Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana

by Phillip M. Hoose, Bob Plump (Foreword by)

Overview

Named by The New York Times as "a knowing, respectful and caring look at heartland America" and containing a new foreword by legendary player Bob Plump, this is a book every basketball lover should own. The best of Phillip Hoose's classic writings are included here with a fresh look on Indiana's favorite and most beloved sport. A new edition of a well-known Indiana classic, Hoosiers profiles some of the world's most famous basketball players and coaches—Larry Bird, Bobby Plump, Damon Bailey, Steve Alford, Stephanie White, and Bob Knight among them—along with Indiana towns, schools, and programs. The ultimate book for the diehard fan, Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana explores Hoosier hysteria in all its glory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253021687
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	06/06/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	299
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Phillip M. Hoose is the widely-acclaimed author of books, essays, stories, songs, and articles, including the National Book Award winning book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. He is also the author of the multi-award winning title, The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, the National Book Award Finalist We Were There Too!: Young People in U.S. History, and the Christopher Award-winning manual for youth activism, It's Our World Too!

Read an Excerpt

Hoosiers

The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana

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By Phillip M. Hoose

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2016 Phillip M. Hoose
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02168-7

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CHAPTER 1

FARM BOYS

How Indiana Became the Basketball State

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THE COLD FACT IS THAT BASKETBALL DIDN'T START IN INDIANA. IT should have, but it didn't. It took Indiana University coach Bob Knight to come up with this face-saving explanation: "Basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts," Knight explained in 1984, "but it was made for Indiana."

The vector of "Hoosier Hysteria" has been identified as the Reverend Nicholas McKay, a Presbyterian minister born in England. In 1893 McKay was assigned to a YMCA in Crawfordsville, Indiana. En route, he visited Dr. James Naismith's YMCA camp in Springfield, Massachusetts, where a new winter game called basketball had been invented two years before.

McKay gave it mixed reviews. It was active enough but there were still bugs to shake out. After all, it was only by sheerest happenstance that they weren't playing "boxball." Naismith had told the janitor to bring out two boxes, but all he had been able to find were peach baskets. They had nailed the baskets to a balcony railing that went around the gym and placed a stepladder under each basket. After every goal someone had to climb up and toss down the ball.

Reverend McKay knew he could do better. After he found space above a tavern in Crawfordsville for his YMCA, he hired a blacksmith to forge two metal hoops, sewed coffee sacks around them and nailed them to the walls. It did not occur to him to slit the sacks so the ball could fall through, but at least they no longer needed a stepladder as long as they had one tall player. "It became my job, right off, to jump up each time a goal was made and knock the ball out of the sack," Dr. James Griffith, the tallest player in McKay's first organized game, later wrote. "The thing I remember most vividly is having a pair of bruised knuckles next morning."

Basketball was indeed made for Indiana. It was a game to play in the winter, something between harvest and planting, something to do besides euchre and the lodge and church and repairing equipment. At the turn of the century, when Indiana was a landscape mainly of small towns and crossroads hamlets-settlements of a few houses, a church, a schoolhouse and maybe a lodge — basketball was a godsend.

Most towns were too small to find enough players for a football team and too poor to buy all the pads and helmets anyway. But it was easy enough to nail a hoop to a pole or a barn, and you could just shoot around by yourself if there wasn't anybody else, just to see how many in a row you could make.

Basketball was epidemic in Indiana within a year after McKay carried it in. In Madison, they played in the skating rink; in Carmel, they played in the driveway of a lumber yard, with spectators hooting from atop skids of walnut. Other towns shoved the pews back against the church walls or dragged the desks from the schoolhouses out into the snow.

Rules, such as they were, were highly customized. The town of Amboy surrounded its court with chicken wire, so that the ball would always be in play. In Clinton, shooters were allowed to bank the ball in off the ceiling. Brawls were common, and in the Dodge City days, an athletic supporter was someone who came to watch you play.

Each March since 1911, Hoosier schoolboys have played in the state high school basketball tournament. The first "tourney," as it has always been called, was sponsored by the Indiana University Booster's Club, who viewed the occasion mainly as a chance to recruit players away from Purdue and Notre Dame.

