Hoops. Hoosiers. Hollywood. Home.
By Bill Kauffman
Every February, bandbox gyms in thousands of high schools across the fruited plain resound with dribbled basketballs and clanking jumpshots and blackguard curses vociferated against referees who are, inevitably, both blind and biased. If it’s late winter, it must be tournament time.
And you can bet that nearly every shooter on the hardwood floor has seen—and seen himself in—Hoosiers. The 1986 film is generally regarded as the best sports movie ever made. It is also a deeply moving depiction of the centrality to a small town of the locally controlled school.
Hoosiers is based on the great folkloric event in Indiana sports history: the 1954 state basketball championship won by the team from little Milan, Indiana (“Hickory” in the movie). Milan defeated Muncie in the title game, 32-30, on a last second shot by its star player, the exquisitely named Bobby Plump. Unlike other states, Indiana’s tournament was open to all schools, regardless of size. Country boys, city boys, two room academies, and concrete warehouses in the asphalt jungle: everyone competed in the same division.
A generation of Indiana schoolboys was raised on mythic tales of mighty Milan. I spoke recently with one such Hoosier lad: Angelo Pizzo, the Bloomington native who wrote and produced Hoosiers.
Pizzo and his college roommate, fellow Indianan David Anspaugh, had long talked of making a movie “about the meaning of basketball to people in Indiana.” The daydream started to take shape when Pizzo, home for Christmas from USC film school, dropped by a high school game at Bloomington South. “The energy in that place—it blew away any rock concert. You have these guys in overalls, normally monosyllabic people, out of their seats, off the ground. I was just watching those people, feeling the energy, and I thought if I could ever capture this on film it would be special. Of course, the state myth is Milan winning the championship, so that’s what I gravitated toward.”
His early research was unpromising. “The essence of all drama is conflict. I went to interview the original [Milan] guys, and I said to the first person, ‘Were there any problems, any adversities?’ ‘Nope, everybody got along real good.’ I said, ‘You didn’t have one troublemaker?’ ‘Well, Bobby Plump used to show up late. Coach made him run laps.’ I knew I didn’t have a movie.”
So Pizzo drew from his own Indiana boyhood. “I got in my mind five high school buddies. I gave them form and voice.”
The coach of Milan, Marvin Wood, was just 26 years old during the 1954 championship season. “I wrote it that way and the movie didn’t work. If he had failed, he still had the rest of his life.” Inspired by Horton Foote’s Tender Mercies, with Robert Duvall’s memorable performance, “I went back and made the character older, a guy with a last chance.”
A top-shelf lineup turned down roles in Hoosiers. Robert Duvall passed on the role of the coach (Norman Dale in the movie). It went instead to Gene Hackman. The part of Shooter, the redeemable, alcoholic ex-jock played by Dennis Hopper, was rejected by Harry Dean Stanton. John Mellencamp was asked to write the score but, according to Pizzo, said no because he thought “those guys don’t know anything about basketball.” (Pizzo notes that “John never played basketball. He was one of those kids who hated kids with letter jackets.”)
Coach Dale, a volatile man getting a final shot at success in a movie about second chances, is based in part on Indiana University’s legendary Bobby Knight. “I utilized Knight’s offensive philosophy: four passes before a shot,” says Pizzo. He adds: “I wondered what would happen if Knight punched a player”—as the Hackman character does in his film.
In two years of seeking financing for the film, Pizzo and Anspaugh were turned down by every movie studio, every Midwesterner, and every basketball fan they approached. Their savior, says Pizzo, was a foreign rogue who “had never seen a basketball game, never heard of Indiana.” He was “an uneducated Cockney whose dad used to show up drunk and embarrass him when he was playing soccer.” The script’s relationship between Shooter and his son “made him cry. He said, ‘How much do you need?’ We got $6 million.”
Local success
“I always felt that place in a movie is as powerful as a leading character,” says Pizzo. “What is missing in a lot of movies is a sense of place: it becomes generic, it becomes Toronto through
New York. With Hoosiers, David and I insisted that if we don’t shoot in Indiana we don’t shoot at all.”
