With apologies to “Hoosiers”

MODERN DAD | By Jon Show

April 4. Gene Hackman died in February at the age of 95.

I’m not much of a Hollywood guy. I don’t really care about celebrities. I don’t think they resonate with me because I don’t really know them. My only connection to them is the characters they’re pretending to be on screen.

Hackman was different though, for me.

Basketball was my life as a kid. I was raised by a basketball dad to be a basketball kid, and I ended up being one of those kids who didn’t resent being raised to be something. I loved it.

My dad and I talked about basketball. We shot hoops in the driveway. He was my middle school basketball coach. We watched basketball. A lot.

We watched so much basketball that I received the birds and bees talk during a commercial break of an ACC basketball game.

We also rented the occasional movie on weekends, but the only one we ever went to the theater to see together was Hoosiers.

Back home again

My dad grew up playing basketball in the late 1950s in a small town named New Castle, Indiana.

For my dad, Hoosiers was part movie (the plot is fictional) and part documentary (it was based on a true story about tiny Milan high school). The movie was like revisiting his childhood 30 years after the fact.

He played in many of the gyms featured in the movie, especially the fictional Hickory Huskers home court that was in neighboring Knightstown.

The final game in the movie was in Butler Fieldhouse, where he played college basketball on a partial scholarship until he either failed out or his family ran out of money. I’ve never been able to get a straight answer on that.

I bet I’ve watched Hoosiers 200 times? 300 times? I watched it before almost every middle and high school game I played and countless times since. It remains the only movie that I can recite every line throughout its duration.

I don’t know why Gene Hackman’s character resonated with me. Maybe it’s because my dad had some similar qualities. He definitely yelled at his fair share of refs and was tossed out of more than a couple of my games.

It had been a few years since I’d watched Hoosiers from start to finish, so I sat down last month and rented it on Amazon on a Friday night when my family was gone.

It’s amazing how some moments in movies can evoke the same emotions over and over and over and over, your neurons never tiring or growing callused at scenes that you’ve watched countless times.

I still get wide-eyed when the small in stature Hickory team walks into giant Butler Fieldhouse for the state championship.

The hair still stands up on my neck when Shooter celebrates the final victory in a bathrobe while jumping up and down on his bed in the mental hospital.

Hickory stick

I met most of the fictional Hickory Huskers team when I was 14. The Indiana High School Basketball Hall of Fame is housed in New Castle’s Chrysler Fieldhouse, which is the largest high school basketball gym in the world at 10,000-plus seats.

The fieldhouse opened my dad’s senior year of high school in 1959. Thirty years after it opened, and three years after Hoosiers hit theaters, my dad’s team was invited back and recognized on the court at halftime of New Castle’s Friday night game.

During the ceremonies the next afternoon, the actors from the Huskers team took the court against real-life Bobby Plump, portrayed in the movie as Jimmy Chitwood. Plump attempted his famous last second shot at least five times before they finally gave up and moved on.

Hackman and Maris Valainis, who played Jimmy, weren’t in attendance.

Years later I almost met Valainis. After the movie he left Hollywood and became a golf pro in California, and he was supposed to play in an event I was running in Los Angeles until COVID shut the world down.

I was kind of bummed out. I didn’t get to meet him because he was the movie’s hero, but he was never my favorite character.

Almost all of these columns are written without any pre-planned structure so I’m usually on the same journey as you. Something pops into my head and I write until I get somewhere near 1000 words and then go back and fix all the typos.

Right about now I’m realizing that my connection with Hackman in that movie is more about my dad than anything else. You, reader, probably already realized that. Sorry, I’m a little slow on the uptake.

As we get older our pasts become distilled into fewer and fewer memories. I’m sure I had tons of memories of my childhood when I was 18 years old, but at 49 many of them have faded away.

One hasn’t, and never will. And as my dad’s memory has faded even more at age 83, it’s one that hasn’t left him either.

March Madness

It’s been 30 years since my senior year in high school, when my dad was roughly my age now and we made a run through the high school state basketball playoffs.

After a couple of early round victories, we scored an upset win in the sectionals against a team that had beaten us the previous two years. After the game my dad ran down the stands and jumped over the back of the bench to give me a hug, nearly tripping over the chairs.

The next game was a semifinal at the old Boston Garden. We played terrible most of the game but mounted a 25-point comeback in the second half, culminating in a last-minute jumper from the corner to win by one point.

A few days later we won the state championship by a score I forget, against a team I can’t remember, in an arena with a name I can’t recall.

It’s been thirty years and that’s almost all the memory I have of those few weeks, save for one more.

After both of those last two games, as the on-court celebration raged, I scanned the thousands in attendance until I found my dad in the massive arena and scaled the dozens of rows of seats to celebrate with him.

To this day I have no idea why I did it. I’d never done it before. I just did it.

I’ve probably only told that story to a handful of people because it feels weird to talk about your high school years. My dad still tells it often to anyone who will listen.

Roll credits

The final scene in Hoosiers is back in the old Knightstown gym, where a young kid is shooting around by himself, making every shot.

The camera pans the court and slowly zooms in on the Hickory state championship banner hanging on the wall, as Hackman’s memorable lines replay from earlier in the movie.

I never knew Gene Hackman. Never met him. I’m not much of a Hollywood guy and I don’t really care about celebrities.

I guess he resonated with me because my only connection to him was the character he was pretending to be on screen.

Jon Show lives in Robbins Park with his wife, who he calls “The Mother of Dragons.” Their 16-year-old son is “Future Man” and their 11-year-old daughter is “The Blonde Bomber.” Their dog is actually named Lightning.