all the way to the eclipse zone— almost. “This is the kind of road where you might see farm equipment,” Marcella noted, and, as if on cue, we rounded the next corner and had to brake for a combine. With 15 minutes remaining, we entered the zone of totality and continued on to Dixon, where the skies would darken for one minute. It wasn’t the two-minute, 40-second maximum we’d hoped for, but I felt satisfied that we’d done the best we could with the time we had.

That is, until I checked the info sheet and discovered that if we drove 10 more miles to Providence in the 12 minutes we had left before the eclipse began, we’d be rewarded with twice as much totality. Zoom—we hit the road again, navigating straightaways and soft curves until a pair of lofty Golden Arches welcomed us to Providence. About a dozen sky watchers clustered outside the McDonald’s, and as the last two minutes ticked down, I parked, and Marcella and I joined them. An affable employee stepped out of the restaurant carrying a box of viewing glasses, a gift from his manager, and handed them out before the solar show began.

Like a lamp on a dimmer switch, the sunlight rapidly faded. Amid the “oohs” and “aahs” of the McDonald’s patrons, I took a quick peek through the glasses, reluctant to trust them with my retinal health, and aimed my cellphone camera long enough to record an image of the sun in the deep blue sky.

Yep, blue. Contrary to my expectations, it never turned as black as midnight. And the two minutes of totality ended all too soon.

Was it worth the trip? Well, yeah—nothing in my lifetime of cosmic fandom compared to this. Was it the most spectacular sight visible from Earth? Maybe. But I’ve never seen the Northern Lights at their most vibrant.

I’m stoked at the prospect of watching my second total eclipse from my backyard. But the first one taught me a few lessons. I’ve learned, for example, that a partial eclipse is about as enthralling as a partial-view seat at a sporting event. I’ve learned that you can’t find viewing glasses during the week of a total eclipse—except maybe at a McDonald’s. Above all, I’ve learned that if you’re road-tripping to an eclipse, head out early.

If Indiana gets clear skies on April 8, maybe I’ll celebrate as lavishly as I did in 2017: With a Big Mac in a rented SUV.

The post Total Recall: Lessons From An Eclipse Chaser appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

As a kid, baseball was my first love.

I collected baseball cards, played flip (a game in which players toss a ball around a circle using only their gloved hands) for hours on end, mastered a cards-and-dice game called Strat-O-Matic Baseball, and kept copious statistics on every player. When it was time to break in a new glove, I did the whole routine with leather oil, a baseball, and string. Then, I stuck it under my pillow at night. I could mimic the windup of just about every major league pitcher, which established me as something of a massive dork on the playground.

I still remember my first in-person game—the Mets at Shea Stadium— and the feeling that came over me when I walked through the tunnel and saw the most beautiful sight my 7-year-old mind could ever conceive: the greensward spread out before me, perfectly manicured, not a blade of grass out of place. The infield dirt was pristine, and the white lines stretched into infinity. It was a miracle to behold. (Only later in my career did I realize that Shea was a complete dump, a cookie-cutter stadium bereft of charm or amenities.)

For the longest time, baseball was central to my existence. As a kid growing up in New York, there were the beloved Mets and the hated Yankees. We went to games. We watched games on TV. It was appointment viewing. We moved to the Chicago area my junior year of high school, and I became consumed with the Cubs and the White Sox (mostly the Cubs). Then, as a professional sports scribe, I worked in New Jersey (Mets and Yankees again), San Diego (Padres), Pittsburgh (Pirates), Cleveland (Indians, now Guardians), and Denver (the Rockies came along in 1993 as an expansion franchise; in fact, you can get my book on that expansion season, Mile High Madness, on Amazon for about $1.55). Baseball was a central part of the rhythm of summer. Beyond that, it gave me something to cover, something to write about, during the summer months.

And then, around 2000, I fell out of love with the game. It wasn’t a single moment, like some kind of harsh breakup. It was a slow process. Yeah, I’d watch the postseason, but during the summer, it was background noise at best. I could still name the starting lineup of the 1969 Miracle Mets—go ahead, try me—but I couldn’t name three current players on any team, including the Mets.

It just got too freaking slow, which became increasingly inescapable during the time I was covering sports in Denver from 1990 to 2000, when every game lasted four high-scoring hours or more because of the altitude (this was pre-humidor).

When I arrived in Indianapolis the summer of 2000, I continued to enjoy going to games—mostly for the beer and occasional fireworks—but without a local major league team to follow on a daily basis, my attention was diverted. I remember watching a postseason series around 2000 or 2001 and realizing I didn’t know a single one of the players. At that point, I knew I was not the same kid who used to “amuse” his classmates with his Tom Seaver and Mike Kekich schoolyard windups.

My attitude and disinterest distanced me from the game for more than two decades, but that all changed this year. It’s a whole new ballgame. I’ve fallen back in love with baseball.

This doesn’t mean I’ll watch all 162 Mets games this coming season. Given the woeful state of the team, that’s a painful proposition. But when a game is on, I plan to watch from start to finish. Especially in the postseason. Paying attention to the postseason was how I started slowly dipping a toe back in the water. But something happened last regular season: I found myself checking the TV listings to see if there were any compelling matchups coming on. I started watching games from the first pitch to the last. I was mesmerized again, just the way I was as a kid.

