I’ve watched Mike Chappell lumber out to the Colts’ practice fields with a cast on his ankle and a cane in his hand, moving more gingerly than half the injury report. I’ve seen him do it on crutches, under the stifling summer sun, roster and reporter’s notebook dangling from his pocket, each step a little more agonizing than the last.

Advertisement

He missed a practice once, back in the mid-1990s, and never forgave himself. “Beat writer’s guilt,” he calls it. It was just a walk-through, a light workout the day before a preseason game, a quiet morning that was supposed to stay quiet. But the Colts made news, signing quarterback Jim Harbaugh to a contract extension, and Chappell wasn’t there. As a beat writer, he says, you always have to be there.

He didn’t miss another practice for 20 years.

But it’s getting harder. He’s 71. He darn near ruptured his Achilles a few years back — his is “frayed,” his doctors told him — and he hasn’t moved the same since. He wears these tattered old compression socks most days that are supposed to help but don’t do much. He’s had both hips replaced and a heart stent put in. Discs in his back are enflamed, and his sciatic nerve is pinched, causing numbness down his left leg. Standing’s hard. Walking’s worse.

He slogged through a nasty case of COVID-19 in 2020 that kept him in bed for weeks. He recently just climbed from another bout.

“It’ll pass,” he says.

He doesn’t need to be doing this, doesn’t need to be hobbling out to practices and chasing scoops and lobbing questions at athletes a half-century his junior. But he is. Next season will be his 40th on the beat. He started shortly after the Colts arrived in town on those Mayflower trucks in the spring of 1984. The team was based out of a local elementary school back then.

Twelve head coaches have come and gone, including interims. So have 27 starting quarterbacks. Chappell has seen it all and written it all.

Even now, there’s just something about the grind he can’t quit.

“There’s only one Mike Chappell,” says Colts owner Jim Irsay, who has answered Chappell’s questions, shared late-night conversations on the state of the team and read his work for almost four decades.

Advertisement

“The older I get, the more I realize how rare he is,” Irsay continues. “He knows the game. He knows our team. His integrity is impeccable. I’ve just got so much respect for him.”

Thirty years at The Indianapolis Star. One writing for WRTV-6’s website. The past eight doing so for Fox 59. At first, Chap — as he’s known to all — figured he’d walk away when Peyton Manning’s run with the Colts came to an end. But when it was time, he couldn’t. He told himself he’d leave after the next franchise quarterback left, but when Andrew Luck retired in 2019, he still wasn’t ready.

He’s not sure if he ever will be.

He was determined to stick around long enough to get Edgerrin James into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and in 2020, on James’ third try as a finalist, he did. A year later, Chap’s presentation to the 49 Hall of Fame voters was a bit more succinct.

“Peyton Manning,” he told the room. “End of discussion.”

He’d always wanted to drop the mic like that.

GO DEEPER

Gold teeth to gold jacket: The stories that made Edgerrin James a legend

He’s now leaning toward hanging around long enough to get another Colts great, kicker Adam Vinatieri, his gold jacket.

“What else am I gonna do?” Chappell says. “Some people get up in the morning and cuss all the way to work, then cuss all the way home. I’ve been lucky. I fell into something I was pretty good at.

“And hey, they pay you for it.”

Chap is — and always has been — a beat writer’s beat writer, unable to sleep at night unless every last morsel of information finds its way into one of his stories. “It just has to go somewhere,” he likes to say, believing in his core that it’d be a disservice to the reader not to mention the last time the Colts gave up this many sacks or ran for this many yards. Ask him about it and chances are he’ll tell you the score and the quarterback’s stats from that game, no matter how long ago it was. Remember, he was probably there.

Advertisement

But it never comes with ego, no “I was there, kid” arrogance. He is a resource to any and all, a living, breathing library of football knowledge, a wealth of information that would put the Colts media guide to shame. Hell, Chap is the Colts media guide. The communications staff asks him to double-check its work.

For years, in the attic of his Beech Grove home, he kept every media guide from every team dating back to the 1980s, an unrivaled collection of NFL information. Eventually, he had to get rid of it all. “Fire hazard,” he sighs. Still, he has kept every Indianapolis Colts media guide ever printed, all the way back to 1984, and he can’t find it in himself to throw them away. It would just feel wrong. You never know when you might need the team’s third-down stats against the Jets in 1985.

He has witnessed everything a beat writer can, from those god-awful early years to the brilliance that followed, from the Mike Pagel era to the Jeff George era to the Manning era to the Luck era and everything since. He has filed datelines from Tokyo and Mexico City, where the Colts played preseason games in the 2000s, and from London, where they played a regular-season game in 2016. He’s been to 20 Super Bowls, including the Colts’ appearances in 2007 and 2010. He has missed fewer than five home games in 39 years.

Players, especially the superstars, grew to respect that.

“Mike hustled,” Manning says. “He wasn’t a guy who’d show up on Friday and ask how practice went that week. He knew how practice went that week.”

Now, that doesn’t mean the QB wouldn’t occasionally give him a hard time.

“He’d wear these Super Bowl windbreaker jackets from like 15 years earlier,” Manning says, laughing. “I’m like, ‘Mike, man, we gotta get some updated material.’ Sometimes he’d wear these sleeveless tank tops to training camp like he was working on his tan. It was not a great look!

Advertisement

“But Mike, he was there every day. Every single day we were in Anderson or Terre Haute for training camp, thousands of them. Every game I played there. Always liked Mike. Always thought he did a good job. Always thought he was fair.”

