Casual
Casual The Final Score is: Indiana 0, Indiana 0 Remember Hoosiers? If you've seen the 1986 movie, you were probably charmed by the thinly fictionalized David-and-Goliath story about how one of the...
...I say that merely as a fan, who couldn't jump or shoot well enough to make the team...
...The enthralling spectacle of our state's high-school basketball tourney-in which every school from the smallest to the largest goes head to head-drives Hoosiers to hysteria not because we are uniquely susceptible to mass lunacy and have nothing else to do all winter long out in the cornfields (true, but beside the point...
...We didn't mind...
...You can say this for the peasants of P?rigord and the lobster fishermen of Maine: They at least had the wit to sell dear when the world came to buy...
...Do we really have to dynamite the mountain because so few reach the summit...
...The basketball bureaucrats of Indiana have decided simply to sell out, and at low prices too...
...It is an incomparable experience at a young age...
...Last week, the Indiana High School Athletic Association's governing board decided to junk the venerable tournament that nourished Hoosier hysteria...
...Because Indiana seemed to be the last state to withstand a national tsunami of misbegotten egalitarianism that believes in showering trophies down on every one of God's children and all His sports teams, too...
...There are multiple state championships in team sports, one for each division...
...Maine lobster, so I've heard, was the 19th-century equivalent of soup-kitchen slop for the nearby indigent who couldn't afford real meat...
...truly we didn't...
...What's more, it's a simpleton's view that adults best serve the interests of students by depriving them of the possibility of epic achievement in the belief that they are bound to fall short...
...The everyone-deserves-to-be-a-champion movement is more than a quarter-century old...
...They defend themselves, of course, by invoking, as the commissioner put it, "the best interests of the students we serve...
...Legendary exploits are rare things, indeed...
...It sent me into a funk of sour resentment over the missed opportunity to launch a lucrative screenwriting career...
...It looks as if Indiana's tender-souled high-school sports politicians are rushing to destroy their meritocratic jewel of a basketball championship before it's too late...
...I say one Milan redeems all that...
...Hoosiers are not given to extravagance of expression or emotion...
...Barring a popular uprising, which is not out of the question, the state will go to a four-division, four-champion, small-school-self-esteem-fest starting with the 1997-98 season...
...Did the peasants of P?rigord appreciate the fungi that their pigs rooted up before the chefs of Paris sought them out as the finest truffles known to man...
...that before 1954, small schools lost overwhelmingly, as they have ever since-year after year after year of unrelieved defeat-in the first round of tournament play...
...It marks you for life...
...Then we lose all reserve, we scream, we hyperventilate, and we weep...
...Indiana-and I say this with the affection of a native son-is a flat state filled with flat people...
...Everyone gets to be a "winner...
...Now it seems the egalitarian disease has afflicted the Hoosier state with all the subtlety of a mad-cow virus...
...Why...
...The program will then fade into the well-deserved obscurity that high-school basketball enjoys everywhere else in the land...
...Until the month of March, that is...
...They say also that, after all, there has only been one miracle team from Milan...
...Since I grew up in Indiana passionately affected by what we natives call Hoosier hysteria and knew intimately the story of Bobby Plump's heroics in the 1954 tourney, I had a different reaction to Hoosiers...
...Just for showing up...
...Richard Starr...
...The success of Hoosiers, then, made clear to those of us who grew up in the middle of it something we had only halfway suspected...
...If you've seen the 1986 movie, you were probably charmed by the thinly fictionalized David-and-Goliath story about how one of the smallest high schools in the state of Indiana (Milan, enrollment 161) overcomes incredible odds to beat one of the largest (Muncie Central, enrollment 2,300) for the 1954 state basketball championship...
...I consoled myself with the thought that people tend to be blind to the universal appeal of their local customs...
...It is a (benign) form of madness...
...This may be deeply satisfying if you're in the trophy-making and plaque-engraving business...
...And if they only come along once in a century-well, that is often enough for people to be inspired by them...
...In a flat state, high school basketball was our Mount Everest, and most of us were doomed to be sherpas in the base camp...
...that since 1954 no team so small has soared so high...
...No, our championship is more dramatic than all the others...
...How had I failed to see the big-screen potential of this legendary story...
...Ridicule of its kissing cousin-the self-esteem movement-is fast becoming a species of conventional wisdom...
...But don't try to make a movie out of it...
...Most states divide their teams into different divisions by size of school-David fights David, and Goliath slugs Goliath...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 34
