Doyel: Story behind new food at Colts games includes Ali, Tyson and Bonzi Wells' point guard
INDIANAPOLIS – You think this is a story about food. And it does smell good in here, inside the main lobby at Lucas Oil Stadium, where the Indianapolis Colts are unveiling their 2023 menu. There’s loaded burgers and dogs and something called sweet tea fried chicken. There’s a brownie the size of your head.
Almost time to eat, but somebody’s introducing the executive chef, Jon Wanland. Nice guy, but I’d already interviewed him. Colts executive Roger VanDerSnick is introducing Wanland, and I’m nibbling on a nacho, and VanDerSnick is saying something about Wanland having cooked for Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, and now I’m choking on a nacho.
Fox 59 sports anchor Chris Hagan leans over, and not to save me. To taunt me.
“He didn’t give you the Muhammad Ali story,” Hagan says.
I’m rising to leave, but now someone’s talking about the new BBQ sauce at Colts game. I sit down, because BBQ sauce.
Turns out, it’s made by an IU grad who grew up eating his grandfather’s top-secret BBQ sauce, no written recipe, just whatever Grandpa John Tom was making after his factory job in Muncie. The IU grad went into TV, got a job in Milwaukee. His grandfather retired from the factory to open a BBQ restaurant, but died of a heart attack.
The grandson eventually quit the TV business and chose a new path: He’d live out his grandfather’s BBQ dream.
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With a recipe the old man never wrote down.
This story about food can’t really be a story about food. Between Muhammad Ali and a top-secret BBQ sauce, along with another few (chicken) nuggets along the way, there’s a bigger story here.
But we’ll highlight Lucas Oil Stadium’s new menu, too. The Colts gave us a sneak preview this week, and it was a lot of food. And I’m nothing if not thorough at my job.
Mike Tyson eats keto?
Chef Wanland won’t say what he served Muhammad Ali. It was more than 10 years ago at his first job running the kitchen of a sports venue. It was in NASCAR, at the Phoenix Raceway. Ali was there.
“I don’t recall,” Wanland tells me after VanDerSnick had spilled the beans about him feeding Ali. Wanland seems uncomfortable with the topic. Maybe it’s a privacy thi—
“But I remember what I served Mike Tyson,” he says.
That was at his last stop, the American Airlines Center in Dallas, home of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, NHL’s Dallas Stars and events like UFC 277. It was July 30, 2022. Tyson was there.
I’m teasing Wanland about Tyson’s most infamous meal, against Evander Holyfield in 1997 – “Tell me Tyson requested fried ear,” is what I said – and Wanland’s saying no, Tyson was a guest of UFC president Dana White.
“And he’s on the keto diet,” Wanland says of White. “So it was a keto spread.”
Apparently ear isn’t on the keto diet. Never mind. You’re here for the same reason as me, the new food at Lucas Oil Stadium, and it’ll be two things: Upscale, and local.
“We’re hyper-focused on local, giving back to our Hoosier farms and Hoosier businesses,” Wanland says of a menu that includes Indiana-grown, hand-breaded pork fritters and Indiana-grown chicken marinated in pesto.
Upscale? Baked potato salad, smoked pork rinds, Mediterranean mezze platter – some of the new offerings for Mr. and Ms. Fancypants at the suite level. Also BBQ smoked chicharrones and roasted corn fundido, and if you don’t recognize the words chicharrones or fundido, don’t feel bad. Neither does my laptop’s spell-checker!
The new food is off the charts, is my point, and not just for Mr. and Ms. Fancypants at the suite level. It’s for us on the concourse, too.
“For the concessions,” Wanland says, “we have a loaded concept – a little play on your normal hotdog. We’re going to upgrade your hot dog, we’re going to upgrade your burger.”
Loaded burgers? I tried one this week, just to see what a loaded burger tastes like. Did that for you. Then I tried a loaded hot dog.
Did that for me.
Bonzi Wells' old point guard
He calls after Charlotte’s Web.
