Ebbets Field
Reviews
A film about the meek with a mighty message
By DAVID BULLA
Ebbets Field Editor
�It�s nice to be important, but it�s more important to be nice.� -- Mary Lou Wood, wife of Milan High School coach Marvin Wood, after the Indians� 1954 IHSAA state championship
�Hoosiers,� the 1987 drama by writer Angelo Pizzo and director David Anspaugh, has been called the best sports film ever made by Marv Albert, the long-time NBA broadcaster. Yet �Hoosiers,� nominated for two Academy Awards, is far more than a sports film. It is a narrative that touches on some of life�s most universal themes: love, redemption, sacrifice and unity. What Pizzo and Anspaugh created went beyond �Rocky I,� �Chariots of Fire� and �The Natural,� all serious sports films that treated the underdog theme. Hoosiers, in the same vein as the melancholy �Bang the Drum Slowly,� is a story about ordinary men and women trying to make meaning out of their lives. Man, Martin Heidegger wrote, is not merely a higher organism responding to and controlling his environment; he is that being in the world whose calling it is to find a name for being, to give testimony to it and provide for it a clearing. And the meaning of this extraordinary little film comes in its final four words, spoken by protagonist Norman Dale: �I love you guys.�
Indeed, love is the film�s greatest theme: the love of son for his father, the love of coach for his players, the love of a man for a woman, the love of a town for a stranger in its midst, the love of a town for its school and its basketball team and finally, as Gene Hackman, who plays Norman Dale, puts it, the love we have for the idea of the little guy being able to overcome the big guy. In short, �Hoosiers� is about a set of cultural values fast waning in contemporary America. Therefore, though the story intends to have a very inspiring message, it becomes more like nostalgia with each passing year. Small town America -- Indiana -- is giving way with each successive decade to another America, a global, corporate, non-agrarian, non-Rust Belt America, and the transition has made these various types of love much more tenuous for late 20th- and early 21st-century Americans.
This is a story about how all of these types of love include faith and respect. Dale�s love is that of a father who merely asks of his sons: Believe what I say and do it, then you will be empowered by a love you have never known before. This love doesn�t hold the same sway over us as romantic or physical love, yet it is equally rewarding in the long run. It is a restorative love, requiring sacrifice, of putting oneself second to that of family and community. Almost every major character in Pizzo�s gem of a movie learns this lesson, and its payoff is the renewal of a small Midwestern town.
The film�s fictional Hickory, Indiana, based loosely on Milan, Indiana, is a town that has seen better days. Pizzo, a native of Bloomington, Ind., who attended first University High School (which is now defunct) and then Indiana University, said he could not make a film strictly about tiny Milan�s 1954 miracle state championship team (ranked by the Indianapolis Star-News as the top sports story in the state in the 20th century) because �the guys were too nice, the team had no real conflict. I try to trick the objective, linear, logical side of my brain into taking a rest when I put pen to paper. All I was interested in was to tell a good story with compelling characters while capturing the unique and special world of Indiana High School basketball. There had to be conflict, exposition, climax and resolution. The real Milan team�s story was not entertaining enough for a feature film� the writer said. Thus, Pizzo and Anspaugh created Hickory, a corn-belt town in the tradition-laden, slow-paced Heartland. When Anspaugh, the producer of the first-rate TV cop series �Hill Street Blues,� first shows Hickory to us, drab colors -- gray and brown -- predominate, suggesting the town�s long, slow decline, a slide that is inevitable as post-World War II America turns away from family to corporate farming.
Yet Pizzo is not going to tell us a story about ruin. The town is small-town southern Indiana beautiful. When the leaves turn in the fall, the orange and red vistas foreshadow a transformation from humdrum village to renewed town. It is ironic that it is fall when Dale enters the town and this modern David-and-Goliath story begins. Hackman�s character is the catalyst for renewal. He shares a covenent with his players that is so genuine and demanding that Jimmy Chitwood, the town�s best teenage cager, begins to rethink his decision to forego his senior season in order to focus on getting an academic scholarship. Dale, it is clear to Chitwood, is not a fraud. He is a consummate professional, but he is also a man who needs a break in life.
