Basketball, the Indiana state religion

Rating: 7/10 (31 January 2010)

I guess because on either side of Indiana, both Ohio and Illinois have two major league baseball team franchises, the state of Indiana has rebelled and adopted basketball as the official state sport. Some could compare Indiana's basketball mania to many southern states and their local devotion to college and high school football. It's more like a secular religion down there.
In the early Fifties Gene Hackman has been hired by a local high school to coach its floundering basketball team which is built around one star player, Maris Valainis. Maris's father was the assistant coach and is also the town drunk and is played by Dennis Hopper. He's as jealous as Lloyd Bridges was when Gary Cooper didn't recommend he move up to the job of marshal in High Noon.
Barbara Hershey plays a teacher who is worried about Valainis getting a good education and who actually now has custody of the kid because Hopper's been ruled an unfit dad won't let him play. That's the specific problem that Hackman is facing.
The general problem is that especially in a small town setting everyone and his brother think they can do a better job than the current athletic coach of whatever sport. Just listen to any sports phone-in show on the radio and you'll have that fact confirmed. Still that's just what comes with the territory.
The best character in Hoosiers is without a doubt Hopper. He was a star basketball player in the town and he can't get over the fact that those years in high school were the high point of his life. He never went on to anything else and that's what Hershey is trying to prevent happening with his son. Ironically this same situation is humorously exploited in Married With Children where Al Bundy waxes nostalgically about his high school football days, remember four touchdowns in a single game.
In fact Dennis Hopper got an Oscar nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category, one of two that Hoosiers got the other being for best musical scoring.
I think Hoosiers misses being a classic though a lot will disagree with me. The characters except for Hopper are not really developed by the script. Other than Valainis the kids on the team have no real individual identities, we never learn just Hackman did that brought him out of college ranks and in the Navy for eleven years between his last college job and this one.
The basketball scenes move at a good pace though and Hoosiers is after all about basketball. And nothing but basketball.