Lathay Pegues is a basketball player from Muncie Central, an IU graduate, a former TV journalist in Milwaukee and now co-owner of the best new BBQ sauce in the country. But above all that, he’s a dad. And this week he and his daughter are in their first play together, “Charlotte’s Web,” presented by the Muncie Civic Theatre. Shows are next month. He calls after rehearsal.
Pegues is 48 and the most interesting person I’ll meet in 2023, and not just because he’s a BBQ sauce entrepreneur. But that doesn’t hurt. He calls it JohnTom’s Barbecue Sauce, and at Colts games it’ll be on your loaded burger and dog, your brisket and pulled pork nachos, your brisket sandwich.
That’s where the story ends, but you have to hear how it started.
John Tom Branson was born in Madison County, Miss., in 1920. He moved to Muncie and worked at the old Broderick Company, a foundry off Macedonia Avenue. John Tom would come home from work – that’s what everyone called him, “John Tom” – and start barbecuing on the homemade brick pit on his patio. He never wrote down the recipe for his sauce. Didn’t need to write it down. He could make it blindfolded, and when he retired from the foundry he planned to open a BBQ restaurant. This was 1986, and he was scouting out sites when he died of a heart attack.
Pegues was just 11, a basketball player – Bonzi Wells’ future point guard at Muncie Central – and a future journalist. Went to IU, got a job in TV, was off and running. Like his grandpa, Pegues enjoyed playing around with BBQ on the side, and for years he’d been trying to recreate John Tom’s secret sauce.
When his TV station in Milwaukee closed in 2006, Lathay was at a career crossroads.
“What do I do now?” he remembers thinking. “Maybe it’s time to see what this sauce can do.”
By then Pegues had stopped trying to crack his grandpa’s code. He’s come up with his own flavor, and a name:
JohnTom’s Barebecue Sauce.
“It’s my motivation,” Pegues says. “I could’ve put my name on the bottle, but because I put his name on the bottle, I feel like I have to see this through. I have to make this work. It’s in honor of him.”
John Tom Branson's legacy
Pegues went public with his sauce in 2006 and nearly caused a stampede. Look, this is what happened:
It’s the 2006 Indiana Black Expo at the Convention Center. Pegues is serious now about his sauce, teaming up with some friends from IU – Terrell Cooper (a cousin) and Rodney Robinson – and they bottled their two flavors and brought 26 cases of each (52 total) to the expo. Twelve bottles per case. That’s 624 bottles.
“By Sunday morning we’d sold out,” Pegues says. “We were like, ‘We’ve got a product.’”
They’d set aside one bottle of each flavor, for sentimental reasons and to discuss it with whoever showed up for the rest of the Expo.
“We had these two bottles on our table, and we had a crowd of people asking us if we would auction off those bottles of sauce,” he says. “We were like: no. They were like, ‘Auction it to the highest bidder.’
“True story!” he’s saying.
A few months later his co-partner Robinson – IU’s Kelley School Business, class of 1998 – is at Chalkies, an old pool hall on East 82nd Street. He’s eating and playing pool, and he has an idea. He asks to speak with the head chef, tells him about JohnTom’s Barbecue Sauce, gives him a taste.
The head chef wants more – but he doesn’t want 18-ounce bottles. He wants gallon jugs.
This is how it starts. Pretty soon, with Pegues making the magic sauce and his partners working their magic charm, JohnTom’s is the official BBQ sauce at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Notre Dame athletics. It’s at Purdue games and IU dining. It’s with the Colts now. It’ll be with the Pacers this season. JohnTom’s is going national.
This is how the story goes. But Lathay Pegues knows how it started, with Mississippi native John Tom Branson on a patio in Muncie, making his homemade BBQ sauce on a homemade pit he made from brick.
“I just wish he was here,” Pegues says. “I wish he could’ve seen his name on the bottle in grocery stores or at the Colts complex. You made it, Grandpa. Your sauce made it.”
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: The rest of the story behind the Colts' 2023 menu at Lucas Oil Stadium
