Local high school hoops lore became a classic sports movie

I was happy to see my beloved “Hoosiers” on Bruce Jenkins’ excellent list of his 10 favorite sports movies (see accompanying story).

It had me harking back to one of the first articles I wrote for The Chronicle, on March 27, 2001, recalling my time working on the film as a college student in Indiana. At the time, the film was only 15 years old; now it is 34. In other words, “Hoosiers” is as old now as the classic western “High Noon” was then.

So what does “High Noon” have to do with “Hoosiers”? Read on:

***

As a movie maven and a sports honk, my March Madness has always included a frantic rush to see all the Academy Award-nominated films as well as watching the smallschool Hamptons of the world going for the upset against the powerhouse Dukies.

So it was in that frame of mind when I passed the DVD rack at Borders the other day and saw “Hoosiers” for five bucks off. It brought back a flood of memories about my only experience working on a movie.

It was in the autumn of 1985, and I was a sophomore at Indiana

University. In that basketball-mad state, it was huge news that two IU alums, writer-producer Angelo Pizzo and director David Anspaugh, were coming back to make a movie based on Milan High School’s legendary 1954 state championship.

Milan, a school of 161 students — only 73 boys — in the southeastern part of the state, beat Muncie Central, a school 10 times bigger, on Bobby Plump’s last-second shot. It is now part of every Indiana kid’s soul. Our IU boys needed help — namely, work-for-free production assistants. As the alternative was studying, I gladly spent two weekends as a P.A.

On the first weekend, the location was tiny Knightstown, Ind., about 40 miles east of Indianapolis and about 40 years behind it. The old gym — now being used by the middle school teams — was serving as the home of the fictional Hickory Huskers, based on Milan. The scene being shot that day was when the new coach, the brilliant but volatile Norman Dale (Gene Hackman, who based his character partly on former IU coach Bobby Knight), introduces his team at a pep rally but gets a lackluster greeting by the townsfolk.

My job was to help select extras from a pool of people gathered at the fancy new gym, where Knightstown currently played. People from all over the area had shown up for their shot at immortality, dressed in 1950s clothing. The film production unit’s makeup department was swamped giving ’50s-style haircuts.

I had been given a walkietalkie, and a production manager’s voice occasionally would crackle through and ask me to select extras. (“We need a dozen schoolkids, and maybe a half dozen middle-aged people,” he might say.) That took about half a day.

Finally, my duties were done and I was allowed go over to the old gym and observe filming. Anspaugh and Pizzo were there, going over lines with Hackman and Barbara Hershey, who played the coach’s love interest. I was disappointed that one of my favorite actors, Dennis Hopper, who would be Oscar-nominated for his portrayal as an alcoholic assistant coach, would not be present.

I did end up talking to a kindly old gentleman standing on the fringes of the action. He played the high school principal, and it wasn’t until deep into our conversation that I found out he was Sheb Wooley, a country singer who had a 1950s hit with “The Purple People Eater.” He also was a villain in one of my favorite movies, “High Noon,”

Gene Hackman played head coach Norman Dale in “Hoosiers.”

so he talked about acting with Gary Cooper.

I worked one more weekend on “Hoosiers,” when they filmed the thrilling final sequence at historic Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, where Milan won the championship (it was called Butler Fieldhouse then).

The producers had brainstormed for a way to fill the stadium, even placing a call to the Indiana Pacers, asking if they could move their game. An awful team that drew poorly at the time, the Pacers said they would have done it, but that night rookie Patrick Ewing would make his Indianapolis debut with the Knicks, so brisk sales precluded a move.

Finally, they remembered they were making a movie about the passion of high school basketball. They phoned my alma mater, Broad Ripple High, which was to play against neighborhood rival Chatard. The schools agreed to move the game, the students wore ’50s clothes and the crew filmed them as they cheered during the high school game, later cutting

some of that footage into the final sequence of the movie. Plenty of the students stuck around for the movie teams’ “game,” too.

None of us there that day knew that “Hoosiers” would be loved far beyond the borders of Indiana, becoming a sleeper hit upon its release in November 1986, and a legitimate national phenomenon in March 1987.

That’s because after the reellife “Hoosiers” was nominated for two Academy Awards (including Jerry Goldsmith’s score), the real-life Hoosiers were marching through the NCAA Tournament. When IU made the final game against Syracuse at the Louisiana Superdome, Anspaugh and Pizzo gave up their tickets to the Oscars, scheduled for the same night, and sat at home with two TVs. IU won 74-73 — on a lastsecond shot, just like in the movie — but the movie went 0-for-2.

Orion Pictures 1986