jerseyshorejohnny
Well-known member
Back in 1986, when a Hoosier was the NBA’s most valuable player—Larry Bird, reared in French Lick, Ind., educated at Indiana State—Americans flocked to the movie “Hoosiers,” a feel-good film starring Gene Hackman, Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey about a tiny high school that defied all odds to win the Indiana state championship.
The film, inspired by the Milan High School squad that won the state championship in 1954, opens with a glimpse of a rural crossroads, two young people shooting balls at a hoop affixed to an old white barn, DeSoto automobiles with their distinctive grilles cruising a picturesque set of downtown blocks—a portrait of an old America, where the floors of the high school glistened with wax, the girls wore long plaid skirts and the male hoopsters wore short pants on the hardcourt and performed their foul shots with underhand thrusts.
It’s a wonderful movie, as Frank Capra might say, capturing the magic that comes from a leather ball and an iron hoop and from a stolen kiss between a grizzly high-school basketball coach and a comely school teacher—so wonderful, in fact, that the American Film Institute selected it as one of the best sports films of all time and former Vice President Mike Pence (born Columbus, Ind.) proclaimed it the “greatest sports movie ever made.”
The story is well-loved, and the accolades are well-earned, but there is another Hoosier story that deserves to be known, as moving as the film’s and as worthy of mythic status: the real-life tale of an Indiana high-school team that won the state championship in 1955, a year after the big victory portrayed in ”Hoosiers.”
As Jack McCallum tells us in “The Real Hoosiers,” Crispus Attucks High School in segregated Indianapolis didn’t have an even remotely respectable gym, and its neighborhood and atmosphere bore little resemblance to those of the movie’s Hickory High School. Yet it won two consecutive Indiana state championships with every bit as much grit and resilience as the movie’s now-legendary team.
There is a star to this story, too, if not of the strictly Hollywood variety: Oscar Robertson, known to millions as one of the great pro players of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even considering the achievements of his professional career, Robertson’s most treasured moments came in the years he played under Ray Crowe at Crispus Attucks, where he once scored 62 points in a single game and recorded 1,231 points in three seasons of play.
Robertson and Crowe are the central figures of “The Real Hoosiers,” but the narrative adroitly unfolded by Mr. McCallum, a veteran sportswriter whose last book chronicled the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors, widens out to convey the particulars of the time and place: the mid-1950s, just after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the nation’s schools; and midcentury Indiana, a state in which the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence and, at one time, might credibly have claimed the allegiance of the entire Indianapolis school board. Crispus Attucks High School was, in Mr. McCallum’s bracing description, “built near a confluence of three fetid waterways, built to keep Blacks in their place, built by haters, built to fail.”
In making history, the Attucks players rewrote the customs, the rhythms and the character of the game in a basketball-mad state. Led by Robertson—the great-grandson of an enslaved man and the descendant of a Southern sharecropper family that traveled north to Indianapolis in search of work and opportunity—the Attucks Tigers played a disciplined brand of basketball that combined two of Crowe’s core principles with relevance beyond the court: self-control and ethics. “Be right without fear,” he preached. “Unfair victory is bittersweet.”
As an Attucks sophomore, Robertson—not yet the “Big O” of Hall of Fame legend—was what Mr. McCallum calls “an unlikely agent of chaos,” with an unusual “get-the-hell-out-of-the-way” style that was both an act of aggression and a work of art. From season to season, his leadership role increased, along with his stature. By the time he arrived at the University of Cincinnati in 1957 he was a phenom—“a kid who, from his earlier days, thought like a quarterback, a kid who seemed to bypass apprenticeship,” almost musical in his movements. “He was Miles Davis,” Mr. McCallum says, “an artist who blew with the cats on 52nd Street but was also schooled in the rudiments at Juilliard.”
Robertson and his teammates played against both tough opponents and an open-secret obstacle: race-driven refereeing, which gave white teams a quiet but distinct advantage. Robertson had challenges at home, too: a parental divorce and a forced move because the city fathers agreed to bulldoze his neighborhood so a hospital could expand. The pretext was redevelopment or urban renewal—two terms prominent at the time and in disrepute today—but the subtext, also prominent and in disrepute, was slum clearance, displacing 10,000 people, almost all black.
All the players on both teams in the 1955 final also were black—solving the racial officiating problem, for sure—and so when Attucks defeated Roosevelt (from Gary) only a decade after blacks were first allowed to play in the tournament, two landmarks were reached: Attucks was both the first black school to become state champs and the first winners from Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Star called it the top story of the year, edging out a fatal crash at the Indianapolis 500. A year later the Attucks Tigers, champions again, were the first undefeated basketball team in state history.
The team’s success changed the high school even as it coaxed Indianapolis and its broader culture toward change. Money from ticket revenue flowed to the school, enough to underwrite a new printing press and equipment for vocational-education classes. It also helped the school sponsor golf and tennis teams when those sports were not part of the vision of black students, who were certainly not welcome in the white-only clubs where those sports were played. Black businesses in the area began to flourish. People experienced a new sense of possibility and hope.
And the Big O himself? When, on Jan. 9, 1958, he scored 56 points for the University of Cincinnati against Seton Hall, Robertson was asked whether that Madison Square Garden game was his biggest thrill. “Nah,” he answered, and readers of “The Real Hoosiers” will recognize that he was speaking the truth. “My biggest thrill was helping Crispus Attucks win two Indiana state championships.” His Tigers were indeed the Real Hoosiers.
