The Hoosier Pulse/Hooping It Up
Owen, Kent
THE HOOSIER PULSE HOOPING IT UP by Kent Owen T ime was when Indiana's favored pastimes ran to harness racing, horseshoe-pitching, squirrel-hunting, and fishing for bluegill and bass. But ever...
...It is a Washington Post sportswriter's chronicle of IU's 1985-86 campaign, focusing on the behavior and personality of the coach in relation to his players, friends, associates, rivals, officials, and the clamorous world of bigtime college basketball...
...How can these things be true...
...His is an almost Platonic conception of ultimate truth, goodness, and beauty...
...They wear themselves oddly and offhandedly, fleshy here, stringy there, sags and wrinkles, women just short of pretty, men a mite out of focus...
...Ina sport where flamboyant and controversial figures are uncommon, Knight is the grand anomaly...
...For all anybody knows, the game may scratch ,an itch deep down in the collective Hoosier unconscious...
...To dunk is spectacular, to assist honorable...
...The old gyms, school buildings, barber shop, farm houses, stores, town streets give off the worn-down surfaces of many Indiana places, and the people in and out of the crowds (almost all of whom are what they look like, aside from the early fifties get-ups) bear in their features and postures the distinctive marks of the Hoosiers as one of America's first hybrid peoples...
...In no one person has the cliche, "Hoosier hysteria," ever appeared so clinically exact...
...Obviously, Hoosiers owes a lot to Steve Tesich's Breaking Away, one of the more humane and better wrought films of recent years...
...Such small pleasures can be enjoyed on their own terms for what they are, or enlarged into natural symbols of how orderly and bountiful the earth is supposed to be...
...Unlike baseball, which inspires fulsome homage, basketball has failed to stir the imagination of good writers to any lasting result...
...Feinstein has not given us the whole truth about Bob Knight or even a tentative, partial interpretation of the man...
...But nowadays the public spectacle of wholesomeness is rare indeed...
...sters gabbling and old folks just visiting, the true spirit of Indiana bodies forth...
...T ohn Feinstein's A Season on the J Brink- A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers1 has worked its way onto the big-seller lists...
...In basketball the play of the team as an intricately coordinated unit is almost always more important than any single star...
...Knight is brashly and brightly talkative, sarcastic, and magnetic...
...reworks the history of the Milan Indians, who in 1954 fulfilled the dream of beating big city teams to win the tournament on a last-seconds jump shot by the thereby immortalized Bobby Plump...
...But ever since 1893 when one of James Naismith's former students introduced the new game of basketball at the Lafayette YMCA, the Hoosiers have taken to it with gleeful zeal...
...He is unyieldingly loyal to his friends and players and expects them to return his allegiance...
...He seldom suffers fools of any kind...
...So far, thank heavens, no shrink-turned-sportswriterhas tried to do the number on Knight that William Bullitt and the duped Dr...
...Now if Knight could only learn the enduring lessons of the Indiana experience: moderation, self-restraint, and a little political savvy...
...If Bob Knight is a genius at coaching basketball, he is also a great teacher, and his lessons, if properly understood and heeded, are no different from what the Hoosiers have-found all along so sustaining in their game...
...Although Feinstein hints at this innermost morality several times, particularly in a limp epilogue, he fails to understand the man he has followed doggedly and written about rather clumsily...
...maybe Brueghel's burghers and peasant folk really did glow in exuberance on holidays...
...It teaches us, as Emerson taught, that character, more than ability, is the sine qua non, and that hard work, discipline, intensity, tenacity, guts and grit and heart can win out in the end...
...Still the school gym on Friday night comes as close to a thorough democracy as the pioneers could have envisioned...
...Hoosiers (what else could it be called...
...Can it be the Hoosiers themselves, that most strenuously democratic of American breeds, have let an autocratic, authoritarian jackanapes corrupt their precious game...
...The characters avoid the snares, and the actors make them sound, look, and feel like the genuine items to a farethee-well...