The screen writer alludes to an America that was much more conversant with the Old Testament than we denizens of the early 21st century. His story has its cultural roots in the stories of Ruth and David in the Old Testament, central Hebrew stories that have helped to shape the Judeo-Christian tradition. The redemption that Pizzo presents in his narrative requires two conditions: (1) a person must be lost -- or at least he or she must be a stranger in a strange land; and (2) that character must be given a second chance, an opportunity to recover himself. Note that I said given a second chance. Norman Dale cannot create it himself; it has to be given by the town, which it eventually does in the referendum scene at the church.
In �Hoosiers� several lost souls emerge: Dale, Chitwood (whose parents and old coach have died), Myra Fleener (the school marm who gave up her pursuit of a masters degree to come home and help take care of her aging parents), Wilbur Shooter Flash (the town has-been hero and inebriate, played by Dennis Hopper, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance), Everett Flash (Shooter�s tea-totaling, achievement-oriented son), George (the scheming interim coach) and Cleatus Summers (the principal who hires his old college buddy Norm before having a heart attack as the Huskers struggle mightily to understand their new coach). Even the town�s matriarch, Opal Fleener, Myra Fleener�s mother, has her own personal cross to bear since her husband got sick and died. In small town America, such suffering seems to get magnified; it is harder to hide the pain. But communities like Hickory are closer, so suffering is accompanied by comfort from relatives and neighbors, even if the Midwestern attitude is to keep a stiff upper lip.
Of course, the very thing that makes small town Midwest America so attractive -- being closeknit -- is also its curse. In Hickory nobody wants to give an outsider the benefit of the doubt and its citizens don�t accept change very easily. This story comes down to two sides who dont wan�t to change -- sleepy Hickory and the pugnacious Coach Dale -- learning the democratic American art of compromise. The hard-learned lessons of sacrificing the old ways for a new, rejuvenated community paint a gleaming scene, as best represented in the closing view of a cornfield in another autumn with the setting sun finding its way through the gathering clouds.
Thus, Hickory, initially an unforgiving town, learns to accept part of Norman Dale�s values, especially his emphasis on putting the needs of the team before the needs of the individual. Although he is dictatorial in his coaching style after having spent a decade in the military, Dale does believe in the second chance, precisely because he has to overcome his own fate. Before he went in to the Navy, he had led the fictional Ithaca Warriors to a national small-college championship, but his Odysseus-like broadsword air -- he punched a player in practice -- earned him a life-long explusion from both the NCAA and the New York high school athletic association. He has been made a scapegoat, a lesson to other coaches who might go beyond tough love to motivate and discipline their players. Dale does not question his fate. Accepting Cleatus�s invitation to coach in Hickory is his second and last chance to get the coaching thing right. He knows he must rule with an iron fist and provide exacting discipline for his young men, but he also knows he can never use his fist again to make a point.
When confronted by Myra Fleener about the incident at Ithaca that led to his firing, Dale makes no excuses. He regrets striking his player, who happened to be a tough, hard-nosed young man. �Kind of like somebody I know,� Myra says. The former Ithaca warrior is not willing to make himself a victim; instead, he accepts his past and offers a ray of light to a dying town that loves its basketball teams as all small towns in Indiana did when Pizzo was growing up in the �50s and �60s.
Dale has a tragic flaw -- his temper -- and the Fleener women go about the business of saving him from himself, just as he shows Shooter how to save himself from his own destructive, alcoholic self. Opal Fleener�s pep talk and Myra Fleener�s high moral standards give Dale a guide, and Norman the conquering hero provides the rest, leading the boys of Hickory to the improbable state championship.