The film, inspired by the Milan High School squad that won the state championship in 1954, opens with a glimpse of a rural crossroads, two young people shooting balls at a hoop affixed to an old white barn, DeSoto automobiles with their distinctive grilles cruising a picturesque set of downtown blocks—a portrait of an old America, where the floors of the high school glistened with wax, the girls wore long plaid skirts and the male hoopsters wore short pants on the hardcourt and performed their foul shots with underhand thrusts.
It’s a wonderful movie, as Frank Capra might say, capturing the magic that comes from a leather ball and an iron hoop and from a stolen kiss between a grizzly high-school basketball coach and a comely school teacher—so wonderful, in fact, that the American Film Institute selected it as one of the best sports films of all time and former Vice President Mike Pence (born Columbus, Ind.) proclaimed it the “greatest sports movie ever made.”
High-school basketball heroes, the revolutionaries inspired by America, the genius of Miles Davis and more.The story is well-loved, and the accolades are well-earned, but there is another Hoosier story that deserves to be known, as moving as the film’s and as worthy of mythic status: the real-life tale of an Indiana high-school team that won the state championship in 1955, a year after the big victory portrayed in ”Hoosiers.”
As Jack McCallum tells us in “The Real Hoosiers,” Crispus Attucks High School in segregated Indianapolis didn’t have an even remotely respectable gym, and its neighborhood and atmosphere bore little resemblance to those of the movie’s Hickory High School. Yet it won two consecutive Indiana state championships with every bit as much grit and resilience as the movie’s now-legendary team.
There is a star to this story, too, if not of the strictly Hollywood variety: Oscar Robertson, known to millions as one of the great pro players of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even considering the achievements of his professional career, Robertson’s most treasured moments came in the years he played under Ray Crowe at Crispus Attucks, where he once scored 62 points in a single game and recorded 1,231 points in three seasons of play.
Robertson and Crowe are the central figures of “The Real Hoosiers,” but the narrative adroitly unfolded by Mr. McCallum, a veteran sportswriter whose last book chronicled the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors, widens out to convey the particulars of the time and place: the mid-1950s, just after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the nation’s schools; and midcentury Indiana, a state in which the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence and, at one time, might credibly have claimed the allegiance of the entire Indianapolis school board. Crispus Attucks High School was, in Mr. McCallum’s bracing description, “built near a confluence of three fetid waterways, built to keep Blacks in their place, built by haters, built to fail.”
In making history, the Attucks players rewrote the customs, the rhythms and the character of the game in a basketball-mad state. Led by Robertson—the great-grandson of an enslaved man and the descendant of a Southern sharecropper family that traveled north to Indianapolis in search of work and opportunity—the Attucks Tigers played a disciplined brand of basketball that combined two of Crowe’s core principles with relevance beyond the court: self-control and ethics. “Be right without fear,” he preached. “Unfair victory is bittersweet.”
As an Attucks sophomore, Robertson—not yet the “Big O” of Hall of Fame legend—was what Mr. McCallum calls “an unlikely agent of chaos,” with an unusual “get-the-hell-out-of-the-way” style that was both an act of aggression and a work of art. From season to season, his leadership role increased, along with his stature. By the time he arrived at the University of Cincinnati in 1957 he was a phenom—“a kid who, from his earlier days, thought like a quarterback, a kid who seemed to bypass apprenticeship,” almost musical in his movements. “He was Miles Davis,” Mr. McCallum says, “an artist who blew with the cats on 52nd Street but was also schooled in the rudiments at Juilliard.”
Robertson and his teammates played against both tough opponents and an open-secret obstacle: race-driven refereeing, which gave white teams a quiet but distinct advantage. Robertson had challenges at home, too: a parental divorce and a forced move because the city fathers agreed to bulldoze his neighborhood so a hospital could expand. The pretext was redevelopment or urban renewal—two terms prominent at the time and in disrepute today—but the subtext, also prominent and in disrepute, was slum clearance, displacing 10,000 people, almost all black.
All the players on both teams in the 1955 final also were black—solving the racial officiating problem, for sure—and so when Attucks defeated Roosevelt (from Gary) only a decade after blacks were first allowed to play in the tournament, two landmarks were reached: Attucks was both the first black school to become state champs and the first winners from Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Star called it the top story of the year, edging out a fatal crash at the Indianapolis 500. A year later the Attucks Tigers, champions again, were the first undefeated basketball team in state history.
The team’s success changed the high school even as it coaxed Indianapolis and its broader culture toward change. Money from ticket revenue flowed to the school, enough to underwrite a new printing press and equipment for vocational-education classes. It also helped the school sponsor golf and tennis teams when those sports were not part of the vision of black students, who were certainly not welcome in the white-only clubs where those sports were played. Black businesses in the area began to flourish. People experienced a new sense of possibility and hope.
And the Big O himself? When, on Jan. 9, 1958, he scored 56 points for the University of Cincinnati against Seton Hall, Robertson was asked whether that Madison Square Garden game was his biggest thrill. “Nah,” he answered, and readers of “The Real Hoosiers” will recognize that he was speaking the truth. “My biggest thrill was helping Crispus Attucks win two Indiana state championships.” His Tigers were indeed the Real Hoosiers.
