Hoosiers

[JackJD]

In another thread, Nidaros and I had an exchange on the movie "Hoosiers" starring Gene Hackman as Coach Norman Dale, including the following:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nidaros
...The Coach Norman Dale from the movie Hoosiers is a very real person in my mind and there a bunch of them in real life.

JackJD:
Here's a link to the "real" Hoosiers team, the 1954 Indiana State champs from tiny Milan, Indiana, the team on which the Hoosiers movie is based. Milan's sharpshooter, Bobby Plump, is an interesting subject too...Google that name...a bigger-than-life figure in Indiana sports history.
http://www.sportshollywood.com/hoosiers.html

The movie "Hoosiers" is on ESPN Classics tonight (11/25/07, 7:00 p.m.). I can only guess how many times I've watched the movie -- many more times than any other movie (my second most watched movie is probably Animal House -- yeah, I know, a real mental giant). Hoosiers is my favorite sports movie, ahead of The Natural, Field of Dreams and Remember the Titans.

[HoboD]

Re: Hoosiers

In another thread, Nidaros and I had an exchange on the movie "Hoosiers" starring Gene Hackman as Coach Norman Dale, including the following:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nidaros
...The Coach Norman Dale from the movie Hoosiers is a very real person in my mind and there a bunch of them in real life.

JackJD:
Here's a link to the "real" Hoosiers team, the 1954 Indiana State champs from tiny Milan, Indiana, the team on which the Hoosiers movie is based. Milan's sharpshooter, Bobby Plump, is an interesting subject too...Google that name...a bigger-than-life figure in Indiana sports history.
http://www.sportshollywood.com/hoosiers.html

The movie "Hoosiers" is on ESPN Classics tonight (11/25/07, 7:00 p.m.). I can only guess how many times I've watched the movie -- many more times than any other movie (my second most watched movie is probably Animal House -- yeah, I know, a real mental giant). Hoosiers is my favorite sports movie, ahead of The Natural, Field of Dreams and Remember the Titans.

Rudy!..... Rudy!........Rudy!..............

[JackJD]

Re: Hoosiers

Absolutely, HoboD: Rudy is one of my all-time favorites.

Hoosiers is on again on ESPN Classics...must be running it non-stop today.

[Nidaros]

Re: Hoosiers

I would think most esquires would watch and re watch the Ox Bow Incident. Nahh thats one to serious, but I got to see some of it on Turkey Day. Its one that goes over your head. Lots of deep themes. You have to be over 65 to recognize the Ox Bow Incident cast. That was a great movie and book. Its in black and white though.

Hoosiers is a big movie in my mind as well. What I found in the links that JD pointed me to is that Hollywood still had a good product even after they found the real Milan story kind of dull and made adaptations. The real coach has a wife and family, Coach Dale was pursuing romance the Barbara Hershey character.
I dont think the NCAA, NAIA has ever banned a coach for hitting a player. Or do I stand to be corrected on that? I might also add that small towns have fallen hero's like the individual played by Dennis Hopper. So the changes from reality no doubt sold tickets and videos and now DVD's.

[GoJackRabbits#1]

Re: Hoosiers

Ha. I got somethin' to talk about here.

I can lay claim to being the only person on this board who has ever actually been to Milan, Indiana, a dot of a town in southeastern part of the state, maybe 45 minutes to an hour west of Cincinnati, a short jaunt off the Sunman/Milan exit of I-74. My mom's side of the family settled in the nearby town of New Alsace.

Anyway, even though Hollywood made some predictable adaptations to the story, the essence of what happened remains true. Back then, Indiana had only one division in the state tournament, so the winner of the state tournament was THE winner of the state tournament. It wasn't that long ago the tournament was divided up into divisions separating bigger schools from the smaller ones, and this was a BIG deal in Indiana; some people acted as if some sacred tradition was being broken.

It is my understanding that the the movies depiction of the final game was true to form, particularly the final play, down to the dribble. The Butler Fieldhouse in Indy, the site of the real final game, was used in the film.

The Milan story is a huge part of Indiana lore and the state's identity. Basketball is so big there.

[HoboD]

Re: Hoosiers

Here is some interesting trivia regarding Hoosiers:

The filmmakers had trouble filling the FieldHouse with extras for the final game, and needed to move people around when shooting different angles. Extras were given 1950's hairstyles and their clothing was checked for anachronisms.

Based on the 1954 Indiana State champs, Milan Indians.

The announcer at the final game is Hilliard Gates, who announced the "real" game.

The actual game was played between the Milan Indians and the Muncie Central Bearcats. For the movie, the South Bend Central Bears were the opponent. The true championship took place in 1954, not 1952 as in the movie, and the score was Milan 32, Muncie Central 30.

