- This page is about the 1986 film "Hoosiers".
Hoosiers is also the nickname of Indiana
University
athletic teams; see Indiana Hoosiers. For the
UK Indie band, see The Hoosiers.
For information on the word itself, see Hoosier.
Hoosiers is a 1986
film about a small-town Indiana
high school
basketball team that wins the state
championship.
The story is set during 1951, when all high schools in Indiana,
regardless of size, competed in one state championship tournament.
It is very loosely based on the story of a real Indiana team of
that period, the
Milan High School
team that
won the
1954 state championship.
Gene Hackman stars as Norman Dale, a
new coach with a spotty past. It co-stars
Barbara Hershey,
Sheb
Wooley and
Dennis Hopper as a
basketball-loving town drunkard, a performance that brought Hopper
an
Oscar nomination.
The movie was written by
Angelo Pizzo,
who would go on to co-produce the underdog sports movie
Rudy, and directed by
David Anspaugh, who directed that film. The
score was composed by
Jerry Goldsmith, who was also nominated for
an
Oscar for
Best Music, Original Score.
Hoosiers was ranked number 13 by the
American Film Institute on its
100 Years... 100 Cheers. The film was the
choice of the readers of
USA
Today newspaper as the best sports movie of all time.
In 2001,
Hoosiers was selected for preservation in the United
States National Film Registry
by the Library of
Congress
as being "culturally, historically, or
aesthetically significant".
In June 2008, AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten" — the best ten films
in ten "classic" American film genres — after polling over 1,500
people from the creative community.
Hoosiers was
acknowledged as the fourth best film in the sports genre.
A museum to commemorate the real life achievements of the 1954
Milan team has been established.
Hoosiers was re-titled as Best
Shot in the United
Kingdom
.
Plot summary
Norman Dale arrives in the rural Indiana town of Hickory to be a
teacher and coach basketball. His friend Cletus has offered him the
job, knowing that it is something of a last chance for Dale, who
lost a previous position after physically striking a student.
Like much of the state, Hickory's community is passionate about
basketball. It is also painfully aware that the best player in
town, Jimmy Chitwood, does not intend to play on this season's
team, and Hickory faculty member Myra Fleener warns the new coach
not to try to persuade Jimmy to change his mind.
The enrollment is so small that Dale has very few players on his
squad. Nevertheless, when his strict rules are disobeyed, he
dismisses a key member of the team. The coach further alienates the
community with a slow, defensive style that does not immediately
produce results and by losing his temper, causing him to be ejected
from games more than once.
Dale needs a new assistant coach and invites a knowledgeable
basketball fan known as Shooter, the alcoholic father of one of his
players, to join him on the bench. This, too, confounds the town,
including Shooter's son.
By the middle of the season, an emergency town meeting is called to
vote on whether Dale should be dismissed. Fleener appreciates the
coach's staying away from Jimmy Chitwood and sides with him, but
the town nevertheless votes him out. At the last minute, however,
Jimmy asks permission to speak and announces that it is time for
him to begin playing basketball again—but only on one condition,
that Dale remain as a coach.
From this point on, Hickory becomes an unstoppable team. Despite a
setback in which Shooter arrives drunk to a game and ends up in a
hospital, Coach Dale's team advances through tournament play, with
contributions from unsung players such as the pint-sized Ollie and
devoutly religious Strap.
Hickory shocks the entire state by reaching the state championship
game. There, in a large arena and before a crowd the likes of which
these players have never seen, Hickory faces long odds in defeating
a team from South Bend that is deeper and more athletic. But with
Chitwood once again coming to the rescue at the last possible
second, tiny Hickory takes home the 1951 Indiana state
championship.
Cast
- Gene Hackman as Norman Dale
- Barbara Hershey as Myra
Fleener
- Dennis Hopper as Shooter
- Sheb Wooley as Cletus
- Maris Valainis as Jimmy Chitwood
- Brad Long as Buddy
- Steve Hollar as Rade
- David Neidorf as Everett
- Kent Poole as Merle
- Brad Boyle as Whit
- Scott Summers as Strap
- Wade Schenck as Ollie
- John E. Blazier (Spectator In Jasper Gym) (Uncredited)
Based on a true story
The film
is not really based on the story of the 1954 Indiana state
champions, Milan High School (
MY-lun), but the term "inspired by a true story" may be
more appropriate as there is little in the movie that coincides at
all with Milan's 1953–54 season other than both were small schools
that won the State Championship in the 1950s. The game
winning shot in the movie was based on
Bobby
Plump's last second shot to win the 1954 Indiana State
Basketball Championship. In most US states, high school athletic
teams are divided into different classes, usually based on the
number of enrolled students, with separate state championship
tournaments held for each classification. At the time, Indiana
conducted a single state basketball championship for all of its
high schools, and continued to do so until 1997.
Today, only Kentucky
, Delaware
, and
Hawaii
continue to use the one-class system to determine
the state high school basketball champion.Some elements of
the film do match closely with those of Milan's real story. Like
the movie's Hickory High School, Milan was a very small high school
in a rural, southern Indiana town. Both schools had undersized
teams. Both Hickory and Milan won the state finals by two points:
Hickory won 42–40, and Milan won 32–30. The final seconds of the
Hoosiers state final hold fairly closely to the details of
Milan's 1954 final; the final shot in the movie was taken from
virtually the same spot on the floor as Bobby Plump's actual
game-winner.