Recent rule changes have made the game much faster and more palatable. There are still things that drive me crazy, like both Texas and Houston pulling their starters in the middle innings during the playoffs while both pitching shutouts. Remember complete games? But matches are moving at a much better pace. Shoot, even stolen bases have made a reappearance. Bunts? OK, let’s not get crazy, but you get the idea. Yes, I know, the Arizona Diamondbacks bunted a few times in the World Series, but it’s a rare occurrence in this day and age of the strikeout and the three-run homer. Small ball, once all the rage, isn’t completely dead, but it’s on life support.

Baseball, which has gone from the “national pastime” to an afterthought when compared to the NFL and the NBA, fixed itself prior to the 2023 season, and America took notice. According to MLB.com, 17 teams exceeded 2.5 million in attendance, and eight surpassed 3 million in 2023. It was the highest-attended season since 2017 and a 9.6-percent increase over the previous year.

With the rule changes, the game now has a flow to it.

The pitch clock, which mandates that pitchers take no longer than 15 seconds to throw—or 20 seconds to throw with a man on base—has changed everything. Batters have to be in the box and ready to hit in eight seconds. In 2021, when pitchers were futzing around between each pitch and batters were adjusting their helmets, their batting gloves, their cups, and just about everything else you can think of—remember Mike Hargrove, nicknamed The Human Rain Delay?—games lasted an average of three hours and 10 minutes. Baseball lovers enjoy talking about how the beauty of the game lies in its timelessness, but it was getting absurd. In an age of diminishing attention spans, three-plus hours of baseball, not exactly an action-packed sport to start, was a bridge too far.

In 2023, the pitch clock reduced the average game time to just two hours and 39 minutes, a 24-minute decline from the previous year. According to Forbes, only nine games lasted 3.5 hours or longer. In 2021, there were a whopping 390 marathon games of 3.5 hours or longer. The 2023 average is the shortest it’s been since the 1985 season, when the average was two hours and 40 minutes.

Thank goodness. Baseball has been a special game for more than 100 years, but sports need to be tweaked as the circumstances require. The new digital guardrails are needed. Yet, the game’s timeless element—part of its romance—remains. I’ll let Howard Kellman, the longtime voice of the Indianapolis Indians and the biggest baseball fan I know, explain it as he did to about 50 Rotarians at the Bridgewater Club earlier this year:

“Baseball is the only sport where the defense has the ball. All the other sports, the defense reacts to the offense. But in baseball, the hitter reacts to the defense and the pitcher. That’s why it’s so unpredictable. You can have a bad ball club, but if you get a well-pitched game, you can win that given day. All other sports are governed by a time clock. You can be trailing by five, six runs and then have a rally, and it’s like you defeat time. Time stops. It’s 27 outs, and that’s what makes this game so special.”

Now, I’d be lying if I said I’m a regular at Indianapolis Indians games. I go now and then, mostly for the beer and, on occasion, the fireworks. I root for the Indians but can’t name a single player, despite the fact that some rising stars have come through this city and organization. I’ve been in Indy for 23 years, and not once has a reader ever said, “Bob, you really need to write about the Indians.” Except for a very small hardcore group of baseball fans, locals seem to view game attendance as more like a trip to the zoo or a walk in a leafy park. No one goes to the nearest sports bar and engages in debates over whether the Indians’ middle relief is strong enough to win the division.

Professional baseball, though, including the minor league, has made some improvements, and not just with the pitch clock. For starters, the bases are now bigger, enhanced from 15 square inches to 18. This helps decrease the number of collisions on the basepaths and increase the success rate on stolen bases, which became something of a lost art in the age of the walk, the strikeout, and the three-run homer.

The defensive shift is gone. Now, there must be two defensive players on each side of second base. In 2022, the league batting average was .243. A year later, it was .248. My guess is that number will continue to increase over time.

A pitcher can now only attempt to pick off a baserunner—or disengage from the rubber—twice during an at-bat. After a third disengagement, the pitcher will be charged with a balk. And after years of watching a chorus line of relief pitchers parade to the mound batter after batter, the league has mandated that a relief pitcher must face at least three batters, unless it’s the end of an inning. That’s moved the game along significantly. Who wants to spend half their life waiting for a new reliever to warm up?

Back in the day, it was all about putting the ball in play, moving runners over, and manufacturing runs. That has changed in this all-or-nothing era.

There have been other, less obvious rules changes and tweaks, but in the end, what they add up to is a baseball game that takes less time out of your life and creates more action on the field.

I have a buddy who is a huge, lifelong baseball fan. One day, I was watching his beloved Padres and texted him a comment about the game. He was shocked. “You’re watching baseball? Since when?”

This rekindled love of baseball doesn’t necessarily make me popular around the house, where my wife would much rather watch HGTV or Netflix, but on those occasions when I can commandeer the remote, baseball it is. On a casual summer night, there’s nothing I like better than curling up with a good Major League Baseball game. There’s something undeniably soothing about it, but it’s not a snooze fest anymore. I’ve fallen back in love with the game.

Play ball. I’ll be watching.

The post The Change That Made Me Fall Back In Love With Baseball appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.