The club invited each of Indiana's thirteen congressional districts to send its best team to Bloomington, no questions asked. Usually, local play made it clear who was best, but sometimes there were mitigating circumstances. For example, South Bend High School once informed the boosters that Rochester High had compiled the best record in season play only because one of their forwards was really a Notre Dame student who came home on weekends. The boosters held themselves above this ugliness, perhaps because they knew that the boy, Hugh Barnhart, was also the son of the local congressman.

When news reached Crawfordsville that their very own Athenians had won the first tourney, citizens ran shouting through the streets, men with their coats turned inside out. Church bells tolled throughout the town. Everyone danced around a mighty bonfire until a train whistle was heard above the clamor. Then they all sprinted to meet the Monon, steaming in from Bloomington. It took several minutes at the platform for them to realize that the players weren't on the train. Exhausted, they had spent the night in Bloomington.

Indiana's first superstar was a farm boy named Homer Stonebreaker. He played in 1913 and 1914 for Wingate High School, a crossroads schoolhouse whose enrollment included only twelve boys. Like many Hoosier schools at the time, Wingate High was a single room with a stove, a place in out of the cold where a few kids might learn something useful until the ground could take a plow. Having no gym, they practiced outside, except for the one evening a week when Coach Jesse Wood hitched up a team and cantered six miles to a gym at New Richmond.

"Stoney," as the boy was called, was a square-shouldered, 64" center who scored most of his points from far outside, by squatting suddenly and spinning up long, looping underhand shots. It is said that opposing coaches ordered their players to pick up Stoney at midcourt, but often even that was too late.

The Wingate players were ridiculed in Bloomington. While everyone else wore monogrammed tank tops and short pants, the Wingate boys took the court in sweatshirts, baseball pants and long socks.

The laughter stopped once they stepped onto the court. Wingate won four games — three by lopsided scores — and then faced South Bend High School for the state championship. The game was a classic; Wingate won, 15-14, on a shot by forward Forest Crane late in the fifth overtime period.

Stoney and the "Gymless Wonders," as they were called, became instant folk heroes. Challenges came from all over the state the next season. Great convoys of Model T's formed in the town square, and out over the fields they rumbled. Five hundred fans chartered a train for the Kokomo game alone.

Wingate repeated as tourney champions in 1914, with Stoney scoring all of Wingate's seventeen points in the closest game, against Clinton. Not many are left who saw him — coach Wood outlived all his players — but Stoney's memory shines bright. "I used to ask the oldtimers if there were any players from the early days who could still play today," said Bob Collins, former sports editor of the Indianapolis Star. "Three names usually came out: Johnny Wooden, Fuzzy Vandervier [who led Franklin High School to three consecutive championships] and Homer Stonebreaker."

To cope with the tourney's explosive growth — entries increased twenty-fold in the first ten years — officials in 1915 divided the tourney into local, single-elimination tournaments called "sectionals." Winners met for the state championship.

With local bragging rights at stake sectional games became even more intense than the games at Bloomington. These were mythic events, played on hallowed battlegrounds with maple floors, where martyrs fell and true heroes emerged. Losses were seeping wounds that festered in coffee shops all summer long.

The sectionals were organized basically at the county level, and in Indiana counties typically amounted to several hamlets connected by pure rancor to the local Kremlin, the county seat. The litany of complaints against the county seat became a part of Indiana's special script, as even and soothing as a chorus of locusts on a summer night. It was common knowledge in the provinces that the school in the county seat typically had the following advantages:

1. The home court in the sectional.

2. An amoral coach.

3. A county all-star team, full of players who should have been going to other schools.

4. A pair of forwards who had voted in the last election.

5. A center in his third year as a junior.

6. A network of grade school teams, controlled by the varsity coach, that would shame the Yankees' farm system.

Winning was everything; amateurism was a cynical joke. Merchants rewarded winning coaches with bonuses — once a Pontiac sedan — and players with gold watches. Coaches went after the parents of any tall boy who could shoot a lick, promising the father a better job in their town.

