Hoosiers

Hoosiers has its factual roots in a heroic basketball season. Tiny Milan High School won the 1954 Indiana basketball championship against incredible odds, capturing the imagination of roundball fans everywhere.

It’s one of those marvelous miracles that sometimes happen in sports, and it’s a natural story for a movie. Who better to give it filmic (and fictionalized) life than a pair of native Indianans: screenwriter Angelo Pizzo and director David Anspaugh. Perhaps they can best understand the hysteria with which Hoosiers assess their favorite sport.

In fact, that’s what Hoosiers does best. The feeling of a heavy autumn descending over a small town, and of a populace fiercely devoted to the only game around, is colorfully painted. It’s the sort of place where a school minister’s invocation is, “Lord, bless these boys and the season before them.” There may actually be too many shots of corn waving in the wind and pumpkins ripening.

The bucolic setting is invaded by an outsider: a new coach (Gene Hackman, exemplary as usual), brought in as a favor to the principal of Hickory High. Hackman’s a former big-college coach, who left the game years before in a player-slapping incident. This is his final shot at basketball.

He’s as ripe for redemption as the pumpkins are for carving. And he’s not the only one: There’s also a former local star, now a grown-up town drunk (Dennis Hopper). Hackman, determined to drag this souse into glory with him, makes Hopper the assistant coach on the team.

This is the role for which Dennis Hopper is nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and no wonder. Even his first scene, a continuous take as he stumbles into a diner, begs change, and is hustled out by his embarrassed son, has Academy Award nomination written all over it. Which is not to denigrate Hopper’s performance; he’s fine, and in a long tradition of Oscar-nominated drunks.

The season begins with a wobble, and the townsfolk want Hackman to pack his bags. But he wins over the participation of the school phenomenon (Maris Valainis), a boy with a deadly jump shot, who hasn’t played since the previous coach died. With this kid on board, the team is off and running.

At which point, better than halfway through, Hoosiers becomes a much less interesting movie. As the victories get more last-second and heart-stopping, the film becomes more mechanical.

The well-observed business of the town and its people falls away, and the victories take center stage. Barbara Hershey, who plays Hackman’s love interest, all but disappears in the last part of the movie.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with corn as high as an elephant’s you-know-what, but Hoosiers gets to be too insistent about it. If there is a short guy on the team who usually acts as waterboy, you can bet he’ll be called upon to make two free-throws in the final moments of a crucial game. And it’s sure that a dried-out Hopper will guide the team to a win when Hackman is tossed from a game.

Hoosiers is still enjoyable – and I look forward to more films from David Anspaugh, who has a nice touch (he’s directed a lot of episodes of Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere on television). But this film fades quickly from memory, and, for all its last-gasp histrionics, doesn’t match the drama of a truly historic sports event.

First published in The Herald, February 1987

Audiences, you know, disagreed with me. Apparently this is one of those beloved movies that was a drag to make; IMDb says that Hackman was a bummer on the set. Of no interest to anyone but me: changing the text here, I’ve put back the capitalization of Best Supporting Actor. At one point in my years at the Herald, an editor told me that I shouldn’t capitalize the categories for the Oscar nominations, and I didn’t, for years. Never knew why. AP Style book? Seemed odd at the time, seems odd now. Anyway, I’m capitalizing them.