Will lightning ever strike twice? Can David beat Goliath a second time? These questions haunt everyone in the small town of Milan, Indiana, whose basketball team inspired Hoosiers, the greatest underdog sports movie ever made. From a town of just 1,816 residents, the team remains forever an underdog, but one with a storied past that has them eternally frozen in their 1954 moment of glory. Every ten years or so, Milan has a winning season, but for the most part, they only manage a win or two each year. And still, perhaps because it's the only option for Milan, the town believes that the Indians can rise again. Bill Riley follows the modern day Indians for a season and explores how the Milan myth still permeates the town, the residents, and their high level of expectations of the team. Riley deftly captures the camaraderie between the players and their coach and their school pride in being Indians. In the end, there are few wins or causes for celebration—there is only the little town where basketball is king and nearly the whole town shows up to watch each game. The legend of Milan and Hoosiers is both a blessing and a curse.
Will lightning ever strike twice? Can David beat Goliath a second time? These questions haunt everyone in the small town of Milan, Indiana, whose basketball team inspired Hoosiers, the greatest underdog sports movie ever made. From a town of just 1,816 residents, the team remains forever an underdog, but one with a storied past that has them eternally frozen in their 1954 moment of glory. Every ten years or so, Milan has a winning season, but for the most part, they only manage a win or two each year. And still, perhaps because it's the only option for Milan, the town believes that the Indians can rise again. Bill Riley follows the modern day Indians for a season and explores how the Milan myth still permeates the town, the residents, and their high level of expectations of the team. Riley deftly captures the camaraderie between the players and their coach and their school pride in being Indians. In the end, there are few wins or causes for celebration—there is only the little town where basketball is king and nearly the whole town shows up to watch each game. The legend of Milan and Hoosiers is both a blessing and a curse.
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Overview
Will lightning ever strike twice? Can David beat Goliath a second time? These questions haunt everyone in the small town of Milan, Indiana, whose basketball team inspired Hoosiers, the greatest underdog sports movie ever made. From a town of just 1,816 residents, the team remains forever an underdog, but one with a storied past that has them eternally frozen in their 1954 moment of glory. Every ten years or so, Milan has a winning season, but for the most part, they only manage a win or two each year. And still, perhaps because it's the only option for Milan, the town believes that the Indians can rise again. Bill Riley follows the modern day Indians for a season and explores how the Milan myth still permeates the town, the residents, and their high level of expectations of the team. Riley deftly captures the camaraderie between the players and their coach and their school pride in being Indians. In the end, there are few wins or causes for celebration—there is only the little town where basketball is king and nearly the whole town shows up to watch each game. The legend of Milan and Hoosiers is both a blessing and a curse.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253020956 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/29/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 195 |
| Sales rank: | 988,184 |
| File size: | 542 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Bill Riley is a writer and teacher originally from Greenfield, Indiana. His work has been featured in Punchnel's, Prime Number, Spry Literary Journal, and Terre Haute Living Magazine. Connect with the author on his website, www.authorbillriley.com.
Read an Excerpt
The Milan Miracle
The Town That Hoosiers Left Behind
By Bill Riley
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Bill RileyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02095-6
CHAPTER 1
MEASUREMENTS AND PRIORITIES
Preseason: 0–0; Previous Season: 3–17
Barely ten minutes after the electronic bell's beep released students into the hallways and out to their cars and buses on the first chilly day of fall, Logan Alloway was in the Milan Senior High School gym with a basketball. Minutes later, two of his teammates and one of his friends joined him, hiking up the legs of their jeans to get into a defensive stance, driving past volleyball players — whose turn it was to use the court — and kicking the ball out for three-pointers. It might have been the volleyball team's turn to use the gym, but this was first and foremost a basketball court.
Logan was almost five feet nine and just fifteen years old. He wore baggy jeans, an oversized plain black shirt, and loose, untied high-top basketball shoes. Behind him, a ratty 1954 state champions banner hung next to a tattered 1953 state runners-up banner. From my view on the sidelines, the glint of his diamond stud earring was interrupted only by his cocked wrist as he set up another long jump shot.
"He needs to grow four inches," Josh Blankinship told me with a hand over his mouth, interrupting the instrumental of bounce bounce, swish, bounce bounce bounce, swish. Josh acted as if he were telling me a secret, but it was the worst-kept secret in town. "Four inches and he'd be unstoppable."
