Indiana Road Trip: Every Town Needs a Nick’s

By Ryan Fagan
Sporting News’ Ryan Fagan is traveling the Hoosier State, watching every D-I team in Indiana over 12 days. He’ll write about all things Hoosier Culture for The Sporting Blog.
About an hour after the Indiana game ended, I was waiting there on the court at Assembly Hall for Jay, our photographer, to finish packing his stuff so we could head over to Nick’s.
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A kid decked out in an Indiana t-shirt and shorts was shooting hoops, so I asked him if he could make that 3-pointer the way that Brian Butch had a short time ago. Remember that 3-pointer? The bank-job with about 5 seconds left that shocked all of Hoosier-dom and gave Wisconsin a key Big Ten victory?
Real quick … I’m gonna throw in side note about this trip out here. I had all but decided that I was going to play the role of homer for the length of this excursion. Y’know, root for whichever team was at home, on whichever campus I happened to be visiting. When in Indiana, right? Typically, as a sportswriter I’m a unbiased observer. Root for the team that’s leading and pray that the game doesn’t go into overtime. It’s not as hard as you think ... just take an objective look at the event unfolding in front of you. But because of the nature of this road trip, I decided it’d be OK to allow myself to secretly pull for the home team -- secretly, of course, because there’s no cheering in the press box. But I’d allow myself to be happy when the home team won. So that thought process had started to seep into my subconscious, and I was just the tiniest bit excited each time the Hoosiers pulled ahead in the last minute or so, even if my spot on media row was mostly blocked by the tuba section.
And then, the bank shot. I was crushed. It just wasn’t fair ... stupid refs had blown a traveling call so obviously that somewhere Bobby Knight was blowing a gasket and didn’t even know why. How could this happen to us … er, I mean, to them? Crap. Yep, I’m ditching the homerism for this trip. It’d be like getting emotionally attached to a puppy or a new girlfriend every day, then having to leave them behind or watching them wet the carpet. Can’t do that and write all these informative and witty blogs every night, y’know?
Anyway, back to the gray-and-red clad Hoosier lad. I asked him if he could make that shot, and he just looked at me and said, “Already have.†Excellent.
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Every college town should have a Nick’s. Bloomington’s is on Kirkwood Street, and it doesn’t look like much from the outside. But get inside and you just keep discovering new passageways and new rooms full of folks -- all wearing their Hoosier best -- with different feels and looks to them. Doorman Carl is one heck of a nice guy, though I wouldn’t want to mess with him when he’s wearing his bouncer hat. He’s a big man. He’s wearing a bear-claw necklace, but not one he bought in a knickknack store. Nope, he was on the hunt that landed this bear, and he had a bear sandwich and bear stew before that trip was done.
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You pass by Carl and enter the main room, and make sure there aren’t any wayward elbows as you slip through the tight fit between tables. Then it’s past the kitchen, and up the stairs to what looks like the primary upper room. But keep going and hang a left, and you’re into a completely new and much larger room with its own bar. It’s like the owners just kept building and adding on as people kept coming in. We wound up in an upstairs room, where Becca was kind enough to serve me a chicken fingers appetizer (I had eaten press-box pizza earlier so I wasn’t really hungry) and a Blue Moon. I’d been to Nick’s once many years ago, but had forgotten they served their draught beer in mugs. There’s something comforting about that.
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Lots of you have sent in suggestions for places to eat and things to see and people to meet for the upcoming days of this trip. Great stuff, keep ’em coming.
(Photos by Jay Drowns/SN)
Previously from the Road Trip: Welcome to Indiana Basketball↵