KAREEM TAYYAR

Silver Screen Pastoral:
Hoosiers, Basketball, and American Mythology    

1.
The film opens in Norman Rockwell's America, as Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) drives through rolling fields, stops at rural gas stations, and looks out his windshield at picturesque farmhouses that seem miles away from their nearest neighbor. Add in Jerry Goldsmith's score, all swelling strings and horns, and from the first minute of running time, it's clear we're inhabiting a landscape as mythic as Camelot or Middle Earth.

This version of American Pastoral usually means a baseball film has begun. Think The Natural. Think Bull Durham. Think Field of Dreams. After all, no sport has made greater hay out of idealizing its existence to such an extent that it often feels like baseball gave birth to the United States, rather than the other way around.

Yet this is not a baseball film. It is instead about the sport that had, in so many ways by the mid-1980s, replaced baseball as the national pastime.

Which means that it's also a film about fathers and sons, about second chances, purifying rituals, secular brotherhoods, Christian fellowship, and too many varieties of sadness, regret, and dreams to articulate.

2.
I'm not sure I liked that introduction. It makes the movie feel like an epic poem, which it isn't.

3.
Let’s try this instead.

It's 1951. Norman Dale, a middle-aged man who has been in the military for the past ten years, arrives in the small town of Hickory, Indiana, in early fall. He's alone, and it's clear from his reserved demeanor that he doesn't want to speak about the past. Or, more specifically, about his past.

The town is beautiful in the way that small towns so often are in American popular culture. John Mellencamp would recognize this town. Edward Hopper and Steven Spielberg would too.

Coach Dale, whose daily uniform is khaki officer's pants, a white shirt, dark tie, and a brown leather jacket, has been hired to coach Hickory’s basketball team.

The players, with one exception, are more or less average. Hard-working, and as in love with the game as one would expect teenaged boys from the Midwest to be, but hardly the stuff that championship dreams are made of.

The coach is a "my-way-or-the-highway" type of leader. Reserved, hard-headed, a little arrogant, but also one who clearly cares about his players, and about the way the game is supposed to be played.

Coach Dale has the usual conflicts with the players early on. All of which are necessary for Dale to, as he tells another character in the film, "break them down and build them back up again."

It's an attitude that wouldn't fly in 2024, and probably shouldn't have flown in 1951. No matter what Dale says to his players about them being members of "his army," sports aren't combat.

Still.

Hickory is a town whose best days are well behind it. Which means these kids know, even if only subconsciously, that their lives will never again feel as full of purpose and excitement as they do now. Dale knows this too. We can see it when he tells a fellow teacher who is critical of high school sports, that "some people would give anything to be treated like gods for just a little while."

Is it sad?

Yes.

A little absurd?

Certainly.

Entirely true?

Without question.

As the games begin, it's clear most of the townspeople, many of whom are as hostile to outsiders as those in The Scarlet Letter, want Coach Dale gone. They’re appalled by his in-game tactics — especially his decision to have the team play man-to-man defense, something they believe to be beyond the athletic abilities of the players — and by his unwillingness to allow them to serve as de facto assistant coaches. These are people who believe they have already lost enough, that the world coming into focus is one that has little time for them, and they are not about to have an outsider ruin something they hold sacred.

In other words, this is a sports film we have seen too many times to count, albeit one handled with a grace, a nuance, and an attention to detail that places it in the upper echelon of those movies.

We know where this is all going.

The townspeople will come around, Dale's players will, having fully absorbed his teachings, perform well above their talent levels, and Dale himself will exorcise his personal demons.

Which is, on some level, exactly what happens.

But which, on other, more meaningful levels, has nothing to do with what makes this picture a masterpiece.

4.
By 1986, Dennis Hopper was a first-ballot Hall-of-Fame Hollywood cautionary tale. An actor of immense talent whose first two screen credits were supporting roles alongside James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, and whose directorial debut, Easy Rider, ranks alongside Orson Welles's Citizen Kane as the greatest first film a director has ever made, had largely spent the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s sleepwalking through forgettable movies like Mad Dog Morgan, Flesh Color, and O.C. and Stiggs. Such a fall from grace wasn't exactly a surprise, considering no one this side of David Crosby had spent more time stoned during the Summer of Love than Hopper had.

Yet in 1986, newly clean, Hopper reminded audiences of his talent in a trio of disparate projects: River's Edge, Blue Velvet, and Hoosiers, his performance in the latter of which remains, alongside Jack Lemmon's in Days of Wine and Roses, among the most moving, vulnerable, and confessional representations of addiction ever committed to celluloid. From the near-dizziness Hopper conveys each time he's drunk, to the discomfort he displays when, having gotten sober, he arrives for his first game as an assistant coach dressed in his wedding suit, to the fear we see in his eyes when, after Dale has been ejected from a close game, it falls upon Hopper to lead the team in their timeout huddles, it feels as if we are watching a documentary rather than a fiction.

5.
We should probably discuss Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis), who is to basketball films what Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs is to baseball movies. Chitwood, who says fewer than fifty words in the entirety of the picture, is a hoops savant, a kid who seems to go weeks at a time without missing a shot, and whom everyone in town reveres with a near-religious devotion.

Given that it was 1986, and that the movie takes place in Indiana, it's impossible to talk about Chitwood without also discussing Larry Bird, the Indiana high school and college phenom who dominated the professional landscape in the mid-1980s like few players before or since, leading his Boston Celtics squad to three championships and winning the league's Most Valuable Player award from 1984 through 1986.

There was something mythic about Bird’s talent. Though decidedly limited as an athlete, he was a dead-eye shooter who seemed to be in range from anywhere on the court, and as only the greatest of players can do, Bird routinely elevated his game during the highest-pressure moments.