But in that moment Logan Alloway was just a freshman basketball player in a gym with a capacity for 2,076 screaming fans in a town of only 1,816, a boy who couldn't play enough basketball or get enough of that gym.
A two-on-two game broke out — Logan and his friend against the two other guys on the team. Logan faked to the basket and crossed the ball through his legs, then stepped back to arc a shot. Next possession, he faked a pass into the post and took a snap shot, quick release. The other team switched their marks, and a taller kid came out to guard Logan, to get a hand in his face. Logan passed the ball down to the post, then flared out to the wing, his left hand around his useless belt, holding his jeans up. As he received a pass, he had already started his shooting motion. Three possessions, nine points.
The boys gave up their end of the court ten minutes into the volleyball team's scheduled practice time, but they left no question about whose gym it was. Logan Alloway was one of four hundred students at Milan High School in 2010, and basketball was one of nineteen varsity sports, but that gym had always been a basketball court above all else.
As I drove into Milan from the east, from the nearest metropolitan area — Cincinnati, just under an hour away — I passed everything most people know about southeastern Indiana. I drove next to the Ohio River, with its barges and muddy water, past the Hollywood Casino in Lawrenceburg, and along the Eads Parkway, which seems to be built for the express purpose of shuttling senior citizens to and from the slot machines on the banks of the river. When I hit Lawrenceburg, I rolled down the windows and smelled the gin and whiskey in the air from Lawrenceburg Distillers Indiana. When Seagram's built the distillery in the mid-i8oos, it was the largest in the world. Three years ago, Pernod Ricard sold the plant to Angostura, a move that still threatens to shake this region's already unstable economy. The sweet smell quickly becomes sickeningly so.
I kept driving another thirty minutes up State Road 350 to Milan. That's "MY-len," not anything like its Italian namesake. The town sits to the east of the Ripley County seat, Versailles. That's "Ver-SAILS," not anything like its French namesake.
The fields looked just like the fields that Barbara Hershey and Gene Hackman walked through on the way to their first kiss in Hoosiers, the 1986 movie based on Milan's 1954 state basketball championship. Hoosiers is set in the fictional town of Hickory, but even as I drove through modern-day Milan, I could tell the producers captured 1950s Milan well.
I knew the town had fallen from its perch as the heart of Hoosier Hysteria in the past few decades, but I believed that people in Milan must still care. Milan, even though I had never visited it before, made me proud to be a Hoosier. I bought into the idea that hard work produced good results. I was never good enough to make my high school basketball team, but I served as my high school radio station's play-by-play announcer. To me, basketball felt like the culture of Indiana, the social event, the center. And I knew this was in no small measure because of the movie Hoosiers and that Milan team back in 1954. Basketball made Indiana relevant, and Indiana made basketball relevant.
Milan Junior-Senior High School sits on the edge of town. Only a hundred or so homes fit inside the town limits. Downtown is a thousand-foot-by-thousand-foot square holding a medical clinic, a diner, the town hall, five churches, a funeral home, and a museum commemorating the 1954 state championship. The wood siding on the buildings weeps and hangs. The old asphalt ofthe roads is prone to potholes in the freeze-thaw-refreeze rhythm of southern Indiana's winters. A meat market sits on the far northwest side of town, and past that, only cows.
The junior high and senior high are connected and share everything but a gym — they each have their own. Behind the school sits the football field, the same field where the members of the Milan Indians football team were starting to crash into each other as I arrived in town, tackling and passing and reading defenses, preparing for their upcoming sectional game against North Decatur High School. The football team was playing well and had beaten much larger local rival Batesville High School already that year. At any other high school in the country, the scene of defensive linemen pushing a blocking sled against the backdrop of red and gold leaves would look like a picture-perfect image of autumn.
I wasn't there for the football, though. I came to Milan because I was curious. A fellow Hoosier, I had grown up hearing about the Milan Miracle. On the night before soccer games in high school, my team would get together and eat spaghetti and watch an inspirational movie. We saved Hoosiers for our first tournament game each year. It didn't matter if we were the richest school (we weren't) or the school with the most talent (we weren't). We worked hard; we played as a team. Hoosiers told us we could win.