The movie's final game was even shot in the
same building that hosted the 1954 Indiana final, Butler University's Hinkle
Fieldhouse
(called
Butler Fieldhouse in 1954) in Indianapolis
.
Differences
- In the movie, Hickory begins its season without tryouts, as
only seven players are even concerned with playing basketball for
Hickory. Two players quit the team on the first day of practice,
though one returns the next day and the other also returns to the
team later into the season. Jimmy Chitwood is also added halfway
through the season, bringing its roster to seven plus Ollie, the
manager, who sees some time on account of injuries. At Milan, 58 of
the 73 boys enrolled at the school tried out for the team, and had
a roster consisting of 10 players.
- The controversy surrounding the coach and his methods, an
important element of the movie's story, was completely absent in
Milan — at least by 1954. Milan had fired its previous coach,
Herman "Snort" Grinstead, after the 1951–52 season for ordering new
uniforms against the superintendent's orders. Years later, Plump
would tell an ESPN interviewer that Grinstead had been "the most
popular coach in Milan's history." While Grinstead's successor,
Marvin Wood, would initially make some waves in Milan, he was never
the target of a town meeting to have him fired (unlike the movie).
In his first season as coach in 1952–53, he would lead Milan to the
state semifinals, defusing any remaining criticism.
- The town drunk character in the movie, Wilbur "Shooter" Flatch,
is the father of one of the members of the team, and becomes one of
the assistant coaches. He has no Milan counterpart.
- In the movie, Hickory's best player initially refuses to play,
devastated by the sudden death of his previous coach. This has no
parallel in the Milan story; as noted above, Milan's previous coach
had been fired two years before their championship.
- Hickory's manager, Ollie MacFarlane, plays in one game when the
Huskers have no other players left, and sinks two free throws to
win a key game. Milan had a manager with a similar name, Oliver
Jones, but he never played.
- The
school song played twice in the Hickory/Linton game is not Milan's,
but Manchester High School's located in North
Manchester, Indiana
. Filmakers wanted to use it because it was
one of the few only original school songs in Indiana. The song was
composed by former Manchester High School band and Manchester Civic
Band director Harold Leckrone.
- Hickory is depicted as a massive underdog throughout the movie.
Milan entered the 1953–54 season as one of the favorites to win the
state title, as it returned four starters from the state
semifinalists of 1952–53.
- Close tournament finishes
- In the movie, Hickory wins each of its tournament games by two
points or less. In 1954, Milan won seven of its eight tournament
games leading up to the final by double-digit margins, and the
other by 8 points.
- Wood, who died of bone cancer in 1999, could hardly have been
more different from Hickory coach Norman Dale (the Gene Hackman
character). Dale is a middle-aged former college coach with a shady
past and a volatile temper, and had a romantic relationship with a
fellow Hickory teacher. Wood was only 26, and married with two
children, when Milan won the state title, and had coached the
Indians to the 1953 state semifinals. By almost all reports, Wood
was a soft-spoken man of high integrity who often practiced
alongside his players.
- The championship game opponent
- In the state championship scene, the movie portrays South Bend Central High
School (chosen presumably because Milan had lost to South Bend
Central in the 1953 state semifinals) as a predominantly black
team. The real team was from Muncie Central High School, which had a
predominantly white team with three black members. The movie probably
borrowed from the actual history of the 1954 semistate final (state
quarterfinals), in which Milan defeated the segregated Crispus
Attucks High School
in Indianapolis, led by all-time great Oscar Robertson, then a sophomore. In
the movie, the South Bend Central coach is played by Ray Crowe, who
coached Crispus Attucks in 1954 and would, the next year, lead the
team to become the first all-black team in the United States to
win a state championship playing against schools with white
players. The Attucks team, with Crowe as coach and Robertson as
floor leader, would repeat as state champions in 1956, becoming the
first undefeated team in Indiana high school history.
Similarities
There were other connections between the movie and real life. The
announcer of the championship game in the movie was
Hilliard Gates, whose voice was familiar to
Indiana high school basketball fans of the 1950s and '60s.
The
legendary announcer Tom Carnegie played
the role of the public address announcer during the final
championship game at Hinkle Fieldhouse. Ray Craft also has a role in the film,
welcoming the Huskers to Butler Fieldhouse as they get off the bus
for the championship game. The game winning shot for the
championship is shot by Matt Melvin.
Behind the scenes
During
filming on location at Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler
University, directors were unable to secure enough extras for
shooting the final scenes even after casting calls through the
Indianapolis media. To help fill the stands, they invited
two local high schools to move a game to the Fieldhouse. Broad
Ripple and Chatard obliged, and crowd shots were filmed during
their actual game. Fans of both schools came out in period costumes
to serve as extras and to supplement the hundreds of locals who had
answered the call. At halftime and following the game, actors took
to the court to shoot footage of the "state championship" scenes,
including the game-winning shot by Hickory. (Note: Look closely at
the short stands behind one of the Fieldhouse goals and you'll see
a Chatard Letterman's Jacket bearing the year '86 worn by one of
the student extras.)
Speculation exists that the character of Norman Dale was named for
Norm Ellenberger, whose middle name
is Dale. A longtime assistant coach for
Bob
Knight at Indiana, he once played basketball for coach
Tony Hinkle at Butler.
The
film's producers chose New Richmond, Indiana
to serve as the fictional town of Hickory, and
recorded most of the film's location shots in and around the
community. Signs on the roads into New Richmond still recall
its role in the film.
See also
References
External links