"It was just dog eat dog," recalled the late Phil Eskew, former commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA). "The basketball players were important kids in anybody's town, and they could go anywhere they wanted. There were married and overaged kids playin' kids that hadn't passed a subject."

The minutes of the early years of the IHSAA, formed in 1903 to regulate high school sports, read like a police docket: damage claims for broken windows, referees assaulted, brawls, illegal rewards, and more brawls. One letter from Anderson High accuses rival Cicero High of "re-oiling" its players in a 1916 contest. Regrettably, the author did not provide a description of the crime, nor did he explain why the original oiling went unpunished.

In 1916, the IHSAA hired a lawman. Arthur L. Trester, 38, a veteran school principal and superintendent, was the stern, uncompromising son of Quaker parents. He had grown up on an Indiana farm and worked his way through a master's degree in education at Columbia University, where he formed a close friendship with the famed educator John Dewey. Trester was a huge, lantern-jawed man, almost always formally dressed, puritanical, shrewd, and intimidating. He was given a free hand to clean house.

At once, Trester set about straightening out the Association's financial records, codifying its existing rules and making new eligibility standards for players and teams. Then he turned to the matter of enforcement.

Overnight, Trester's office became the state's woodshed. Anyone accused of violating an ISHAA rule received a letter from Commissioner Trester stating the charge. Defendants had the entire trip to Indianapolis to reflect on the matter, confidence ebbing by the mile. Hearts hammered against their ribs as the groaning elevator lifted them to the eighth floor of the Circle Tower Building. There they faced The Commissioner and stammered explanations through dry lips. They were usually found guilty and often suspended from competition. "The rules are clear, the penalties severe," he would say curtly to those who sought a discussion.

Strong personalities tested him. Charles O. Finley, who, as the owner of the Oakland Athletics baseball teams of the 1970s, made a reputation for bedeviling Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, cut his teeth on Arthur Trester. As a high school student, Finley was accused of enrolling in a Gary high school to play a sport without changing residence from a nearby town. He was summoned to Circle Tower. Trester heard him out and banned Finley from competition for a year. The rule was clear, the penalty severe.

As the tourney grew the Indiana legislature repeatedly tried to take over the IHSAA and its huge booty of basketball revenue. It galled the lawmakers that they could not deliver tourney tickets to their constituents. When the challenges came, Trester would stay up all night, phoning and telegraphing coaches and principals to come to Indianapolis for "their" association. Trester sat silently through hearings, letting others defend him against charges of greed and gross megalomania. Then, when the bell rang, he rose to leave and the lawmakers scrambled out after him, begging for tickets.

Trester was even the chief referee. In the 1932 Muncie regional tournament, with Muncie Central leading New Castle by one point, a New Castle guard named Vernon Huffman heaved the ball toward the basket from midcourt at the buzzer.

Unbelievably, the ball swished through the net, but one official was signaling that the goal had counted and the other was gesturing no basket. As fans poured onto the floor, the referees made it into the dressing room and managed to push the door shut.

Soon they were able to agree, but there was no way they were going to announce their decision before talking to Trester; he signed the cards that made them referees. They called him again and again. No answer. So they drove off to Yorktown for a bite, leaving thousands in anguish. At six that evening Trester returned the call, listened to the story and told the officials he would back their decision against the storm that would surely come. Not until then did the two feel at ease to announce New Castle's victory.

In 1925 Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of the game, visited the Indiana state finals as Trester's guest. The two men sat among 15,000 screaming fans and watched a superbly-played game. Naismith was stunned. He could not believe what had happened to the winter diversion he had started three decades before with two peach baskets. Thousands of fans had been turned away for lack of space. And this for a high school tournament. "The possibilities of basketball as seen there," Naismith wrote in Spaulding's Basketball Guide when he returned home from Indiana, "were a revelation to me."

Until Henry Ford began to mass-produce affordable cars, Hoosier engineers dominated the American auto industry. At least 375 models have been made in Indiana, most of them in the first third of the century. Spring would come, and the tinkerers would push back their shop doors and roll out elegant custom touring cars like the National, with its pushbutton electric gearshift, the Cole, with its revolutionary V-8 engine, and the Waverly, advertised as the darling of the ladies with veils and linen dusters.

