The Road Trip Goes to a Basketball Game

The Great American Road Trip

Destination: Indiana

Movie: Hoosiers (1986)

You are about to learn something about me that you probably did not know before. And you don’t even have to join Facebook and play a meme to find it out. We are visiting Indiana today, but I am going to indulge in a bit of nostalgia for Ohio before we proceed.

I was once a cheerleader. I was in 8th grade and when I hit high school the popular girls in ninth grade teamed up with the existing cheerleaders, so my career only lasted one year. But it was memorable.

Small towns in the mid West back before all the little high schools got swallowed up into consolidated school districts, were the center of social life in each town.  There were two things that would draw everybody out–a church potluck or a high school basketball game. Basketball was big in Killbuck, Ohio, partly because we had so few students that our team could not play regulation football. It was called “Canadian” football and only required ten boys.  Anyhow, in Ohio, who needed football when you had Ohio State and the Cleveland Browns? Baseball was taken care of by the Cleveland Indians, but basketball was the place for heart-stopping, on-your-feet-yelling, do-0r-die all out warfare between Big Prairie and Berlin (BER-lin), Glenmont, and Killbuck.  And come tournament time, everyone followed the team to Coshocton or Wooster or wherever the playoffs were being held.

When we tried out for cheerleading, we made up our own routines and when we won, we sewed our own black circle skirts and tacked a black “K” on our gold satin blouses. There were no cheerleading camps, no cheerleading coaches–heck there wasn’t even a girl’s physical education coach, let alone a girl’s dressing room. But we got to ride on the team bus. With the players!

To this day I can remember the heart-stopping ending of a Big Prairie game, and the smell of the school gymnasium, packed with all the townspeople, and the floor slick with the sweat dripped by adolescent boys, who for a couple of hours each week became gods. Gods  with greasy hair and pimples–but gods nonetheless.

That’s why Hoosiers is such a perfect movie to present life in Indiana, another of those Midwestern states where small rural communities and basketball rules.

And for your listening pleasure, Kerry Dexter at Music Road suggests Carrie Newcomer, whose home is in southern Indiana.

The movie does not have to over dramatize the importance of the game to someone who has lived through it, and if you want to understand  mid-century small town America as you prepare to visit Indiana, take a look at Hoosiers. I suppose I should explain here that ‘Hoosier’ is the nickname for people from Indiana, and if you want a scholarly analysis–here’s a professor for you.

Second reason for watching the film would be the scenery of farmland USA. This is what you will see, folks, when you venture outside the cities on your road trip.

Based loosely on a real life small town southern Indiana basketball team that won over the state’s Goliath’s back in the 1950′s,the movie stars Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper. The Wikipedia entry on Hoosiers may set you straight on what is real and what is not in the move.

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Tags: basketball, BlogSherpa, Gene Hackman, Hoosiers, Indiana, Midwest USA, road trip, travel movie