If you’ve seen one sports film, you’ve seen them all, and that’s especially true if you’ve seen Hoosiers. The 1986 flick starring Gene Hackman as a brash, new head coach who leads a small high school basketball team to a state championship is generally acknowledged as the best sports movie ever.
Does Hoosiers make sense as a basketball film?
And I got nothing bad to say about Hoosiers. The music is great, the acting is solid; the people playing the high schoolers actually look like they’re in high school, as opposed to something like Grease, where 30-year-olds are running around in hoop skirts and lettermans. Personally, I’m a sucker for a sappy ending where the characters have either aged to near death, or it’s like 100 years in the future and they’re dead altogether. Even if it is just a portrait of the Hoosiers basketball team, it gets to me. Then again, I’m the kind of guy who writes about sports history on a regular basis, so I’m pretty nostalgic to begin with.
Are there tropes? Certainly. The new coach who takes over an impossible situation; the superstar who joins the team in the middle of the season; the validation of the coach’s wacky new philosophies; the no-good scrum of the team coming through in a key situation; the team winning a game of championship-esque importance, as underdogs, on a last-second play, to the delight of everyone. Throw in a romance subplot or two and you’ve got the DNA of basically every sports movie ever made. Hoosiers does it better than almost every film in the genre because of the acting, and the music, and the quaint settings of the fictional Hickory, Indiana. Plus, it gets a pass for coming out in 1986, when the sports film formula hadn’t been thoroughly beaten to death. Some could argue Hoosiers popularized that formula.
So here’s the thing with Hoosiers. I watched it the other night, and I came to the realization that the supposed theme of the movie isn’t really all that accurate. Hoosiers is ostensibly about a renegade new coach whose radical new teachings helped guide a basketball team out of the gutters, and eventually to the state championship. That seems like a reasonable description of the film, right? Well, the only problem is that Gene Hackman’s character doesn’t exactly do much of anything to help the team. In fact, by the end of it, I came away thinking that coach Norman Dale wasn’t so much what Bill Belichick was to the 2001 Patriots, but what Trent Delfer was to the 2002 Ravens.
His teachings really didn’t do a whole lot. In the beginning of the film, he goes on a tirade about how everyone has to pass the ball four times before anyone can shoot. And then in a game, when one of the players shoots early and makes the shot, he angrily benches the player for the rest of the game, and the Hoosiers finish the game a man down. And they lose, of course. After re-watching it, it’s hard for me not to see this as an exercise in ego on Dale’s part, and not so much a prudent piece of wisdom. I know disobeying the coach is bad and all, but isn’t the point of having an objective to score points to... score points? Who cares that he did it without making a few superfluous passes. Plus, isn’t that a really dumb rule to have anyway? I don’t know how Chauncey Billups could play in the NBA if he got reamed every time he took a wide-open, pull-up three.
If the shot’s a good shot, take it. Ordering against it for the sake of ordering against it is dumb, even if the guy ordering it was Lex Luther in a different movie.
So halfway through the film, the townspeople get together to try to kick Dale off the team. Dale makes a final bid to save his job by saying that he regrets nothing and that he’s proud of what he’s done and proud of his team. And I guess at this point, we’re supposed to be captivated by Dale and supportive of him. But really, I found myself siding with the townspeople. The team was losing, his coaching strategies weren’t working. It was time to give him the old Terry Francona/Theo Epstein treatment.
But then, the best basketball player in the city, Jimmy, decides he suddenly wants to be on the team, but on the condition that coach Dale stays. And like that, the townspeople decide to keep him on after all. So it’s not even like he won the support of the fans or anything. It was all thanks to Jimmy. And I’m not even all that sure why Jimmy suddenly changed his mind. Was it really because of the one conversation Dale had with him where he specifically said he didn’t care if Jimmy played for them or not? Maybe... I dunno...
Anyway, for the rest of the film, the Hoosiers are an unstoppable juggernaut, and it’s all because they have Jimmy now. Coach Dale doesn’t really do anything; the most inspired thing he does is get himself thrown out of games from time to time, but he isn’t even the guy drawing up strategies for them at that point. That’s true to form for real-life basketball, where the one superstar makes all the difference in the world. But when the film keeps cutting to Dale, and following Dale, and making Dale the main character, it’s obvious who we’re lead to believe is the archetype of the Hoosiers’ success. But it ain’t him. It’s Jimmy. By the end of the film, I couldn’t recall a single play he drew up that translated into points, which seems sort of essential -- to have one play where he pulls a play out of his hat, and everyone credits him for his ingenuity.
Case and point, in the final game, when Jimmy is carrying the Hoosiers by hitting every shot, Dale calls for a last-second shot where Jimmy is the decoy. And Jimmy basically calls the play off and decides to take the final shot himself, which he hits. So in the most critical moment in the film, Dale drew up a dud play that everyone hated, and Jimmy decided he would finish the game, because he was the guy doing everything.
That’s basically what I found the real theme of the movie to be. I’m sure Dale did something to help the team at some point, maybe. But really, what did he do? Did he do anything in any of the games that distinguished himself as a great, legendary coach? To me, Hoosiers is a miscast movie where the main character, Jimmy, is painted as the guy who needed to be coaxed through Dale’s guidance, even though it should have been the other way around; Jimmy basically carried the team, and Dale was just along for the ride. It’d be like if a movie was made about the 2011 Miami Heat, but the main character was Erik Spoelstra.
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