But apparently Milan wasn't watching Hoosiers. Despite being the small town's claim to fame, despite being the most-watched David versus Goliath sports movie of all time, Milan's basketball team was no longer David. Well, in some ways they were David, all right: woefully overmatched in both size and talent in almost every game. Maybe Goliath had changed: the small area schools had become midsized consolidated county schools, and the big city schools had become farm teams for semiprofessional AAU college scholarship factories. In any event, Milan hadn't won much lately. Most seasons they struggled to win two games. And yet, we — myself, but also the hordes of reporters from far and wide that remind us each March, when a small school makes a run, that it's been done before and could be done again — hardly noticed. We didn't notice when the hoops on the barns outside of town rusted and weren't repaired. We didn't notice when people and jobs — what few there were to begin with — left Milan. We didn't notice that David didn't seem to be winning much anymore.
I was curious, but mostly I needed to know that the story I had been told, the story I had told, the story I had memorized, still existed. I needed to know — as a small-town Hoosier myself, who put stock in my ability to compete with everyone else — that the underdog could still win.
At Milan High School, autumn meant the men of H&W Sport Shop of Campbellsville, Kentucky, fitting the boys of the Milan Indians basketball team — from middle school to varsity — for their season's shoes. Josh Blankinship sat in a lunchroom chair near the H&W cash box, hand over his forehead as if he had a headache. He scanned the order sheet for the shoe sizes and didn't like what he saw. True, these boys were still growing — their acne and ill-fitting clothes underlined that point. But often a bigger-than-proportional shoe size could predict some future height.
"The average shoe size we sell to basketball teams around this area is a 12," Ronnie said to me as he laced up a pair of shoes on a shrimpy sixth-grader. All Josh was seeing was a bunch of size 9s. At the end of the day, the biggest shoe H&W sold to Milan was a 13 1/2. The smallest went to a seventh-grader who ordered a woman's size 6. The Milan Indians would be starting five guards that year on varsity, and their tallest starter was six four.
The first coaches' meeting of the year, on October 21, started as soon as the football coaches cleared out of the office post-practice. Josh's office didn't smell much different than the varsity football locker room next door. He shared the small office with the football coach, Ryan Langferman, who, at thirty-two, was just four years older than Josh. They seemed to like their office more in the style of a dorm room than a study. Three black helmets with gold-and-white Ms and two sets of shoulder pads lay on the floor in the middle of the office, right in front of a brown leather couch. Notre Dame football posters and calendars hung on the walls instead of Josh's preferred Indiana University basketball. The lockers in the small changing room offthe office were filled with Under Armour apparel, and a canister of muscle-building supplement sat on top of the lockers.
Joining Josh was Tyler Theising, the young freshman coach just two years out of school at nearby East Central High; Randy Combs, the former basketball head coach and football defensive coordinator, and now the eighth-grade boys' basketball coach; and Jeff Stutler, an assistant on the football team and the varsity basketball assistant coach. As the football coaches left, the mood in the room turned from jovial to serious. The football team was playing well and currently had six wins and four losses. The previous year, the basketball team had gone three and seventeen.
"Let's be honest with ourselves here, guys," Josh said, leaning back in his chair as he talked with Jeff and Tyler. "Lewis at point, Herzog at the two, Braden at the three, Kurtis at the four, Nick at the five."
Tyler ran his hands over his red hair from back to front, making sure it was lying flat. Jeff stroked his salt-and-pepper goatee.
"That's five juniors, guys. That's five guards. Our top five." Josh was worried. The biggest guy from that group, Nick, was six feet four inches.
"And then I've got Alex Layden and Ethan Voss, our seniors." Five eleven. Six three. "They won't start, and I expect Logan Alloway to start stealing some minutes from them toward the end of the season." Logan Alloway. Five eight. "I bought Layden and Voss's shoes today, those are our seniors. I don't see any way Derek makes the team. His dad's going to be the first one to call when I cut his ass, but he got boxed out by Jared Biddle — yes, five-foot-ten Jared Biddle — last week. We can't keep him."
Josh passed out the meeting agenda and some "team philosophy" papers to the coaches. Each sheet had the Milan Basketball letterhead at the top — in Vegas gold and black — and "Return to Glory" in all caps under the letterhead.
Later, as Josh walked around the Milan gym, it was clear that he understood what Milan meant to the state, and to high school basketball nationwide. Pre1997, the state basketball championship was an open competition. There were no classes based on schools' sizes, and many small schools faced local giants in their sectionals. It didn't matter if the school's enrollment was two hundred or two thousand: everyone played for the same trophy.
And so tiny Milan High School winning the state championship in 1954 was the stuff of Hollywood. But what Hoosiers doesn't reenact, and what actually might be more impressive, is that the team finished second in the state in 1953. Two top teams from one small town.
