This is the second entry in my recollection of my favorite scenes in my favorite sports movies. In Part One we rehashed Bull Durham. Today, we contemplate why four passes — four! — is the precise number every basketball team should throw before shooting:
Hoosiers (1986)
The Choice: Again and again we have seen NBA superstars use leverage to their best advantage, and so it is in this film, when a would-be high school basketball star named Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis) marches into a meeting of the good citizens of the Hickory, Ind. — one in which they fully intend to run coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) outta town — and announces that he reckons it’s about time he started playing some ball.
Cheers all around. One catch, though.
“I play, Coach stays,” Jimmy says. “He goes, I go.”
The town’s firebrands are crestfallen, having already voted to dismiss the coach. But they vote again, Dale keeps his job and Hickory rolls to the state title, in a tale loosely based on the real-life story of Milan High (enrollment: 161), which beat Muncie Central (enrollment: 1,662) to capture the Indiana crown in 1954.
By my count Jimmy misses two shots in the entire movie — one after Coach Dale visits him as he shoots around on a sawdust court behind the school, and informs him that he doesn’t care whether he plays for the team or not, the other in a playoff game. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons wrote during his ESPN days that it was actually three before the state final. Simmons also drew up a boxscore for that game, against mythical South Bend Central, and surmised that Jimmy went 14-for-18 from the floor and scored 30 of Hickory’s 42 points.
But with the game tied and just seconds remaining, Coach Dale nonetheless draws up a play which calls for Jimmy to be used as a decoy. Which leads to a second power play on Jimmy’s part — albeit an understated one.
“I’ll make it,” he tells Norm.
And, spoiler alert, he does.
Bottom line: JImmy woulda found a way to play for the Lakers or Nets in this day and age.
Runner-up: Gets kinda misty at my house when the Huskers gather together in their locker room before the state final. (“Let’s win this’n for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here.”) And Dennis Hopper enlivens every scene in which appears, none more than the one where he draws up a last-second play after Coach Dale intentionally gets himself ejected. ( “And don’t get caught watching the paint dry.”) Of course, there’s also the one where Norm breaks out the tape measure when his team enters Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, providing fodder for every underdog high school coach until the end of time.
Nitpicks: Coach Dale kicks two guys off the team in his first practice. One of them returns almost immediately. The other — Buddy, the gritty, gutty, T.J. McConnell-like point guard — just kind of reappears a while later. (I’ve seen the deleted scene explaining his reinstatement, on an anniversary CD — remember those? Not a great scene, but some explanation was definitely in order.)
Aimless fact: David Neidorf plays one of the players, Everett Flatch, in this movie, and also plays the slumping outfielder who is released in “Bull Durham.”