Yet the basketball landscape of the 1980s was one where Bird was occasionally labeled as a the NBA's White Savior — or, as his teammate Cedric Maxwell, chiding Bird during the latter's first practice as a member of the Celtics, stated, "Great White Hope" — and whose popularity was, among certain segments of the league's fans, intensified, as Bird admitted in his marvelous autobiography Drive, by "the color of my skin."

Add to this fact that Bird played the entirety of his career in Boston, a city whose notoriously racist environment was the stuff of legend, and it's easy to see why a filmmaker like Spike Lee uses a white character wearing Bird's jersey in Do the Right Thing as a signifier for racist dog-whistling.

To his enduring credit, Bird never played along and spoke for the entirety of his career with eloquence and moral conviction about the need to eliminate racism from American sports and society.

Something which Hoosiers is unwilling to do.

Instead, the film presents a version of the country where the white Americans are the ultimate underdogs, and whose small-town environments, rooted in tradition, retain an innocence that their big-city counterparts have entirely sacrificed.

This is, of course, insane.

It also happens to be a point-of-view shared by some of the most famous sports films this country has ever produced.

Consider that the last white American fighter to hold the heavyweight championship belt was Rocky Marciano in 1956, yet there is an entire sub-genre of Hollywood sports film dedicated to lionizing white boxers who "overcome the odds" to become champions.

Or consider that Field of Dreams, the classic baseball picture from 1989, centers around Kevin Costner's farmer building a stadium on his land so that the ghosts of white players who were banned from the game for throwing the 1919 World Series can have a place to play, never once thinking to include the several generations of African-American men who had been kept from playing in the major leagues to begin with because of their skin.

In other words, the politics of Hoosiers, while embarrassing, are not unique.

They are, however, something to keep in mind, given that the film takes place more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act would be passed, and nearly fifteen years before Texas Western, starting five African-American players, would defeat a Kentucky squad that not only featured an all-white starting lineup, but were led by the overtly segregationist coach Adolph Rupp.

Indeed, the movie can't seem to imagine any greater injustice than that Hickory's players and coach are not initially supported by its hometown or that they practice in an admittedly modest gym. Which means that when we get to the state title game and see that the opposing team features several black players (along with two black coaches), the audience has been set up to see these individuals as representing American privilege, rather than considering that they have overcome a variety of challenges that the Hickory players cannot even begin to imagine.

None of this ruins the film.

But it does bear keeping in mind.

6.
My goodness, it can be a beautiful sport to watch.

One player curling off a teammate's well-set pick, catching a pass in rhythm and letting go of a jumper that arcs through the air towards the basket.

A ball-handler leading a three-on-two fast break, eyes scanning from right to left and back again, shaking his first defender with a deft crossover dribble, then tossing a soft bounce-pass in the direction of a streaking wingman who receives it in stride and leaps towards the hoop for a layup.

A player, as deep in concentration as any Buddhist monk, drawing in a few breaths before beginning the rituals that will culminate in his free-throw attempt.

Writers over the years have compared basketball to jazz and democracy, but the truth is that it isn't like anything.

Five players, working in concert with one another, being guided by someone who has his players’ best interests at heart.

I'm not sure there is another film that captures this beauty as fully as Hoosiers does, no matter its flaws.

Each time we watch the Hickory players in motion, running through their sets in the hopes of finding a good shot, we might as well be the parents the camera often pans to back in the stands. Living and dying with each make or miss that our boys experience.

It's wonderful and exhausting, liberating and devastating.

So maybe it is, actually, like jazz and democracy after all.

7.
Maris Valainis, the actor who plays Jimmy Chitwood, was a golf pro for a time in the area where I grew up, and he would occasionally play pickup basketball at the gym where I was a regular. He was a good player, still possessed of that unmistakably perfect form we see in the film, and though he kept mostly to himself in between games, it was a thrill for some of us local kids — then the age that the players in Hoosiers are in the picture — to get in a few runs after school or on weekends with the actual Jimmy Chitwood.

What I most remember about the afternoons when Valainis would show up to play was how we took great pains not to acknowledge that we knew who he was. We'd steer clear from mentioning anything about the movie around him and were even careful not to look for too long in his direction, as if worried that, were anyone to mention the name Jimmy Chitwood to Valainis, we would be breaking a spell that would cast us out of the magical world Chitwood's presence created and back into the run-of-the-mill suburban gym where we actually were.

Until, that is, one afternoon when a friend of mine — we'll call him Jack, and who went on to a be a star college wide receiver and journeyman NFL player — walked up to Valainis, and with the mixture of directness and kindness that only a sixteen-year-old can possess, said, "Yo Jimmy, want to run with us?"

Vallainis simply nodded before firing up another jumper, and Jack returned to the sidelines like a conquering hero, having uttered the unsayable out loud and proved that the Hoosiers mythos was not so easily punctured.

8.
You know how the movie plays out, even if you've never seen it. Dale draws up the right play, Chitwood nails the shot, and a celebration ensues. You can't help but feel the hair on your arms stand up, or suddenly feel compelled to find the nearest pickup game and try to relive your youth. The type of film moment that one can't resist, even when we know we're being manipulated.

But then the moment is over, and we're back in the Hickory gym. Except this time years have passed, if not decades, and Dale and Hopper and the rest of the squad look back at us from a framed photograph that hangs on the wall behind one of the baskets. Time has marched on, and it's likely Dale and Hopper have passed away, and that the kids who comprised the title-winning Hickory High team have kids and grandkids of their own.

Maybe some, if not most, of them play basketball, and maybe once in a while they're in the mood to hear the story of how their grandfathers once did the impossible. It doesn’t matter that the good times didn't last. They're not supposed to. And anyway, that’s what stories are for.

Even if they don't hit every mark.

 

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