* Suggestion from my friend Larry Prater *
Up until last week, I probably was the only basketball fan in America who hadn't seen HOOSIERS yet. No shame in that, really. I'm past that part of my life where I was ashamed of stuff like that. Now, I just correct it. I would've waited a couple years to see it, but since the Indiana Pacers are going to wear uniforms based on that movie next season, curiosity got the best of me. I know what to expect out of sports movies and HOOSIERS didn't reinvent the wheel in that regard: it's pompous, predictable, manipulative and thoroughly cliché and that's why it's so good. HOOSIERS is a seminal sports movie not because it innovates, but because it gives people what they want. It delivers the shit out of what they want.
Hickory, a small Indiana town, lives and breathes basketball like the rest of the State. Their high school team is adrift since the death of their coach and the decision from their superstar Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis) to sit out until he figures out if he wants to still play basketball. The school principal (Sheb Wooley) decides to hire his old friend Norman Dale (Gene Hackman), a disgraced NCAA coach who's been out of work for over a decade. Dale knows what he's doing better than everyone in town, but Hickory is so set in its ways, they're not about to let a stranger tell them what to do and teach them a couple things about their passion without a fight.
HOOSIERS is, like most sports movies, not really a sports movie. It's a heavy-handed drama about sports culture. The basketball scenes mostly consists in Gene Hackman being kicked out of games for being abusive and the boys shooting outside jumpers and layups like Larry Bird on quaaludes. The most technical aspect of the game is performed in the final game, when the opposing team starts running dribble handoffs because they are quicker and more athletic and all the Hickory Huskers can do, at least for the first half, is stare in confusion like they've never seen this fundamental basketball play in their lives. Thing is, basketball is only accessory to HOOSIERS. It's treated with the trademark polite condescension of Hollywood executives in this tale of a city man winning a small town over with his work ethic and integrity. Somehow, it only makes me movie more adorable, though.
I like HOOSIERS anyway although I'm aware it's not rational. Athletic success is the second Great Measure for Male Achievement in our society after financial success and any men I know (self included, of course), will take any underdog story we can get our hands on. John Oliver said it best, the only thing that's going to make a grown man cry is a coach delivering an inspirational speech set to emotional music. HOOSIERS has a surprisingly subtle and understated approach in that regards, which I appreciated. It's a movie set in the 1950s, so they speak and act like men of this era would: with few, well chosen words, pats in the back and emotional gazes. The only moments where they vocalize their emotions is when they're angry as hell. HOOSIERS won't make your heart swell with emotion, but it'l make you feel proud, like you're watching your little brothers succeed at basketball.
I don't think that anyone who has watched the FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS series before HOOSIERS can truly experience the film the way it's meant to be. It was such a milestone in sports fiction that everything that came before seems tame and everything created after has to measure itself against it. I liked HOOSIERS despite its condescending and gimmicky use of the sport I love, because it fuels the mythos that sports culture is a life-or-death subject for everyday people, which is both true and not. It is a part of our culture and an instrument that helps tearing down social boundaries, but at the end of the day, it only carries the meaning fans are willingly giving it. I thought HOOSIERS represented that reality quite well, too and it's why it is a movie that will live on through its truths in the post-FNL era, and not for its heavy-handed attempts at melodrama.
