I fell down a well…
I got involved in a WhatsApp discussion yesterday about unusual sports trivia and that led to me to Googling some interesting things and, long story short, I fell down a deep, deep internet well of interesting stuff about Hoosiers, one of my favorite movies.
Enjoy.
Hoosiers is based on “the Milan Miracle,” the story of the 1954 Milan High School Indians who won the Indiana High School Boys Basketball Tournament championship. With an enrollment of only 161, Milan was the smallest school ever to win a single-class state basketball title in Indiana, beating the team from the much larger Muncie Central High School. In the movie’s final game, the Hickory Hoosiers defeat South Bend Central, whose coach is played by a man named Ray Crowe.
In real life, Crowe was a basketball coach, educator, school administrator, and public official in Indianapolis and is best known as the head basketball coach of Crispus Attucks High School from 1950 to 1957. Following the Milan Miracle, his teams won the Indiana state basketball championship (in both 1955 and 1956) and, were the first all-black school to win a state championship in the country. He coached numerous Indiana All-Star players, including Oscar Robertson. It’s to the film-makers’ credit that he is given a role in the movie.
Hoosiers is widely regarded as the best basketball movie ever made and, in many people’s minds, the best sports movie, period. It is ranked #13 on the AFI’s list of the 100 most inspiring movies. I think it’s great — and the shot of Dennis Hopper jumping on the bed usually makes me tear up — but the movie is not without flaws.
This guy makes some excellent points about how awful Hoosiers really is and, after rewatching Chitwood’s final shot, I find myself wondering why the hell South Bend’s coach didn’t double-team Jimmy on the last play.
More about Chitwood: Maris Valainis, the actor who played the role, was an unknown who came to the rural Indiana casting call the film had to hold because it was made on a shoestring $6M budget. He had given up on waiting in the 600-person line and was walking to his car when a casting director saw him and asked him to show off his skills. He got the part.
Nobody knew it at the time, but Valainis had been cut from his high school team three times… nonetheless he evidently had skills: in filming the movie, they had to take two cuts of the game winning shot, and he made the shot both times.
The real player was named Bobby Plump and, while most of the movie has very little in common with actual events, Plump did sink the game-winner on a play that started with 18 seconds left… and he hit it from the same spot on the floor that Chitwood does in the movie.
Lots of ink has been spilled on this movie… some of the best (and most nerdy) is this statistical analysis of every play Chitwood makes in the movie.
Finally, this is amazing. Over the course of the entire movie, Chitwood has four lines:
- “I got something to say.”
- “I don’t know if it’ll make any change, but I figured it’s time for me to start playing ball.”
- “I play, coach stays. He goes, I go.”
- “I’ll make it.”
Enough.