Restoration in �Hoosiers� is both personal and communal. Not only are Norman, Shooter, Myra, Everett, Cleatus, et al. saved, but so too is the whole town. Indeed, �Hoosiers� is not about basketball or Indiana, though they provide the setting for this remarkable film; rather, it is about spiritual renewal. It is about the spiritual second chance all of us want, if only we weren�t so busy and confused to miss the chance. �Hoosiers� reminds us that the second chance comes to those who love, believe and sacrifice.
In fact, the catalyst to the plot of �Hoosiers� is Jimmy Chitwood�s recognition that he must pose an overwhelming question to the town: do you want me to play ball again and save this town? Thus, saving the town in not incumbent upon Jimmy; it is incumbent on the town to learn how to save itself. As coach Dale points out, his life is his own and he must make independent decisions about it. When Jimmy lets go of the late Coach Tidd, the Huskers� best player no longer acts like a wounded hero left in a state of repose. Now he is ready to act and to conquer Lions, Wildcats and Bears. Hamlet is finally ready to become the conquering hero.
Americans appreciate winners. Hence, the phenomenon of the Celtics, Packers, Cowboys, Yankees, Braves, Bulls, Notre Dame. But Americans furtively love the underdogs. Everybody wants to be a winner, but everybody has been an underdog at some point in his or her life. Whether Hickory wins the state championship or not, the Huskers will never be the South Bend Central Bears. The Huskers know they will probably get just one shot, and it is for this reason that the state championship means so much more to the Huskers than it could ever mean to the Bears. The same was true for the Milan Indians against the Muncie Central Bearcats in 1954. That is to say that the hicks from Hickory need the the state championship to recapture their best selves. The mighty Bears best selves are constant, unchanging. If the Bears lose, they will say they had a nice season and will get other chances in the future. Meanwhile, the Huskers -- and Hickory -- are undergoing a transformation -- in essence, the American Dream of rags to riches. In many ways Norman Dale, Jimmy Chitwood or Everett Flash is Horatio Alger�s Ragged Dick all over again, with a Midwest accent.
Every good story ultimately is about the search for the good life. The good life in �Hoosiers� is a spiritual life, a small-town life, an unsophisticated life. Corn provides the town with its economic sustenance, but corn yields cannot be taken for granted. There can be drought or too much rain or disease. Thus, strength, as the preacher reminds the team before the state final game at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, comes from heaven above. It would be unfair to understate the religious dimension to this film. Strap�s praying and his preacher father�s driving the team imply divine guidance and heavenly intervention. A Hickory or a David has to have a little spiritual extra help to succeed.
The good citizens of Hickory seem to recognize this deuteronomic truth natually. Coach Dale enters the town skeptical of this downhome ethic. A Stoic from his coaching and military experience, Dale has learned to survive on in his own. He has not needed social or divine intervention, doesn�t believe in it. Like the town, Norman Dale believes in being true to himself. That Straps� prayers seem to be answered are superstitious voodoo to him. But he has to let go of his Stoicism and, when the players are puzzled by his tactical choice on the last play of the championship game, his transformation is complete. �I�ll make it,� Jimmy Chitwood says to his coach. Accordingly, Dale allows that the players are right. Direct democracy wins the day. Thus, the faith of Strap and others in town redeem their coach, a hardened man previously unopen to any spiritual change. When Jimmy delivers his game-winning shot a la the real life Bobby Joe Plump, Norman Dale becomes open to many things he has missed in his life, not the least of which is what surely in a sequel -- don�t do it, Mr. Pizzo! -- would be marriage to Myra Fleener.
�I love you guys,� the only words Norman has for the team before the final game, then, in its fullest implications, means that Hackman�s character has realized his own potential to love others, including a town that nearly destroyed what was left of his life. He realizes, as the David and Goliath story has taught for thousands of years, that the greatest power in our world is not material. Norman Dale is no longer a stranger in a strange land. He is one of Hickory�s own, the same way Marvin Wood, who died last October, became one of pint-size Milan�s very own when he guided the Indians to their only state championship after only two years at the helm there. Dale�s redemption is complete.
