Duce630
(DustinK - Still 76 hostages held by Hamas for over 15 months)
1
I was reading something about Gene Hackman earlier and it led me to thinking a little some of his great roles. I started thinking about Coach Dale in Hoosiers.
The story and the fundamental approach of the coach both bear resemblance to Sampson.
Coach Dale was practically unemployable as a coach because he hit a kid.
Coach Sampson was unemployable in the NCAA for years due to violation of rules on phone calls. Yes he didn’t hit a kid and not saying in permissable phone calls is the same thing.
Both coaches focus on hard work on fundamentals in practice. Both coaches enjoy success that energizes the fan base.
One of the real players on the real team that won the real championship that the movie is based on came to UH to play basketball and became a very successful high school basketball coach in Texas.
I have never seen a movie with Hackman in it that wasn’t good. As for the movie “Hoosiers,” it was a great movie but bore no resemblance to reality. The team the story was based on was not the fictitious Hickory High, but the real Milan High School that won the 1954 Indiana state championship had a very young family man as the head coach, there was no drunken “Shooter” or anything like that. The only thing that was like the movie was that a kid made the last shot to get the championship for a very small school. The guy that made that shot later owned a bar in Chicago called “The Last Shot.”
I read all about it in a Southwest Airlines in flight magazine some years back.
Yes that would have been Coach Ronnie Truitt who led Cy Fair HS to the Texas state championship back in 1971; and that team was also later recognized as the 1971 national champions.
[In fact, there is a Cy Fair I.S.D. school named after him - ie: Truitt Middle School.]
Interestingly enough, I had Coach Truitt as my gym coach at Frank M. Black Jr. High in H.I.S.D. back in 1963 or 1964 before he moved out to the Cy Fair ISD in ~1967. As a young kid back then, I didn’t even know that he had played college hoops for Guy V. Lewis at UH.
Very realistic portrayal of basketball in Indiana. I spent grades 7-10 in Terre Haute back in the 60’s. Played in many gyms that looked exactly as shown in the movie. I probably need to look at the credits to see if I actually did. That would be a fun story if true. It was still an open tournament back then, no class differentiation by enrollment. We were a small Catholic HS and still made some headway in the tournament. The car caravans were quite an event.
One of the highlights in attending the final four in Indianapolis was playing a game at Butler. A bucket lister for sure.
Of course the movie took MANY liberties (to put it kindly), but overall portrayed Indiana basketball realistically.
The court where much of the movie was filmed is in Knightstown, called Hoosier gym, just north of Indianapolis. We drove up during the Final Four tournament and it’s open to the public. I grew up in Iowa and high school basketball isn’t quite the religion that it is in Indiana but still a big deal in the rural areas. The girls state tournament was huge, especially back in the 6 on 6 days.