In a brilliant stroke of verisimilitude, “We determined not only to shoot in Indiana but to hire only real Indiana basketball players. We had open casting calls and reduced them not by reading but by basketball playing.” (In the end, art triumphedover athleticism: the best basketball player in the cast, Wade Schenck, played the diffident manager Ollie; the least-skilled cager, Maris Valainis, played star Jimmy Chitwood.) The gamble paid off. The kids are utterly believable, and the film escaped the curse of such Hollywood sports movies as Bang the Drum Slowly, in which major league baseball catcher Robert De Niro throws like a girl. Pizzo chuckles that “the classic is Anthony Perkins in Fear Strikes Out,” the story of psycho Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall. “Talk about throwing like a girl—he was a girl!”
(In a tragic 2003 coda, one local actor, Kent Poole, whose character Merle utters the most poignant line in the film—“Let’s win this one for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here”—hanged himself from a tree in his Crawfordsville, Indiana, yard. “I got a call from him about a week before he killed himself,” says Pizzo. “He said that he really needed to send me something and got my address. Then I heard he killed himself. Every day I went to the mailbox looking for whatever it was. I never got anything.”)
In its sympathetic yet never bathetic understanding of rural America, Hoosiers avoids the mawkishness of the typical Hollywood valentine to the small town. It also commits a refreshing crime against P.C. sensibilities. Hickory, like Milan in real life, defeats an integrated team for the state title—a jarring scene, since in Hollywood a “white team” never defeats a “black team” unless the whites cheat, pay off the refs, or spit out racial epithets in cracker accents. “We tried to mirror what these kids experienced,” explains Pizzo. “What we didn’t show was that in the semifinals, they played Crispus Attucks, which had a young sophomore star in Oscar Robertson.” In the film, the coach of the team that Hickory defeats in the finals is played by Ray Crowe, the actual coach of the great Crispus Attucks teams.
Hoosiers is one of those rare films that finds a larger audience with each passing year. “The fact that it’s lived on blows my mind,” says Pizzo. “The older the movie gets, the more popular it gets.” You can’t call it a cult movie, since every ninth-grade second-string point guard in America has seen it.
The film is beloved but also genuinely good. It avoids schmaltz, cliche, and cheapness. Its anchorage in Indiana myth and its respect for a place and a time elevate it to that echelon of movies—To Kill a Mockingbird, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Grapes of Wrath—that are both widely cherished and artistic successes. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards (for Hopper’s performance and Jerry Goldsmith’s stirring score), but Pizzo and Anspaugh skipped the Oscars. You see, Indiana University was playing Syracuse for the NCAA championship coincident with the awards, “and I called David and said Indiana basketball is much more important” than the Oscars, recalls Pizzo. Wise choice: Keith Smart’s buzzer-beating jumpshot won the game and title for the collegiate Hoosiers, and Pizzo’s friendship with Bobby Knight resulted.
There’s a knowing moment in Hoosiers in which team manager Ollie notes that the wonders of “progress” include “school consolidation”—which swallowed up and killed thousands of America’s Hickory Highs. Partly because of the state championship Milan retained its independence, but many rural schools which gave small communities a sense of identity were wiped out in the centralizing craze of the 1950s. “When Milan won the state championship, there were 756 high schools,” notes Pizzo. “Last year, there were 265.”
Pizzo lists other changes. “Nobody had television. They didn’t have a movie house. Accents were different. The sense of pride and identity connected with your place was so different then. Now there’s television and strip malls and Wal-Mart. They all play the same video games, they all have Playstations.”
Indiana’s open tournament has been dismantled. Schools now play only schools of similar size. While this may seem “fairer” in some abstract sense, “it’s ruined things,” according to Pizzo. Teams “don’t play their natural regional rivals” in the sectionals; instead, they travel long distances to play schools in their class. With geography taken out of the equation the sectionals “mean nothing. They’ve dissipated the excitement across the board.”
And yet, Indiana endures. “There is still a qualitative difference between people in Anderson, Indiana, and New Albany, Indiana,” says Angelo Pizzo. And that knowledge informs his work.