As much as Hollywood has ignored that state runner-up team, it seems Milan ignores it now. Josh was entering his second year at Milan when he found the state runner-up trophy in the storage attic at the school. He was digging around, creating an inventory of supplies, when there, next to warped basketballs and mildewed practice jerseys, sat a memento of perhaps the second-greatest feat in Indiana sports history.
"I knew we had to display it, but we had to create a space," Josh said, shaking his head. "I mean, look over there." He pointed to a cinder-block wall with about fifty laminated five-by-seven pictures resting on small wooden shelves. "That's our goddamn wall of fame, for crying out loud."
He walked back into the gym and pointed to the state championship banner and the state runner-up banner. They were the same size, about ten feet high and three feet wide, black with gold lettering. The borders were tearing, and water stains distorted the black backgrounds. The edges were frayed. "These things have been moved so many times, stored in attics and closets. They don't get cleaned." Josh was trying to get money raised to restore the banners, but they were the least of the town's, and Josh's, worries.
The biggest problem, the coaches agreed, was the fact that this team was miles behind the other area schools in fundamentals. Passing, dribbling, shooting. One kid came to open gym the week before and employed a push shot. The other area schools didn't have the size problems Milan had — each had at least one kid over six five. A push shot wouldn't do. It would end up in the stands. Cut.
The reputation Milan had around the state and around the country, thanks to Hoosiers, conflicted with the reality. The stereotypical player from a school like Milan might have been undersized, with a less-athletic frame, but he was a gym rat, a kid who couldn't stay off the basketball court, shooting in his driveway until the floodlights turned on, then switching to layups.
But thanks to the economic depression, state funding cutbacks, and many other less-visible factors, it was rare to see a kid from Milan with a basketball in his hands.
"The problem is," Josh said, hanging his head, "if I'm not in here at six in the morning and until eight at night with that gym open, they're not playing."
Then Coach admitted an even more shocking truth in this small town famous for the fictional Jimmy Chitwood: "It's the only basketball hoop in Milan."
Of course, it's not the only hoop in Milan, as I found when I drove around town later that day. But it was close: I struggled to find even one goal in a driveway inside the Milan town limits.
There was a time when the economy and schools in Milan were good, and so was the basketball. Coach Jeff Stutler had moved back to Milan, his hometown, with his wife in 1974 and remembered a time when people asked for Milan by name when they were looking to relocate their young families. He sold real estate back then and would field a call a week asking for availability in the Milan school district. There'd rarely be an opening.
Then, of course, there was 1954. That year, the Pierceville Alleycats — four Milan High School students from neighboring Pierceville (population forty-five) — led the Indians to their championship with skills they learned on a makeshift alley court. They, along with their teammates who lived in Milan's big Victorian homes with the hoops in front, played daily. In 1954, Miss Indiana was Milan's own Cecilia Dennis. Milan wasn't just a small town in a small corner of the state. It was the center.
But not now. Logan got his ten minutes in before volleyball practice, and he played when Josh opened up the school courts for the team. There was no shooting hoops before dinner in 2010; there were video games and Facebook (when they could get the internet coverage) and cell phones (in the few spots in town where the towers reached). The biggest thing holding Milan back wasn't that their big hope for the future, Logan Alloway, stood six to twelve inches farther away from the basketball hoop than his equally talented opponents. It was that he was able to stand under that hoop far less often.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Milan Miracle by Bill Riley. Copyright © 2016 Bill Riley. 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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Measurements and Priorities
Growing Up Milan
We Ask For a Chance That's Fair
Home
Working For Free
All Quiet
The Expendables
Games Within the Game
Change For the Nice Boys
Stalling
Again
Something Positive
Sitting Together
Hysteria
The Milan Everyone Expects
Senior Night
Hope
Both Lion and Lamb
Graduation
Epilogue
Postscript
What People are Saying About This
"For a game that is so centered around arcs and geometry, numbers and statistics, there is a permeating mythos that transcends through the game of basketball—of shots that go in from impossible angles, dead spots on the floor, ghosts in the rafters. Riley's book is an examination of what happens when the odds are defied: instead of the game being forever changed, the anomaly resets—that sometimes instead of focusing on the outlier, there is beauty and fascination found in the status quo; the consistency of layup lines, the players and coaches scrapping to break even."