In the locker room before the final game, on the blackboard are the last names of the players on the opposing team. These are the real last names of the actors who make up the Hickory team.

The theater that was closed for the final game burned down in 1998.

The movie was renamed "Best Shot" in Europe because most Europeans wouldn't know what a Hoosier was.

The actor who played Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis) was the only player on the Hickory team not to play high school basketball. He did play college golf at Purdue his freshman year.

The theme song played twice in the Hickory/Linton game is the real-life theme song for the Southport Cardinals, a high school in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Wade Schenck, who plays equipment manager/reluctant player Ollie McClellan, has his real-life sister Libbey Schenck encouraging him during the games as a Hickory cheerleader (credited).

An actual Milan Indian Guard, Ray Craft, was in the movie. Craft was the person that greeted the Huskers when they got to the state finals, and he also was the one that told Coach Dale that it was time to take the court before the state final.

Maris Valainis was told that whether he made the last shot or not, people were going to rush the floor because of the need for a wide shot of the court. Luckily, he made it as shown in the movie.

Steve Hollar who played Rade Butcher was actually playing basketball for DePauw University at the time. This caught the attention of the NCAA. Later it was deemed that he was acting and not playing and was given a three-game suspension and was charged 5% of his acting fee.

The scene with Jimmy and Coach Dale talking while Jimmy shot baskets was filmed in one take. Maris Valainis said that he "wasn't even listening to him." "I was just concentrating on making them and I made one and they kept going in."

Jack Nicholson was the original choice to play Coach Norman Dale but had a schedule conflict. Told the producers he knew they were on a tight schedule to shoot, and if they found another actor to go ahead. If not, he could do it the next year. Gene Hackman then signed on for the part. (from the DVD bonus features)

For the scene where Dennis Hopper walks onto the court drunk in the middle of the game, Hopper wanted a ten-second notice before calling action. At the ten-second notice, he spun around in circles until action was called, allowing him to stagger onto the court in an awkward fashion in order to appear drunk.

The actor playing Ollie once left the set to watch his high school basketball team play. He was a junior on the team when he got the role and was feeling homesick, so he decided to go watch them. The crew had to contact his mother to get him to return.

[JackJD]

Re: Hoosiers

Great Hoosier trivia. I'm looking forward to watching the movie again.

Not long after the film was released, I met a fellow in Mitchell who claimed Hickory's home court in the movie was his Indiana high school's court ... I don't remember the town he was from.

[BitsTD]

Re: Hoosiers

The movie was renamed "Best Shot" in Europe because most Europeans wouldn't know what a Hoosier was.

[/QUOTE]

I don't know what a Hoosier is.

[GoJackRabbits#1]

Re: Hoosiers

The movie was renamed "Best Shot" in Europe because most Europeans wouldn't know what a Hoosier was.

I don't know what a Hoosier is.[/quote]

I'm assuming you know that "Hoosier" is the nickname for someone from Indiana. Where the name "Hoosier" comes from remains up for discussion, and I don't think anyone is totally sure of its origins.

Speaking of sports movies, "Breaking Away" is another good one filmed in Indiana, specifically in the area around Bloomington.

[GoJackRabbits#1]

Re: Hoosiers

Sorry about the length, but this is a great read. PART 1:

Although the Milan title run was nothing short of remarkable, the Milan High Indians were by no means a bunch of scrubs. The team had made it to the semifinals of the state tournament the year before, and all of its top players returned for the 1953-54 campaign. Before its championship march through the tournament, the team had compiled an impressive 19-2 regular season record. Contrary to the six-deep Hickory High Tigers in Hoosiers, the real Milan team had ten players (enough to practice five on five and to weather the injuries and fatigue of a season). In Bobby Plump, (who in the film is represented by the character of Jimmy Chitwood), the Indians had an unstoppable shooter and scorer. Most important, at this point in history, high school basketball in Indiana was dominated by small-town programs--literally the boys who grew up shooting on a basket nailed to the side of the family barn--rather than teams from more populous urban centers.
The real Milan High team was considerably better than the film leads us to believe, but the squad was still an enormous underdog. The Indians were intrinsically flawed: short on height and hops. The Indians' center stood all of five-foot-eleven. Thus what Milan needed to compensate for its limitations and to neutralize the size and athletic advantage of the competition was an effective strategy. The strategy Plump and his teammates would masterfully use in their title run would forever change the way the sport was played in the state. Milan's coach, Marvin Wood, a twenty-six-year-old up-and-comer, was nothing like Norman Dale, his counterpart in the film (played by Gene Hackman), an aging mentor with skeletons in the closet. Wood brought an offense to Milan that he had learned from Tony Hinkle at Butler University. The scheme was a very deliberate half-court set designed to retain the ball, eat the clock, and carefully pick and choose the shots to take on offense. This style is the antithesis of fast-break, full-court ball, and it is precisely the sort used to slow down and frustrate freewheeling teams that play a quicker game. This often yawn-inducing strategy made basketball games less a contest based on the speed, talent, and size of its players and more of a chess game between two coaches. Since most Indiana high schools played up-tempo basketball at the time, this game plan was also new and often baffling.
Milan's offense looked like the now well-known four corners offense, in which a guard stands with the ball at the top of the key and the remaining four players spread out in the half-court to occupy the four points of a box, one side running parallel to the baseline and the other running parallel to an extended free-throw line. The action ensues when a second guard comes to get the ball from the guard at the top of the key and the first guard takes the spot of the player to whom he has just passed. Meanwhile, the other players cut to the basket and end up in one of the four corners if they don't receive the ball during or immediately after cutting. Unless a cutter is wide open, the ball is worked around the horn from corner to corner. The guard at the top of the key can choose to pass, dribble, or simply hold the ball. While the four corners offense can be played aggressively and can even be exciting to watch when carried out by athletic players slicing to the hoop and crashing the boards, Milan's spread-and-delay offense was neither. Before the advent of the shot clock, the guard with the ball often exercised the last of his three options: he held the ball. And he held it and held it and then held it a little more. Against Muncie Central in the finals, during a stretch late in the game Plump held the ball for four minutes and thirteen seconds without dribbling.
The cat and mouse, as Milan's four corners offense was called, was a perfect way to both hide Milan's height deficiencies--since it had no post player on offense--and to slow down the pace of the game. (The term could also be used as a verb, as in "They were cat-and-mousing the Tigers all night.") Milan milked the strategy, and with a little help from Plump's heroic fifteen-footer in the final moments, it put away Muncie Central, an integrated school with a front line that averaged six-foot-four, by an all-time low finals' score of 32-30. Along the way, Milan knocked off a very strong all-black squad from Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis that featured a phenomenal six-foot-three-and-growing sophomore forward named Oscar Robertson.
According to Indiana basketball historian Philip M. Hoose, hoops had caught on in the black neighborhoods of Indianapolis by the 1940s. Basketball worked in impoverished urban areas for many of the same reasons that it worked in rural Indiana: the sport was accessible and inexpensive. In the Lockfield Projects, the Dust Bowl, a full court with two netless hoops, became the gathering place for talented black ballplayers like Robertson to hone their skills and tangle with the top competition.
By the start of the 1950s, without its own gym and with players wearing hand-me-down uniforms from (ironically) Butler University (the school that had passed the tactical kryptonite onto Milan's Coach Wood), Attucks was poised for tournament greatness. In 1955, the year after the "Milan Miracle," the Attucks Tigers won the championship game against black rival Gary Roosevelt, 97-64, narrowly missing the triple digits and surpassing the scoring record for a team in tournament play by twenty-nine points. The following year, the Tigers did it again, handily beating a white team from Jefferson-Lafayette for the title and finishing the season 31-0. Crispus Attucks High School was soon to be unbeatable, but it was still beatable when it squared off against Milan High in 1954.
The Attucks boys played an explosive, full-court game. On defense they hounded the opposition out of a 2-3 zone or press, and on offense, they looked to break whenever they could. Oscar Robertson, one of the first forwards to double as a point guard, often led the attack, so the Tigers played improvisational basketball and hit the offensive boards with a vengeance. This was the essence of black basketball--up-tempo, innovative, and exciting. It is interesting that this full-court style had previously been a white tradition in Indiana and specifically at IU. Before Bob Knight's name became synonymous with Indiana University, Bloomington belonged to Coach Branch McCracken. In his twenty-four years as IU coach, McCracken won two NCAA championships and four Big Ten titles, and he compiled multiple twenty-win seasons by playing high-scoring, racehorse basketball. And the fans loved it. During his tenure the boys from Bloomington were known as the Hurryin' Hoosiers. With an abundance of top-caliber black athletes, Attucks and its coach, Ray Crowe, had the kind of players to make this brand of basketball work effectively at the high school level, and the Tigers were the decade's dominant club.
During their matchup in 1954, however, the Milan Indians successfully slowed down the Crispus Attucks Tigers. Bobby Plump was on fire that day, scoring 28 points in total, and Milan built a 7-point lead by halftime. The cat-and-mouse game closed out the second half: the cutters got some easy baskets, and stalling made a comeback logistically impossible.
From that tournament day on, the deliberate cat-and-mouse half-court set became not only the blueprint for how to best play Crispus Attucks--and indeed Attucks regularly came up against this tactic afterwards--but it also became the formula that small, all-white schools would forever use to counter fast-breaking black teams. With the desegregation of schools formalized by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, many previously all-white and mostly white high schools, having witnessed, at their expense, the magnificence of Attucks during the mid-1950s, now pursued black players and often played quick-paced black basketball. The fast-breaking approach, which had once been the flagship style of the Hurryin' Hoosiers, was recoded as a black style in the years following McCracken's departure. While the Attucks dynasty signaled an era in which all-black or mostly black squads now dominated Indiana high school basketball, plenty of basketball-crazy white schools still steadfastly resisted desegregation. Consequently, as author Lee Daniel Levine articulates, the popularity of Milan's slow-it-down approach expanded in the 1960s and into the 1970s at the remaining small all-white schools. This became the formula for schools to remain white and still have a decent shot at winning basketball games.

