Looking back on 'Hoosiers'

Only a handful of sports movies in the history of American cinema leave audiences with the feeling they have viewed not a great sports movie, but instead a great movie that happens to be about sports.\nThat's what the 1986 Orion Pictures film "Hoosiers" does.\n"It was a great movie because not all sports movies translate to the mainstream," said Andy Katz, senior college basketball writer for ESPN.com. "It was a good movie no matter what. 'Hoosiers' touched everyone who was rooting for the little guy."\nFor those who don't know, Hoosiers tells the story of a small town and even smaller high school's quest to be Indiana boys' basketball state champions in the early-1950s. \nThe team in the film, the Hickory Huskers, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of their championship season this year. And despite the fact the actors who were on the team actually did receive "1952 Indiana High School Champions" rings after filming closed, there probably won't be an anniversary party as the team is fictional, after all.\nBut that doesn't take away from the realism of the story.\n"I thought it was a great representation of basketball in the 1950s," said Ray Craft, who was a member of the "real" team the movie was based on, the 1954 Milan Indians. "The directors were aware of Indiana. They tried to authenticate it as much as they could."\nAll the players wore the high-top Chuck Cooper canvas Converses, which actually caused blisters on the actors' feet. They all dressed in those painfully-small "Daisy Duke" shorts, with jerseys that looked cheaper to make than a toupee for Gene Hackman's aging head.\nAnd they probably were that inexpensive. After all, the movie's budget was just $6 million.\nBut that meager budget didn't keep the film from making $30 million at the box office, as well as millions more on video and DVD sales, while garnering two Academy Award nominations along the way.\n"Sports movies never seem to come out right -- 'Hoosiers' did," said Don Fischer, 19-time winner of the Indiana Sportscaster of the Year award. "Rarely do you see a movie that close to the real thing."\nWell it was, and it wasn't. True, the scenery and the atmosphere of the town and state are as authentic as possible, but the story was embellished.\nThe film begins with Hackman's character, new coach Norman Dale, traveling to Hickory from wherever it is he's coming from. Dale's love interest and school principal Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) puts it best, "This place doesn't show up on most state maps. A man your age comes here, he's running away from something or he has nowhere else to go." \nWe later learn that Dale is a former national champion collegiate basketball coach that was fired 12 years earlier for hitting one of his players.\nControversy. That's what Hollywood likes.\nIt gets better, though. Dale first gets on the townspeople's bad side by deciding to take no nonsense from his players and change the entire strategy the former coach had implemented.\n"In the 1950s, basketball was it. It was the major social event. The high school game was the thing," said Roger Dickinson, president of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.\nSo you can understand how unpopular it was for Dale to piss off the town. \nDale also loses popularity points, this time through no fault of his own, because the team's star player, Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis), won't play. He thought of the former coach as a father-figure and has gone into a heavy bout of depression, not even opening his mouth to say, "Hi."\nBut after putting just four players on the floor in one game to try to prove a point that his philosophy is the only one that matters, Dale starts to win over part of the town and gain more respect from his players.\nWhat seemed like a shaky situation to begin with and had gotten even worse, was starting to look a little brighter, if not by much.\nBut after employing the "town drunk" (Dennis Hopper, who would receive an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role) as his new assistant coach, a town hall meeting is called to decide whether Dale should be fired or not.\nIn the most emotionally important scene of the movie, the meeting gets turned upside down, however, when Chitwood shows up and states that he will finally play, but only if the coach gets to keep his job.\nFrom there, the only thing that Dale has to worry about is winning basketball games, but that's not as easy as it sounds.\nHickory still had only eight players from the 161 students, and they are about to participate in the state tournament where all the best teams have a full squad of 12 and those schools had a few thousand people to select from.\nRemarkably, Hickory makes it to the state championship where they face "mighty" South Bend Central. In a game, dubbed "David vs. Goliath," Hickory comes out slow, shell-shocked at the atmosphere.\nEventually, though, the Huskers pull it together, nipping and clawing their way back into the game.\nWith the score tied with less than 30 seconds to go, Chitwood is setup with a game-winning shot opportunity.\nAnd wouldn't you know it, Chitwood hits nothing but net to win the championship 42-40.\nWith all its subplots and an obviously great main plot, who wouldn't love this movie?\n"It captures what makes our sport so special in Indiana," said Leigh Evans, who runs HickoryHusker.net, a Web site that gets 1.4 million hits per month during the high school basketball season. "It speaks for more than just a regional thing. It's almost like a subculture."\nA subculture that somehow struck a chord with the mainstream.