Good times! Here's a re-post of a write-up about those 2 games:
I watched the 2006 AFC title game at a small restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, while enjoying copious amounts of excellent Thai food, crappy Thai beer (ugh, Chang!) and crappy Thai weed. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have scheduled a climbing trip to rural Thailand during a post-season run. However the Colts had limped & dragged to a spot in the playoffs, looking tired and very, very beatable. This, combined with heart-breaking playoff exits in prior years when we seemed to have much better teams, led me to think it was fine to schedule a last-minute flight to nowhere.
The day before the game I had found a restaurant with satellite TV. Nobody in Bangkok knew anything about the game, but despite major translation difficulties I managed to get them to promise to show the ‘American Football’ game, if I showed up with some cash.
The first half of the game I was obviously not happy with the results. The Thais, typical of the culture, tried to cheer me up. However throughout the second half I was visibly very excited. The Thais, always happy to celebrate, were getting into it with me, despite not knowing anything about American Football. By the end they were cheering louder than me!
The victory presented a challenge though; I was due to be boated in to a rural climbing location the next day, with limited connectivity to the outside world, and wouldn’t be back to civilization for a month. But there was no way I was going to miss my Colts in the Super Bowl, even if I was on the moon, so I went about searching for a solution.
A few days before the Super Bowl I found a beach-side bar, way on the other side of the bay, that agreed to show the big game. Of course the kick-off was at 6am Thailand time! Knowing the locals were often on ‘island time’ I was nervous that the workers would party all night and oversleep, thus negating my long-awaited Super Bowl.
The morning of the big game I woke up at 5 am, walked down to the beach, and hiked & waded across the bay to the Railay Peninsula. I had barely slept the night before, due to both nerves about the game & my partaking in the all-night beach parties. I stumbled groggily up to the bar a little after 6am, just before kickoff. I was not the only patron; in addition to a few few sleepy-eyed workers there were a handful of old, large Europeans (including 2 huge guys in Speedos) all of whom were rooting for the Bears! Boooooooooo! I may have started as the only Colts fan, but by the end of the game I had the Thais on my side, and we were all cheering away! It was fabulous!
Those were two of my all-time favorite Colts games. It was a unique way see these games, but not how I would have planned it. If I had thought we would go to the Super Bowl I would never have booked that trip & risked not being able to see the games. And in strictly a football sense, it would’ve been more enjoyable to watch the game in familiar surroundings, amid a sea of Colts fans.