The games? That was the fun part. Stressful, too. The worst deadline Chap can remember came on that Monday nighter in Tampa Bay in 2003. By the time the fourth quarter started, the Colts were down 28-7 and his story was finished. All he had to do was hit send. Then Manning and the Colts pulled off the impossible. Chap rewrote furiously. “You just hope you get the score and the teams right,” he says, laughing. After they met their deadline, the Star’s five-man crew was so astonished at what they’d seen that they couldn’t sleep. They hit a 24-hour chain restaurant near the stadium and relived the comeback until 5 a.m.

His favorite player to cover? “Edgerrin,” he says. He remembers an early conversation with James, back around 1999, when he asked the young running back whether he was worried that his dreadlocks and gold teeth might cost him endorsement dollars.

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be me,” James told him.

“He was who he was,” Chap says, and he always admired that. Chap counts Reggie Wayne, now the Colts’ receivers coach, as his No. 2.

“Something about those Miami guys,” he says.

He was always tight with Manning, a relationship built on trust and mutual admiration. Manning grinded. Chap grinded, too, and the quarterback — always mindful of the media’s role within the NFL landscape — respected that. Chappell drove to Tennessee in the spring of 1998 for Manning’s pro day, having never met the quarterback. He wasn’t allowed to watch the workout, but afterward, while he stood in a hallway at the football facility, Manning, Colts head coach Jim Mora and Manning’s agent, Tom Condon, walked past.

Advertisement

Manning looked up.

“Hey, Mike, how you doing?”

Chap was stunned.

You know who I am? he asked himself. Are you serious?

“But that’s him,” Chap says now, looking back. “That’s when I knew this guy was different. It was important for him to never be surprised.”

As the Colts grew into one of the marquee teams in the league, their exposure exploded. They’d play in five or six prime-time games every year, which meant deadline hell for Chappell and his Star brethren. Sometimes they’d have to file 1,100 words mere minutes after a game ended. Chap always appreciated that Manning would come out for his postgame news conference, pads and jersey still on, and give reporters a five-minute interview so they could include his quotes in the next day’s newspaper.

“It wasn’t lost on Peyton that we had sh—y deadlines,” Chap says.

His best scoop? Two stand out. The first came when he was driving from the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., in January 2002, a few weeks after the Colts fired Mora. Chap was on the hunt for his successor. His phone rang. He pulled off on the side of the highway.

It was Irsay.

“Mike, any chance you got Tony Dungy’s number?”

It was Irsay’s way of letting him know the Colts were chasing Dungy, who’d been fired by the Bucs that same week. In the next morning’s Star, readers learned that Irsay was willing to pay Dungy whatever he wanted to become the Colts’ next coach.

Almost a decade later, in the spring of 2011, Chap was covering the owners’ meetings in Indianapolis when his phone buzzed. This time it was Manning. “Hey, Mike. I’m in Chicago,” the quarterback began. “I thought I’d let you know I just had surgery on my neck.”

“Wait, another one?” Chappell responded.

It was the third of four neck procedures for Manning, an omen of the tumultuous year that would follow. Ten months later, the unthinkable occurred in Indianapolis: The Colts released the face of their franchise.

Advertisement

By then, Indy was a proud football town, thanks to Manning and James and Dungy and the rest. Chappell, too, played his part. He wrote the definitive story.

“It’s safe to say his work has played a truly significant role as Indy has grown into an avid, informed NFL fan base,” Chappell’s longtime editor at the Star, Tom Rietmann, says. “He had too many scoops to count. But I would contend his work on the daily, more routine stuff reflects his dedication and competence as a beat writer just as much … early on, Chap mastered how to write a clear yet detailed salary-cap story. Top beat writers could handle that. Many writers, many good writers, could not.”

Said Chap’s longtime partner on the beat, Phil Richards: “There was a time, before NFL news was hard-wired to ESPN and NFL Network, that you very seldom saw an important Colts story anywhere before you read it in the Star. Chap owned the beat.”

Richards, as much as anyone, saw the dedication, the doggedness. They teamed up for 14 years. They chronicled one of the league’s top teams and the drama that came with it. They grew into tight friends.

“He set the agenda and broke the stories. I swept the floor and took out the trash,” Richards says. “He was the consummate beat man.”

Richards thinks back to how seasons would end, sometimes suddenly, sometimes after a stunning upset loss in the playoffs.

“Like a slammed door,” he calls it. “One day they’re playing, the next they’re cleaning out their lockers and disappearing into the offseason.”

After Richards sent in his last story, that left one final item.

“You thank Chap, and you tell him he’s the best man you’ve ever worked with,” he says.

Thirty-nine years on the beat, and the only time Chap has missed a home game — outside of health issues — came late in the 2007 season when his daughter, Angie, died from leukemia at age 31. He keeps a photo of her in his cubicle in the media room at the Colts’ practice facility, and when Lucas Oil Stadium opened in 2008, he had a brick on the outside steps inscribed with her name on it.

Advertisement

After every game, whether he’s in a cast or on crutches, whether it’s 90 degrees or 15, he stops by and says hi.

“My biggest fan,” he calls her.

His aim in this business, from the very beginning, was simple: Do it the right way. He wanted to be respected, and trusted, by those he worked with.

“I think I’ve done that,” Chap says.

More than he knows.

Richards, who presented Chappell at his induction into the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame in 2014, wants to tell one more story.

It was January 2012, and he was in a hotel room in Foxboro, Mass., writing about the Patriots, who were soon headed to Indianapolis to face the Giants in Super Bowl XLVI.

“The phone rings. It’s a source in the building, calling to say the Colts are hiring Chuck Pagano as their new head coach,” Richards remembers. “I open the laptop and begin banging out the story. Then, a thought: Call Chap and give him the quick heads-up.”

So he did.

“Filed it 15 minutes ago,” Chap told him.

Richards could only laugh.

“Of course he did.”

(Top photo courtesy of Mike Chappell)