...they coalesce to make Knight seem boorish, brutal, and almost fiendishly obsessed...
...No story is so vital to the myth of Indiana basketball...
...For Knight, "to play hard and smart" requires discipline, concentration, fortitude, thorough preparation, and, yes, virtue in its literal sense of what best becomes a man...
...W by does Indiana University or the State of Indiana or the NCAA or the Big Ten or decent, reasonable Hoosiers put up with Bob Knight, if these awful things be true...
...It does no good to suggest that in Indiana basketball is the extension of politics by other means, or that it is the moral equivalent of free-market economics...
...Or dull, plodding pseudo-Dreiserian naturalism...
...Others will wince at what Knight subjects his players and coaches to: fear, intimidation, "mind games," grueling practice sessions, pre- and post-game examinations (ordeals by videotape, if you will), benchings, expulsions from practices, and unrelenting, pressurized challenges at every turn...
...To their credit, Pizzo as script-writer and Anspaugh as director got it right...
...Just the amber twilight of autumn woods, the soft, tender greenery of spring, early morning mist over cornfields, carlights shining through drenching rain, weathered barns and houses along dusty gravel roads, bosky, overgrown thickets, brooks and creeks that make the plainest fields worth looking at...
...There can be little doubt that Knight is one of the more perplexing, indeed exasperating figures in higher education in America...
...Or corrupting sentimentality...
...Whatever its grander meanings, here and now or in the sweet by and by, basketball seizes Indiana from late November through March, keeping the Hoosiers warm, dry, and sentient when there are few good reasons for being out-of-doors...
...After all, you don't have to be a Hoosier to like this gentle, unaffected story.ruptible and incorrigible, for his temper is fearsome and furious...
...Freud did on Woodrow Wilson, but these days anything goes for a fast buck...
...There in the town's biggest enclosure, at once overheated and drafty, redolent of salty popcorn, sweaty overalls, senior cords, starch and soap, dinning with brasses and winds both peppy and flat, with youngKent Owen is Indiana editor of The American Spectator...
...It says we can take charge of our lives, no matter how dreary and pointless they may seem, to become the very best we can be because Coach, God, Indiana, and America—maybe in that order—wish it so...
...It would seem that Knight violates the canons of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct embodied in John Wooden, Everett Dean, Tony Hinkle, Branch McCracken, Ray Crowe, Bill Stearman, and all the generations of Indiana coaches who have traditionally made their work one of moral leadership by precept and example...
...At least he fails to express what he must have learned through privileged access to so complex and problematic a person...
...Or release sexual energies pent up by social strictures and religious repressions...
...What price, glory...
...What he provides is random, chronologically assembled facts: the cheats of reality...
...Some readers of Feinstein's book will be pleased to discover confirming evidence...
...Or slick and snide grotesquerie...
...Evidently not so, if the quality of a work has anything to do with its acceptance or staying power...
...The great shooter gets the acclaim, but they also serve whoonly block, pass, rebound, screen, dribble, box-out, and set the picks...
...Knight is at once incor'Macmillan, $16.95...
...It may well be that the relentless pace of the game doesn't lend itself to the kinds of telling images that literature demands as emblems of experience...
...With the metastasis of television over the last thirty years—satellite dishes pock the yards of farmsteads and house trailers—attendance at high school games has fallen off pretty badly...
...Now that the Hoosiers themselves have had the chance to see the movie—they thought it was fine, amusing, entertaining, and even edifying, although the passing was ragged and the free-throws needed work—it will be of more than commercial interest to see how the rest of America likes it...
...Many sportswriters, fans, and groundlings hate and fear him, partly because he holds them in obvious contempt...
...Fortunately, Feinstein declined to dabble in amateur psychologizing, else he might have talked, as others do, about sado-masochistic tendencies, oral/anal fixations, manic-depressive behavior, obsessional and self-destructive traits, and a disturbing assortment of related disorders...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 39...
...Nothing monumental, breathtaking, awe-inspiring, or dazzling...
