In Indiana, Basketball Is a Way of Life

His family couldn’t afford a basketball, so John Wooden’s mother made one for her son. It was a black sock filled with rags. “My mother tried to make it as round as the size of a basketball,” Wooden remembers now, some 80 years later. “My dad tacked up on the barn a tomato basket. Not a peach basket like Dr. Naismith. We grew tomatoes.”

Wooden grew up in Indiana in a small town south of Indianapolis, near Martinsville. Martinsville isn’t a big town, but it seemed so to Wooden. Martinsville was where the high school was and where Wooden would play basketball. Of course, he would play basketball.

Baseball was Wooden’s favorite sport and maybe if he had lived in a small town east of Cincinnati, say, Wooden would have played baseball and became a great baseball coach. But he didn’t. Wooden lived in Indiana. He had no choice.

It doesn’t matter if the basketball is of the grade school, high school, college or pro variety. The people here will smell a game, feel a game, taste a game, find the game and watch it.

There is an apartment complex in New Castle, about 50 miles from Indianapolis and home of the world’s biggest high school gym, capacity 9,800. It is a complex for senior citizens. The executive director of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, which is also in New Castle, lives in the building. Roger Dickinson is 61 and lives in that apartment building.

“There are Pacers signs hanging inside windows, hanging on doors,” Dickinson says. Indeed, the building looks kind of like a college dorm or frat house all duded up before the big game. “It kind of surprises me,” Dickinson says. “These people went to a lot of trouble and I wouldn’t expect it of them. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It is Indiana and this is basketball. Pacer fever has swept the state. It’s that passion I talked about. It’s just here, it’s pride. Even if we are defeated by the Los Angeles Lakers, there will still be great pride about the Pacers.”

Wooden’s grade school team would play organized games in a league. Many were outdoors. Sometimes snow had to be shoveled off the court. But there were always dozens of people lining the court, standing in ice and snow maybe, but eager to watch basketball.

Fifteen of the 16 biggest high school gyms in the world are in Indiana. Dickinson tells you that. One was in Martinsville, where Wooden played. It seated 5,000. There weren’t many more people than that in the town and Wooden never played before any empty seats while he was in high school.

Larry Bird made a joke Monday about those gyms and the fans who always fill them.

“I lived in a town of about 2,000,” Bird said. “Our gymnasium held 2,700. I think that’s why they have the census. We sold out every night. You go to a game in Boston, you see a high school game, there might not be 50, 60 people there. Indiana, they pretty well pack the places. It just carries over to the colleges. The one thing about the Indiana Pacers is that this is the first time we’ve been here in the NBA finals, so obviously everybody’s caught up into it.”

There are many stories that show how intertwined are Indiana’s people and their basketball. Of course, the famous tale of tiny Milan High beating all the big schools to win the 1954 state championship, the championship that meant so much since every team in the state played. The winning shot in the championship game was made by Bobby Plump. Isn’t that a name? Plump owns a bar called Plump’s Last Shot. You go to the bar on a Monday evening and the talk is of the Pacers and of Milan, of how the Pacers are big underdogs to the Lakers, just as Milan was the big underdog to Muncie Central.

That is the talk. It is not cynical or sarcastic. There is a serious discussion of the way skinny Reggie Miller could be like Plump, hit a game-winner as the seconds tick down in Game 7 and how, if he does, the state will come to a stop and Miller can be as famous in Indiana as Bobby Plump.

There are the stories of how every garage had a basketball hoop nailed on it. Big-city mansion, wrong-side-of-the-tracks shack, rural farmhouse. Didn’t matter. The music of a summer night was the sound of basketballs bouncing. The music of a cold Christmas morning was the sound of new basketballs bouncing.

Dickinson will talk forever of the Hall of Fame. The kids come in now and love to head right to the exhibit where a clock ticks down . . . 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . and the ball is in the kid’s hand . . . 6, 5, 4, 3 . . . and he or she can shoot and score . . . 2, 1, 0 . . . or miss. If the shot is made, the crowd roars. If the shot misses, there is silence. The kids love it. The parents pay more attention to the old photos and pins and programs.

“We’ve had people from all 50 states and 66 countries visit,” Dickinson says. “The most people want to learn about Larry Bird. Except the kids. They like the game.”

Two years after Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in Massachusetts in 1891, Rev. Nicholas McKay brought the new invention to a YMCA in Crawfordsville, Ind. In 1911 Indiana held the first state high school basketball championship. In 1920 Naismith came to Hinkle Fieldhouse to watch the state championship. “The Fieldhouse was the biggest gym in the world then,” Dickinson says, “and it was packed as always. Dr. Naismith saw the crowd and could hardly believe it. He said that the game might have been invented in Massachusett, but Indiana was where it grew up.”

But why? Why?

Dickinson says it’s because all the towns in Indiana were small and basketball was a way to get together.

Wooden says basketball was social. Everybody participated. In his high school, Wooden says, home room teachers were expected to sell as many season tickets as there were pupils in the home room. Some kids couldn’t afford the tickets, so the home room teacher would have a bake sale or a raffle. Or maybe a family that was better off would buy a ticket for another student’s family. And every weekend all the families were at the game and they met all the families from the town 10 miles away.

And now people come from all the towns around the state and gather outside the new Conseco Fieldhouse. The Fieldhouse is built to look old. It is made of brick and nostalgia. Nobody buys season tickets for the people who can’t afford them. Not for the NBA. But the people come and stand outside in the rain and watch a big-screen TV. They meet their neighbors, the people from the town 100 miles away, or 50 or 20. Still.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.