High school basketball was important to the small-town life of several Midwestern states in the early part of the century, but the game exploded with greatest force in Indiana in part because Indiana was such an easy state to get around. Hoosierland is small and mainly flat, and an early, statewide network of roads was built to carry and test the great roadsters. Soon a statewide newspaper, the Indianapolis News, emerged, and one barnstorming reporter named William Fox Jr. made it his mission to bring the tourney personally to every Hoosier. His scheme was to give fans a dateline and a story from each of the sixteen regional tournament sites before the state finals. He had four days to do it.

Each year between 1928 and 1936, Fox and Butler University coach Tony Hinkle vaulted into a donated Stutz Bearcat at the final buzzer of the Indianapolis regional afternoon game, raced to Muncie for the evening final and tried to make it all the way to Fort Wayne for their tourney celebration.

After that they had three days to criss-cross the state from Lake Michigan to the Ohio River in order to make Fox's deadline. Hinkle drove by day and Fox wrote by night; they rarely saw each other awake. But it worked. "Shootin' 'Em and Stoppin' 'Em" became every Hoosier's column. Fox's turgid dispatches from the sixteen fronts gave those whose world view ended at the county line a surpassing knowledge of statewide geography.

Unlike its neighbors, Hoosierland had no major-league franchises to distract fans from its obsession. Illinois was the Chicago Cubs and Bears and White Sox, Ohio the Cleveland Browns and Indians and Cincinnati Reds, Michigan the Detroit Lions and Tigers. Indiana was the Frankfort Hot Dogs, the Vincennes Alices, the Delphi Oracles, and the Martinsville Artesians.

Fox magnified local heroics into mythical events. Players and coaches achieved almost scriptural stature. Johnny Wooden, who three times played in the state championship game, probably came to mean more to a kid in Indiana than Ty Cobb to a kid in Michigan. "Wooden, to the kids of my generation, was what Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Lew Alcindor were years later," broadcaster Tommy Harmon has said. "He was king, the idol of every kid who had a basketball. In Indiana, that was every kid."

Fox's gravel-filled accounts and predictions became so popular that the News chief rival, the Indianapolis Times, hired an airplane to race Hinkle and Fox around Indiana.

"Don't take basketball season or life too seriously," advised Fox in one column, perhaps thinking about the increased weight of Hinkle's foot on the pedal as he glanced nervously toward the heavens. "Both are too short."

While New York City tried to scrape the skies with office buildings of Hoosier limestone, back home they piled it up against the schoolhouse. Even small towns built gyms that could hold everyone around, for everyone went to the games.

"I've been in places where I was having dinner on Friday night," says Bob Collins, "and the owner would shout 'Fifteen minutes and we're closin' up!' and everybody cleaned their plates, settled up and went to the basketball game."

Friday night was the perfect time to rob a small-town Indiana bank. "The game was the only activity in town," says Collins. "They had the bake sale at the gym, and the mothers conducted their raffle. I remember one time I went to a game in a place called Grass Creek and watched a kid play tuba in the band. Then he showed up in the reserve game a few minutes later, still dripping wet from his shower after the band quit playing."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Hoosiers by Phillip M. Hoose. Copyright © 2016 Phillip M. Hoose. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Bob Plump
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Farm Boys—How Indiana Became the Basketball State
2. Milan High School—The Hoosier Dream
3. Indianapolis Crispus Attucks High—The Black and White of Hoosier Hysteria
4. Anderson, Indiana—Basketball Town
5. The Calumet Region—Hoops in the Other Indiana
6. Judi Warren and the Warsaw Tigers—Into the Front Court
7. Fathers and Sons—The Mounts of Lebanon, Indiana
8. Meadowood Park
9. Larry Bird—The Guy Down the Road
10. The Education of Stephanie White
11. Coaches—From the Lady Lions to Bob Knight
12. Steve Alford—All In
13. An Interview with Damon Bailey
14. Four Class Basketball—Death or Salvation of Hoosier Hysteria?
15. Perspective—Four Things that Remain Distinctive about Indiana's Game
16. Passages—What Has Become of Selected, People, Places and Gyms
Index