This book takes us to the small town that inspired Hoosiers, that Hollywood crowd pleaser to measure the burden of a once and former glory. In mellifluous prose, Riley shows us that it takes as much humility as grit and determination to live under the shadow of a nearly sixty-year-old sports legend. Riley shows us that the real drama of sports less often lies in the last-minute shot than in the long run of acceptance of circumstances that are usually beyond our control.
For a game that is so centered around arcs and geometry, numbers and statistics, there is a permeating mythos that transcends through the game of basketball—of shots that go in from impossible angles, dead spots on the floor, ghosts in the rafters. Riley's book is an examination of what happens when the odds are defied: instead of the game being forever changed, the anomaly resets—that sometimes instead of focusing on the outlier, there is beauty and fascination found in the status quo; the consistency of layup lines, the players and coaches scrapping to break even.
Here's a book that reveals something about what makes a young man keep playing for a team that he suspects will most likely lose its next game, while introducing us to a coach who tries to right the ship while knowing the same thing. This is a story about losing, but it's not about losers. It's about grit, and getting back up.
For a game that is so centered around arcs and geometry, numbers and statistics, there is a permeating mythos that transcends through the game of basketball—of shots that go in from impossible angles, dead spots on the floor, ghosts in the rafters. Riley's book is an examination of what happens when the odds are defied: instead of the game being forever changed, the anomaly resets—that sometimes instead of focusing on the outlier, there is beauty and fascination found in the status quo; the consistency of layup lines, the players and coaches scrapping to break even.
Here's a book that reveals something about what makes a young man keep playing for a team that he suspects will most likely lose its next game, while introducing us to a coach who tries to right the ship while knowing the same thing. This is a story about losing, but it's not about losers. It's about grit, and getting back up.
Bill Riley tells a very compelling story about the small town of Milan, Indiana where residents still believe in the message of Hoosiers, the movie, and the mythologizing that has surrounded Milan since the school won the Indiana state basketball championship in 1954. Riley is an excellent author to explore the subject, having grown up in Indiana with a heartfelt love of basketball and a long held belief in the Milan Miracle.
The accomplishments of a group of young men in 1953-1954 forever put Milan on both the Hoosier and national basketball maps. Numerous authors have revisited Milan to contrast its' current condition with those of the 1950's, but none have quite honestly captured the full view of what Bill Riley relays in The Milan Miracle. Despite a glorious past, things aren't quite so glamorous for the Milan Indians these days.
This book takes us to the small town that inspired Hoosiers, that Hollywood crowd pleaser to measure the burden of a once and former glory. In mellifluous prose, Riley shows us that it takes as much humility as grit and determination to live under the shadow of a nearly sixty-year-old sports legend. Riley shows us that the real drama of sports less often lies in the last-minute shot than in the long run of acceptance of circumstances that are usually beyond our control.
In this mesmerizing book about hope, dreams and community, Bill Riley creates an unforgettable portrait of tiny Milan, IN, a town sliding into poverty and lost illusions but still carried by the memory of one long-ago championship season. Writing with steely honesty, rich empathy and deep intelligence, Riley explores the heartland of contemporary America and tests the endurance of a particularly American dream.
Bill Riley tells a very compelling story about the small town of Milan, Indiana where residents still believe in the message of Hoosiers, the movie, and the mythologizing that has surrounded Milan since the school won the Indiana state basketball championship in 1954. Riley is an excellent author to explore the subject, having grown up in Indiana with a heartfelt love of basketball and a long held belief in the Milan Miracle.
Bill Riley's carefully observed and often lyrical book makes us feel what's at stake for the players, coaches, and families of 21st century Milan. We're given access to the sounds and sights of the small town gym: those strangely beautiful and often struggling cathedrals of Indiana's state religion. And we watch as the town and team work to forge a new identity while shadowboxing with the mythology of the miracle of Milan. This book is an important addition to the literature of basketball.
Bill Riley's carefully observed and often lyrical book makes us feel what's at stake for the players, coaches, and families of 21st century Milan. We're given access to the sounds and sights of the small town gym: those strangely beautiful and often struggling cathedrals of Indiana's state religion. And we watch as the town and team work to forge a new identity while shadowboxing with the mythology of the miracle of Milan. This book is an important addition to the literature of basketball.
In this mesmerizing book about hope, dreams and community, Bill Riley creates an unforgettable portrait of tiny Milan, IN, a town sliding into poverty and lost illusions but still carried by the memory of one long-ago championship season. Writing with steely honesty, rich empathy and deep intelligence, Riley explores the heartland of contemporary America and tests the endurance of a particularly American dream.