Brings back memories

Rating: 10/10 (8 April 2002)

Okay, maybe I'm biased, having played basketball at a school barely larger than Hickory High (their enrollment was 64, mine was 82) but Hoosiers is one of the best sports movies I've seen in years. So what if it's obvious how it's going to end? Or whether the events seem improbable? Whoever wrote the screenplay knows life in a town like Hickory - how everyone wants to meddle in the team's affairs, how high school basketball is everything to such a town in the winter, and how kids grow up idolizing the local varsity and hoping that one day they will lead the team, and therefore the town, to glory. The reporters, the cameras, the crowds all lend an Indiana flavor to high school basketball that isn't found outside the rural midwest. Folks growing up in California or Massachusetts can't imagine the attention the general public and media give to high school basketball but, believe me: in the midwest, it's real.
The story is based loosely on the 1954 Milan Indians, who knocked off Muncie Central 32-30 in the final. The similarities end there. Milan was small - around 150 students - but they were supposed to go far in the '54 tournament, having advanced to the state semifinals the previous year (losing to South Bend Central) and bringing back much of that team for the '54 run. Along the way they beat Oscar Robertson's Crispus Attucks team, which won the final the following year.
Hackman is terrific as a coach seeking redemption, teaching his wayward pupils discipline and strategy. Hopper deserved his Academy nomination in his role of the town's wayward soul, also seeking redemption but having no idea how to achieve it. Hershey gives a good performance as the teacher suspicious of the outsider like most of us small-town folk appear to be at first.
Not every high school has two thousand pupils, and many public high schools like Hickory still exist; although they seem to have vanished from Indiana (Milan consolidated and now enrolls over 300) there are plenty in the northern Great Lakes and the Great Plains. Hollywood seems to have forgotten the small high school and rural life in general.
Every March, this movie still inspires countless players and coaches to rise to the challenge while all around them think they're overmatched and outgunned. That is the legacy of "Hoosiers."