‘Hoosiers’ Turns 30: Why It’s Still the Definitive Sports Movie

One of the great things about sports is that certain milestones can never be bested, they can only be equalled. And, more often, strived for. In baseball, a perfect game is a perfect game. Many pitchers have achieved it, but no one can do better than perfect. You just want to join the club.

In 1986, two Indiana University alumni — Hoosiers from day one — created what still stands as the sports movie that defines all other sports movies. Screenwriter Angelo Pizzo and director David Anspaugh were the creative forces behind Hoosiers, a simple story about a high-school basketball team in rural Indiana who bring in a new coach who then struggles to live up to the town’s lofty expectations for success. Coach Norman Dale, as played to absolute perfection by Gene Hackman, is the platonic ideal of the stern, dad-like, important-lessons-about-character-imparting coach and teacher character. He begins the story with his tail between his legs a little bit, having been bounced from the ranks of college coaches and having to take this last-rung kind of a job at a teeny Indiana high school. He should be disgraced — he was fired from his college job for hitting a player — but instead he begins the work of shaping this sad group of ball players into a team.

Simplicity is the virtue that comes beaming out of Hoosiers from minute one. It’s such an unassuming, small-town-values-ing, funamentals-and-bounce-passing kind of a movie, you desperately want to hate it for being backwards and mawkish and whiter than freshly-baked bread. But that’s the magic about Hoosiers: you CAN hate it; it’s still going to be the perfect, definitive sports movie. But also: you’re probably not going to hate it. You can resist it all you want, but there is a mathematical precision to why it works:

• It’s fundamentally sound. One look at the four and a half players (Ollie is incredibly short and also not very good at basketball) and you desperately want to see them succeed, if only because it seems so likely that they won’t. Coach Dale sits opposed to the forces of the town which are set in their ways and hostile to outsiders. You want him to win too.
• It’s not about winning … It’s about teaching and getting these ragtag kids to be a team, and getting Everett’s dad (Dennis Hopper, in a performance that got an Oscar nomination) off the sauce, and Gene Hackman and Barbara Hershey marching through their rather workmanlike chemistry (wasting Hershey’s talents is easily the film’s biggest sin).
• … Until it’s about winning. There are few more reflexively thrilling scenes in the history of movies than Hickory’s final play, with Coach Dale’s lessons about teamwork finally sinking in, and Jimmy sinking that shot, and Jerry Goldsmith’s theme kicking back in on the soundtrack. It’s programmed into the human DNA to respond to that.

Saying that Hoosiers is the definitive sports movie doesn’t mean it’s the movie all sports movies aspire to be. Sometimes, it’s the movie that other sports movies define themselves against. Lionizing white, small-town values in the 1950s is the kind of whitewashed nostalgia that gets us into some dangerously blinkered mindsets. The film takes a moment to recognize the segregation of its time, as Dale takes the team down to watch an all-black school play ball, and tries to impart some lessons to his sheltered Indiana boys. But the truth is that getting as much inspirational mileage as Hoosiers gets about a team of white farm boys beating their insurmountable odds starts to feel like a guilty pleasure. We needed sports movies to be like Hoosiers, yes, but we also then needed (and still need) sports movies to be exactly the opposite of Hoosiers.

In the end, Hoosiers succeeds by telling the story of sports at its most universal. Of sports as the great equalizer. Of sports as the place where selves are actualized and men are redeemed and communities are healed and the basket measures the same in big towns and small. It’s a myth, but sports are made of myths. Movies too, for that matter.

[You can rent Hoosiers now on Amazon Video and iTunes.]