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Hoosiers

If Ted Cruz loses the upcoming Indiana Republican presidential primary, he shouldn’t blame Hoosiers. He should blame Hoosiers.

That’s because the Texas Senator, whom political observers say has to win in Indiana on May 3 to keep the slightest hope of derailing a Donald Trump nomination, completely botched a reference to the iconic 1987 Academy Award nominated movie – and no less, in the gym that served as Hickory High’s home floor in the movie. Cruz, like many past failed presidential candidates, is now learning the hard lesson that voters will forgive a lot, but screwing up sports is a deal-breaker.

On April 26, the same day he was thoroughly, electorally curb-stomped by Trump in five northeastern-state presidential primaries, Cruz held a rally at the Hoosier Gym in Knightstown, Ind., about 40 miles east of Indianapolis. For copyright reasons, it’s not the Hoosiers Gym, but the old Knightstown High place looks like it did in the film, with the same gray wooden bleachers, and the 1951 Hickory Husker state champion team photo to the left of the west rim. The movie was based on a real team, the 1954 state champions from Milan, but Indiana has embraced the fictionalized team as a symbol of its love of basketball. For example, the NBA’s Indiana Pacers struck a deal with MGM before the 2015-16 to wear Hickory replica uniforms, to great merchandising success. Plus, you can walk into the Hoosier Gym and shoot around; there are basketballs available for your use.

It was that west rim that turned into a source of trouble for Cruz. As a means of ~~pandering to~~ connecting with the Hoosiers who filled the small gym, Cruz (and/or his campaign team) decided they would re-enact a scene from Hoosiers. Perhaps feeling pressure because Trump already had announced former Indiana University men’s basketball coach and one-time object of worship Bob Knight would appear with him, Cruz invoked another beloved Indiana coach, Norman Dale (played by Gene Hackman).

The scene Cruz re-enacted was one of the most iconic ones from the movie – in which Dale has his team measure the height of the rim and the length to the free-throw line to show his nervous charges they are “the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory” (see above). Here is how Cruz screwed this up:

First, the scene didn’t take place in Hickory’s gym. It was at the state championship site, Butler (now Hinkle) Fieldhouse, and Dale’s exercise was meant to show his team that even though they were playing in a 15,000-seat palace, the court was no different than their home floor. So Cruz, by having his aide (referred to by Cruz as “Bruce, who travels with me”) measure the rim height in Knightstown, was already operating in bizarre world.

So what was the point of doing this, other than pandering? Once Bruce said the rim measured 10 feet, Cruz declared that it’s the same height “as it is in New York City and every other place in the country.” Excuse me? Was that supposed to be news to people in Indiana? Or people who have the slightest understanding of basketball? Why does that even matter? Cruz continued: “And there is nothing that Hoosiers cannot do.” The implication of this statement is that, one, people from Indiana inherently feel inferior to others and are mentally shackled by that feeling, and, two, knowing their rim height is the same as anyone else’s should inspire them out of their torpor to seize the day. Geez, Ted, I wish you were around when I was growing up in Indiana to inspire me to greatness through the knowledge of equal-height rims! I might have turned out to be somebody!

And Cruz’s second major botch, as piled on through the usual social media outlets, was his referring to the rim as a “basketball ring.” That’s just stupid, but I will give Cruz the benefit of the doubt of merely misspeaking. After all, a moment earlier, he said “basketball rim.” Now that deserves a piling on. Like Cruz’s face, calling it a “basketball rim” puts you in the Uncanny Valley of humanity. Ted, you’re in a gym, in the state of Indiana – do you really think without the modifier the crowd wouldn’t know what sport you were talking about? Do you inform people in your football-mad state of Texas that someone crossed the football end zone to score a touchdown?

If you’d like to see how badly Cruz got things wrong, the Washington Post has a video mashup comparing Cruz and Norman Dale.

Cruz’s Hoosiers gaffe wasn’t his only sports-related moment of pandering gone awry in Indiana; during an earlier appearance at a southern Indiana winery, he declared “If and when we win it may feature, like the Indy 500, a campaign crashing and burning and catching on fire.” Yes, there are crashes in auto race, but you don’t go into Indiana and declare its premier sporting event to be a source of death. When Cruz campaigned in Kentucky, I don’t remember him saying: “If and when we win it may feature, like the Kentucky Derby, a campaign crashing and breaking its leg and getting euthanized.”

Here’s the thing about presidential candidate sports references. If you can’t do them right, don’t them at all. Voters might not always be able to figure out when they’re being pandered to, but sports provides an easy way for any voter to identify someone faking trying to be a regular person, or going into whole-hog pandering.

John Kerry in 2004 was a cavalcade of sports muffs, what with his favorite Boston Red Sox player being “Manny Ortez” (a weird combination of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz), identifying the Green Bay Packers as playing in “Lambert Field” (instead of Lambeau), as well as those infamous photos of him comfortably windsurfing and uncomfortably hunting. For pandering, it gets no worse than 2008 candidate Rudolph Giuliani, well-known as a rabid New York Yankees fan, telling voters in New Hampshire that he converted to rooting for the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees’ biggest rival. In 2012, Mitt Romney kept dropping the “s” off of “sports,” as in, “I met a guy yesterday, 7 feet tall… I figured he had to be in sport, but he wasn’t in sport!”

Note that all those candidates lost. Ted Cruz didn’t have much hope of winning to begin with, but you can pretty much book screwing up Hoosiers as the day he guaranteed his loss.

[Where to stream Hoosiers]

Bob Cook, a father of four and a former coach, writes about youth sports for Forbes.com through his blog called Your Kid’s Not Going Pro. His recommendation for getting your kid a college scholarship is to support what they love and otherwise stay out of the way. Follow him on Twitter: @notgoingpro