Excerpted from Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball, University of Nebraska Press, 2007 (adapted from Chapter 5: My Dad Was a Military Man: Bob Knight, Paternalism, and Hoosier History).

[GoJackRabbits#1]

Re: Hoosiers

The rest of it. Read the previous post first. PART TWO:

Both the "Milan Miracle" and the preeminence of Crispus Attucks had profound effects on the integration of Indiana high schools. The high caliber of play at Attucks during the Robertson years drove athletic directors and coaches to acquire more black students. The motivation for many schools to integrate was often a purely utilitarian desire to bolster the quality of their basketball teams. In fact, many schools had little interest in effecting social change and in some instances were downright adverse to the idea of desegregation. After all, only a few decades had passed since the Ku Klux Klan's grip on the state had significantly loosened. (In 1920s Indiana, the Klan achieved its strongest level of political power in any state, northern or southern, and it dominated Indiana's government and school board. The Klan was not merely an extremist group at this juncture, and between one-quarter and one-third of all American-born white males in Indiana were members during this decade.) Regardless of the dubious rationale behind desegregation, several Indiana high schools both addressed the issue in the first place and came to accept integrated education because of what the Tigers had accomplished.
While the brilliance of Attucks's basketball pushed the desegregation process along, although it often moved grudgingly, the "Milan Miracle," had the opposite impact. Nurturing the hope that a second "miracle" might be on the way to their town, many smaller high schools rejected the notion of linking up with neighboring schools or consolidating into one school district, in the process shunning the opportunity for greater racial diversity. As journalist and Indiana historian Irving Leibovitz wrote in 1964, "Hoosiers want school consolidations like Indiana farmers want hoof-and-mouth disease for their livestock." Small-town folks preferred paying more for their children's education and making them continue to use the same dingy facilities than squandering a possibility for roundball glory and the statewide notoriety that came with it.

Small towns may have resisted consolidation and integration entirely because of town pride, but one would expect that schools in urban areas would have been far less apprehensive. Yet the extensive resistance to integration on the part of Indianapolis schools immediately suggests that racist attitudes--which we could assume would have been more pronounced in small-town Indiana than in the state's capital--fueled Indiana's aversion to desegregation at least as much as any hoop dreams. Indianapolis has an atrocious track record on school integration. In 1960, only 20 percent of high schools had been desegregated, compared with 15 percent in 1950. Indianapolis was so slow to desegregate that in 1968, the U.S. government sued the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners, citing de jure racial segregation in the Indianapolis public schools. The government accused the board of purposeful discrimination, gerrymandering of school zones, and faculty segregation. The state of Indiana had prevented school consolidation in Marion County by keeping metropolitan Indianapolis as part of one district and its outlying suburbs as part of another. After the 1968 suit, a drawn out court battle ensued between the Board of School Commissioners in Indianapolis and the federal government as Marion County adamantly continued to resist consolidating with urban Indianapolis. According to U.S. Supreme Court testimony, "The suburban Marion County units of government . . . [had] consistently resisted the movement of black citizens or black pupils into their territory."
As part of the social fabric of Indiana, basketball has always mirrored broader social patterns in the state. Given the context of Indiana's reluctance to adequately desegregate its high schools, the notion of containing blacks on the court by slowing down the game, stalling, and cat-and-mousing takes on deeper meaning. The educational, as well as the social and political, containment of blacks in everyday Indiana society reflects the same desire behind the effort to prevent black basketball players from, literally and figuratively, taking off. The motivation behind both forms of containment is white paranoia: What would happen if "we" let "them" go? Would "we" lose "our" schools? Would "we" lose "our" pastime?

Excerpted from Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball, University of Nebraska Press, 2007 (adapted from Chapter 5: My Dad Was a Military Man: Bob Knight, Paternalism, and Hoosier History).