...They see him as a swaggering bully, jerking players by their jerseys, throwing chairs, swearing foully, browbeating officials, disdaining coaching colleagues, ignoring routine ceremonies of league leaders, and behaving like a spoiled, mischief-making brat...
...livo young film makers, David Anspaugh of Decatur and Angelo Pizzo of Bloomington, have created a good-natured, semi-dry (about the taste of a white zinfandel) account of a rural school that, pulling at every bootstrap, wins the state championship...
...E ven if basketball in Indiana has resisted portrayal, there are still a few brave persons bold enough to make the effort...
...On the surface the facts are there...
...As for fashion, no one would ever guess that Halston, Bill Blass, Norman Norrell, Eleanor Lambert, and Mark Hampton 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 came from Indiana...
...Even in the toughest of contests, they can be better than a zone defense, if you don't leave your feet...
...Ballet may be easier...
...All the same, it has its own kind of spunk and pluck, which reasonable moviegoers, unaddled by rock and porn, should find delightful and endearing...
...It says we can be redeemed, even the most profligate and degenerate among us, through faith, hope, and a man-to-mandefense combined with clever outside shooting...
...If it's to your taste, the landscape of Indiana can be fetching, and Hoosiers mixes in the proper measure of the picturesque...
...If Feinstein had arranged the surfaces he collected so sedulously, he might have discovered that beneath the man, holding him together with the help of his friends, is a depth of integrity extraordinary in any dimension of American life, public or private...
...You may think you've already read this in a Saturday Evening Post short story circa 1930...
...What grand opera means to the Milanese and bull-fighting to the Cordobans, the sport of hoops and hardwood is to the people of Indiana: an athletic contest practiced as an art form and ritualized as a civic ceremony...
...Then, too, the discipline the sport exacts of players may work against the colorful yet self-indulgent behavior that has given baseball and football so many memorable individualists...
...Feinstein has presented in wearisome detail the daily routines of Knight's life through the 1985-86 season...
...Maybe such a life force coursed through medieval Florence or Georgian London...
...The kindly old principal (Sheb Wooley) who gives a second chance to a disgraced ex-college coach (Gene Hackman) who creates a winning team out of seven or so (the editor doesn't make that clear) hobbledehoy kids whose attitudes are on a par with their talents, and the winsome school marm (Barbara Hershey) who believes basketball can be the ruination of minds that have no loftier aspirations, and the town drunkard (Dennis Hopper), once a local hero as a hot-handed shooter, who struggles to reclaim his dignity and the respect of his own son, and a sorghum-and-molasses sampling of townspeople who hold fast to the team as their one...
...Keeping a series of fast-moving actions fixed in the mind's eye is hard to accomplish...
...It may yet be his undoing...
...Only in Indiana, perhaps...
...His standards, academic as well as athletic, are uncompromisingly high, and he is given to impulsive acts of kindness, sympathy, and generosity...
...proud proof of virtue: these are exactly the characters who might have made for sheer bathos...
...It should stand to reason that with the Hoosiers' fondness for story-telling, somebody along the line would have turned the whole thing into a novel or, at least, a movie...
...His vision of intercollegiate athletics as a moral model demands obedience and submission to authority that few young athletes, no matter how skillful and purposeful they may be, can meet...
...For sixteen seasons at IU and six before that at West Point, he has made himself into a personage more notable—some would say more notorious—than his own teams, who perform remarkably, often superbly...
...This is why they did...
...They were all for egalitarian neighborliness and civility, a little leery of economic parity, and dead set against pluralism, largely for fear that the Papists might overrun the state and upset the balance among the Methodists, Baptists, Campbellites, and Presbyterians...
...His moral imagination advances the game of basketball to the point at which all the faculties of the self interact to achieve the Ideal of Excellence...
...Wordsworth would have felt at home here, if he could have stood the accent...
...Have they fallen victim to the bitch goddess of winning at all costs, as Kentuckians have suspected for years...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
