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Hoosiers Museum honors actor Gene Hackman, famous movie and one of the biggest upsets in basketball history
Many call “Hoosiers” the greatest sports movie of all time. Yet there is something more to the movie than just basketball.
There is more to “Hoosiers” than a story of a small school defeating a big school. There is more to the movie than the excitement of the tournament games and the drama of the closing seconds of the championship game.
One of the special things we get from the movie, besides the good basketball, is a real sense of place. It is the atmosphere surrounding the old gyms, towns, barns, and fields. We get this feeling from the very start of the film as Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) drives through rural Indiana. The extraordinary film score by Jerry Goldsmith, meanwhile, proclaims the scenery.
Hackman, a two-time Oscar winner and one of the most beloved actors of his generation, died Feb. 26 at age 95.
Even after its release nearly 40 years ago in 1986, the film’s sense of place continues to compel many to make their own journey to “Hoosiers” sites in Indiana. One place to start that journey is a museum in Milan.
Located in an old bank building, the Milan ’54 Hoosiers Museum celebrates the real basketball team that inspired the movie.
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Reaching from floor to ceiling in a hallway of the old bank is a handwritten bracket of the 752 teams, large and small schools alike, that competed in the one-class 1954 Indiana State High School Boys Basketball Tournament. The “Milan Miracle,” as they call it, was that little Milan High School was the last team standing. The score of the championship game was 32-30, and at the museum you can watch a video of the game.
The museum has displays dedicated to each of the Milan team members. There are also jerseys of the Hickory Huskers, the “Milan” team of the movie, and jerseys of Hickory’s opponents.
There is even a rim with a burlap feed sack for a net from the family farm of Milan ’54 team member Rollin Cutter. The feed sack also worked to clean the basketball of mud and straw during pick-up games in the evenings or after church on Sundays.
Memorabilia available for purchase at the museum includes autographed posters of four Milan teammates playing ball on a dirt court by a barn, bobbleheads of the old water tower in town that reads “STATE CHAMPS 1954,” and “Hoosiers” VHS tapes signed by members of the 1954 Milan team.
Brad Long, who played Hickory Husker team leader Buddy Walker in “Hoosiers,” serves on the board of directors of the Milan ’54 Hoosiers Museum.
“We kind of preserve the history of that event, and all these years later it still resonates,” said Long, whose jersey from the movie is displayed at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. “And that museum … draws quite a few visitors every year.”
Ray Baurley, who is the brother-in-law of Milan ’54 team member Gene White, also serves on the board. Baurley, who retired from teaching and coaching basketball in Milan, showed me inside an old barbershop next to the museum. The barbershop is no longer operational but remains decorated with both Milan and “Hoosiers” memorabilia.
“You’d be surprised where the people come from,” Baurley said about visitors to the museum. “They come from all over the United States.”
Baurley remembered a family who, a few years ago, visited the museum from Japan while traveling around the United States.
“I don’t remember their names,” Baurley said. “But the man said, ‘This is the first stop I want to make, right here.’”
About 70 miles away from Milan, in the foyer of an old brick gymnasium, hangs a “Hoosiers” movie poster from Japan (where the film was titled “Journey to Victory”). This is the Indiana location that served as the home of the movie’s Hickory team. Located in Knightstown, it is called the Hoosier Gym.
Welcoming visitors to the Hoosier Gym are knowledgeable volunteers, such as Bill Goodsene.
“This is really from the movie the most iconic building that’s still around,” said Goodsene, who serves on the gym’s board of directors. “Some of them are gone now and so forth, as time marches on.
“Like one of the barns in the movie at the start of the film,” Goodsene added. “When Gene Hackman’s driving to Hickory the first time there’s a white barn that you see. That was hit by storms a year ago in April, and they had to tear it down.”
MEMORIES & MEMORABILIA
People from all over the globe visit the Hoosier Gym to step out onto the court of their favorite movie team. Basketballs are available for those who want to shoot a few hoops. The Hickory colors of red and gold on the court, gray-green bleachers, and light coming in through windows above the bleachers create the “Hoosiers” atmosphere fans come from miles around to experience.
“Previous to the movie they didn’t have to change hardly anything in the gym,” Goodsene said. “I mean, they put up those banners that you see. Those came from the movie, that are on the back of the stage there and so forth.”
One of those banners, consisting of two wooden pieces reading “Hickory” and “Huskers,” was found by Long in his attic.
“They had kind of a fire sale the last day of filming,” Long said. “They said anything that isn’t nailed down, you can take it for a souvenir. I happened to take that and kept it in my attic. And it sat up there, kind of forgot about it, and discovered it about, oh, 10, 12 years ago and thought, this is silly, it's just up here collecting dust. So I donated it back to the gym and they put it up where it rightfully belongs, really, in the same place it was in the movie.”
Memorabilia Long has kept, such as his Hickory jacket and Chuck Taylor Converse shoes, goes with him on the road to share when he does motivational speaking (bradlonghoosiers.com).
Visitors to the Hoosier Gym can also check out the locker room. It is just an old, cramped space with two benches and a chalkboard (and walls now decorated with jerseys of school basketball teams that have visited the gym). But here is the very place where the Hickory team bowed their heads together before games.
“I think it showed the Christian influence in the small towns,” Long said about the locker room prayers. “I love those scenes. I love that [Hickory team member] Strap prays before he goes out on the floor and I loved that we prayed before games. I think that was part of small town life in Indiana.”
A Hoosier himself, Long appreciated that the filming was done at real Indiana locations, giving the movie its authentic feel.
“That was the charm of it,” Long said. “They used actual towns, actual gyms. They didn’t do a lot of man-made Hollywood stuff, as I call it—artificial. I think that shows through. It’s all filmed on location. It’s like putting pieces of a puzzle together. Our home gym is in Knightstown. Our home school was in Nineveh, that's for the classroom scenes. Our hometown, exterior shots for the town, were in New Richmond. So it’s like taking those pieces of a puzzle and putting them together. But they were all actual places.”
Another Indiana filming location was in Boone County at an old church, where the town meeting took place to vote on the future of Coach Dale.
“A lot of times in those small towns, meeting places were far and few between,” Long said. “So the church was a central part, usually, of a small community. So a lot of times they would have town meetings in there whether it was church related or not. So, I thought that was kind of cool that they did it that way.”
Indiana’s Basketball Cathedral, as it is called, is one more stop to consider when on a “Hoosiers” journey. This Indianapolis location, named Hinkle Fieldhouse and formerly Butler Fieldhouse, was the site of the championship game both in 1954 and the movie.
“Next year you ought to go to Butler,” Long said to a certain “Hoosiers” fan. “You’ll get a kick out of that.”
