Little Film Celebrates About Biggest Event Ever in a Small Town

Movies meaning more to me than real life, I have just eagerly been to see the new film “Hoosiers,” a high school basketball fable to which I give thumbs up.

It’s the story of a high school basketball coach (Whoopi Goldberg) whose best young player (Raymond Burr) has just been told at halftime by the team doctor (Jim Nabors) that he only has two more quarters to live.

No, no, no, that wasn’t it at all. I must be thinking of some other movie. “Hoosiers” is nothing like that. “Hoosiers” is a sweet little movie that shows just how neat high school basketball can be.

You can take my word on this, or you can trust the two amigos, Siskel and Ebert, who liked it, too. Siskel liked it so much that he ran out and bought a basketball, and Ebert liked it so much that he ran out and ate Indiana.

The picture stars one of my favorites, Gene Hackman, one of those rare actors who looks and sounds like a regular human being. My favorite Hackman moment occurs in “Superman,” when, as Lex Luthor, he launches a missile that will wipe out Hackensack, N.J. “But Lex, my mother lives in Hackensack,” whines Valerie Perrine. Hackman looks at his wristwatch and shakes his head.

In this movie, Coach Hackman is a good man to have around. He is so much sharper than the rest of the old-time Indiana high school coaches that he even knows where to order glass backboards before they have been invented.

Hackman’s team is trying to win the state championship. In case Californians do not realize the significance of a state championship in states such as Indiana, suffice it to say that some Midwesterners would sell their souls to the devil and their arms to the ayatollah to win one lousy state title.

From experience, I can tell you what the state tournament means. After years of watching NCAA Final Fours and NBA finals, I can still better recall exact details from the Illinois state high school tournament than I can anything involving Larry Bird or Magic Johnson.

To my dying day, I will remember a big team from a little town, the Cobden Appleknockers, who almost won the tournament one year. In the Midwest, you don’t forget stuff like that.

Ask Bird and Johnson, a couple of Midwestern guys, how well they remember their own state tournaments. Bet they remember every shot, every opponent, every cheerleader’s dimple.

High school basketball is everything you ever wanted in professional sports, and less. It is bleachers as hard on your duffs as cement, an eight-person pep band playing the theme from “Rocky,” at least one referee who looks like a real geek, at least one player who is visibly overweight, and a whole squad of cheerleaders that leaps into the air with glee after a basket that cuts the other team’s lead to 28 points.

There are dots and dashes of all of this in “Hoosiers,” which, with any luck, will do for basketball what “Breaking Away” did for bicycle racing. There have been very few good movies, or very few movies of any kind, about high school sports over the years--Tom Cruise’s “All the Right Moves” was the best ever made about football--so “Hoosiers” is certainly welcome. If it’s a hit, in “Hoosiers II,” Hackman will coach against Mr. T.

Also doing terrific work in this film are Dennis Hopper, who earlier this year played sort of the ultimate scuzzball in “Blue Velvet,” and Barbara Hershey, who was so good in “Hannah and Her Sisters” and deserves, I am convinced, to take a much-needed vacation in Paris with the sportswriter of her choice.

Loosely based on real events, “Hoosiers” has more to offer than just basketball. It is a film about people--everyday, average people--who do not fly spaceships or shoot .44 magnums or ask their servants to check the temperature in the Jacuzzi. This is not another of those movies where “you killed my partner so I’m gonna kill you if I have to kill everybody else in the movie to do it.”

It’s just a nice story about nice people, some of whom wear high-top sneakers. The part where the cheerleaders get run over by a car in the shower . . . oh, sorry, that’s not in this movie. Go see “Hoosiers” some night instead of something with guns, cars and sex. The mind you save may be your own.

On a semi-related front, I have just finished reading “A Season on the Brink,” a book by John Feinstein of the Washington Post on a year spent on the sidelines and behind the scenes with Indiana University Coach Bob Knight.

All I can say is: Bob Knight is loud, lewd, tough, mean, uncompromising and unorthodox, and if we could just lock him in a room with Col. Oliver North, Knight could drag the facts of this Iran business out of him in about five minutes. I can heartily recommend it as Christmas reading.

As for Roger Kahn’s “Joe and Marilyn,” a book about DiMaggio and Monroe, I can heartily recommend it as Christmas fireplace fuel.