Pizzo and Anspaugh followed Hoosiers with two other feature film collaborations. In 1993’s Rudy, their ode to perseverance, a working-class Catholic kid from Joliet who dreams of Notre Dame and surmounts any number of obstacles to earn admittance and then a place on the football team’s practice squad caps his career by finally getting into a game in his senior season. That the film is especially treasured by Notre Damers is an ironic twist, laughs Pizzo, because “growing up in Bloomington, I hated Notre Dame.” He saw in Rudy’s tale “a metaphor for somebody from the middle of nowhere going into the film business thinking he’s going to make a movie, and people telling him he’s crazy and a fool and has no chance. It’s a lonely pursuit, and this is a lonely guy.”
Like Hoosiers, Rudy is also notable for the respect with which it treats men of the cloth.
The Protestant minister who drives the team bus in Hoosiers emboldens the team by reading from the Biblical story of David and Goliath. The priest in Rudy is a wise elder. In other films, the minister would have been a Pharisaical prig and the priest a clammy child molester.
The first failure for the Pizzo-Anspaugh team was 2005’s The Game of their Lives, the story of the U.S. soccer team’s astonishing 1950 World Cup upset of England. It was “a nightmare from start to finish,” says Pizzo, and the film flopped both commercially and critically. On the brighter side, this may have helped forestall the further advance of the alien game of soccer upon American culture.
Living the dream
There is a fitting postscript to the Hoosiers story. Angelo Pizzo, the man who created Norman Dale and sent him to Hickory, has himself returned to Bloomington. This homecoming contradicts the typical tale in which talented boys from Indiana dream of hightailing it to Hollywood or Manhattan, and never looking back. But marriage and children refocused Pizzo’s dreams.
“My wife Greta hated L.A.” says Pizzo. “Then we had two boys and she grew to hate it more. There was stratification, elitism, no mingling. What we were looking for we didn’t find: a sense of community.”
“I was coming back to Indiana 10 or 15 times a year, and it hit me that Indiana was my community. I always looked forward to coming back, and I never wanted to get on the plane to Los Angeles, except to see my family.”
The epiphany hit over eggs and coffee. A friend invited him to a weekly Wednesday morning breakfast at a Bloomington restaurant. The diners included a lawyer, a newspaper editor, a sports statistician, a pharmaceutical salesman, a retired principal, a hippie export-importer, a professor, and the former football coach at Indiana University.
“I had a profound sense of envy of my friend for going to those breakfasts,” explains Pizzo. “In L.A., you don’t talk about anything other than the film business. I could never have a conversation that even remotely mirrored that one.”
“He called me,” says Greta, “and said, ‘I want something like that.’ Then that moved into, ‘No, I want that!’” They made the move to Bloomington in early 2004. “My only regret,” says Pizzo, “is the month of March.”
Greta, who Pizzo met on the set of Rudy, says, “Angelo kept saying you can’t go home again. But we’ve found that not only can you go home again but there’s something about that experience that is essential. We’re in a healthy community; our kids can walk a block and a half to their school; Angelo is connected to something.”
He has not forsworn filmmaking, just the stifling assumption that one must live in the hive to make motion pictures. Pizzo has several projects underway, including a semi-autobiographical film set in Bloomington. His hometown had its cinematic moment with Breaking Away (1979), the much-praised film about a band of townies winning Indiana University’s Little 500 bike race, and while that film has a certain winsomeness, Pizzo was appalled by its inauthenticity. “I saw my hometown being depicted and I didn’t recognize any of the people in it. Those people didn’t belong in Bloomington. The director had never been to Indiana before; the parents were not Bloomington people.” And as for Dennis Christopher, the fey opera-singing hero, “What planet was he from? There’s nothing Bloomington about that kid.”
The lesson Pizzo drew from Breaking Away was that “in a movie called Hoosiers, you’d better get Indiana right.” He and David Anspaugh got it right.
Hoosiers is no fantasy. Go down to your local high school gym. Listen to the screams, the handclaps, the shouts of encouragement. That noise you hear is the sound of community.
Associate editor Bill Kauffman’s most recent book is Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette; his Look Homeward, America is due in May.