Of course, �Hoosiers� is fiction. Not a single shot of it took place in Milan, although I would hope some day that somebody like Ken Burns might make a documentary about the Indians� 1954 state title, the town and its long demise into an even smaller town. (Today Milan has lost much of its central business district and until this season the basketball team has struggled mightily. The Indians, after nearly 50 years of decline, are among the favorites for the 2000 IHSAA Class A championship.) Yet both the fictional Hickory and the factual Milan are the Midwestern versions of the urban Keep Hope Alive. What towns like Hickory -- and Milan -- keep alive is the concept that nice things happen to nice people. As singer-songwriter John Mellencamp would say about small towns: �No, I cannot forget where it is that I come from/ I cannot forget the people who love me/ Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town/ And people let me be just what I want to be.� (Mellencamp was asked to write the soundtrack for �Hoosiers.� He initially signed on, but then, according to Pizzo, grew disillusioned with the film because he felt that Pizzo and Anspaugh knew little about basketball. Instead, Jerry GoldSmith provided the soundtrack and he was nominated for an Academy Award.) Yes, good things come in small packages.
The lasting impressions of this film are not the miracle wins in the regional and state finals, the decision by Jimmy to play ball again, Dale�s teaching his team a lesson. No, it�s the way Anspaugh depicts a place and time -- the film is about 1951-52 Indiana. The music, the lighting, the details (a poster of Truman on Shooter�s wall at his dissheveled cabin in the woods, Dale�s gray Chevrolet and the knob on the steering wheel, the fans who didn�t start their respectful applause until a few seconds after the barbershop quartet finishes the national anthem, the basketball shorts with belts, the netless goals on the sides of barns, the understated, restrained sexual tension between Norm and Myra) and the no-name cast are all small town America during the decade that brought us Elvis. When Merle says in the locker room �Let�s win this one for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here,� he is speaking for the small town in all of us. The underdog is a major part of our culture, even if America is a mighty super power. At two centuries-plus, America is young enough to know from whence it came, 13 colonies rebelling against a formidable empire. Finally, �Hoosiers� is about unity in a world of democracy, about finding consensus. The town finds that it needs the coach. The coach also needs the town and he needs the boys� confidence. Dale uses a metaphor to portray this theme: Five pistions working as one single unit, no one more important than the other. It�s a good lesson that�s not possible without selfless love. While Pizzo�s film has been panned for being overly sentimental, the writer believes he made a movie that speaks to the way life is on this planet. �Human, emotional truths are universal and eternal,� Pizzo said. �The soundtrack to a person�s life shifts and changes daily and in the medium that I work my hope is to reach everyone from seven to 70.� That is the appeal of this film, that it speaks to such a broad audience because all of us know about love and loneliness, about ruin and restoration and about the champion and the underdog. Other writers and directors have attempted this story before, in basketball films alone. �Fast Break,� �One On One� and �Rebound� come to mind. But none of these -- or the fine basketball non-fiction films like �Hoop Dreams,� �Heaven is a Playground� and �The American Game� or the realistic �Blue Chips� -- has a full range of the human experience as Pizzo�s script does. This film is not just about basketball. The IU graduate says the film is about a way of life, about a time and a place. It is about the human condition. Cynicism reigns in the mindset of Hickory�s citizens. Yet a warrior coach emerges almost out of a nowhere to rescue hope from this wasteland. It is a film that reminds me again and again of how essentially idealistic and hopeful teaching and coaching are. It reminds us that nice guys, always the underdog in the world of sports machismo, do finish first occasionally -- and the contrast to the brutish Goliaths of the world makes all the difference.
Angelo Pizzo, who met David Anspaugh (a producer of the television cop drama "Hill Street Blues") while both were undergraduates at Indiana University, is currently working on a film about Mickey Mantle that will appear on Fox. Pizzo, who lives in Ojai, Calif., is also producing and writing an HBO mini-series on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Pizzo and Anspaugh were awarded the Thomas Hart Benton Medallion by IU President Myles Brand Nov. 7, 1996.
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