Caitlin Clark, Gene Hackman, and Hope in Hoosier Land

There are contradictions, and then there is Indiana. 

A little research can make the miles of cornways into town seem weighted to say the least, heavy with middle America gravity. A bit like you maybe don’t want to stop until you’ve hit Ohio. But if you take a short jaunt just outside of downtown Indy — so sheeny, plasticky, rife with every flavor of chain that it seems to have been thrown up whole cloth, yesterday, Truman Show-style — it’s easy to lose sight of where you are entirely.   

In fact it’s dangerously easy to get carried out of the backseat of an Uber, lifted by a trumpet moan floating on humidity, through clanking glasses and tight streetside al fresco dining, to a friendly bouncer who pro-rates your cover charge at the Chatterbox Jazz Club. It is all ceiling-hung checkered flags and Christmas lights and dollar bills on the wall and nightly music or poetry buoyed by the local programs at Indiana University and Butler. On a recent Friday night the barback’s yellow Pacers shirt said Vroom Baby. Indeed. Though the Latin sextet hit more with a lowrider rev, a slink and sway and some samba-groove and zero jazz club stuffiness. Instead it is all formica bar tops to catch the spills of Negronis and frosty grapefruit IPAs, red candles, and a building that feels like it is sort of leaning, definitely leaning into the ramshackle sticky floored vibes. It’s what you try to find in Bed-Stuy, in New Orleans. Ok, maybe that’s a stretch, a wish for things to be so, for a discovery brag to friends that ponder why the fuck you are there. An aspiration to claim that you’ve found a sleeper. 

Or maybe it’s just all that fresh Three Floyds that flow like, well, motor oil.  

It’s also easy to lose track of place in the queue at Milktooth, waiting for one of the world’s truly great patty melts. Or at Love Handle, with spicy grits or fried chicken breakfast sandwiches with mimosas and maybe a Planet of the Apes playing on the wall. Or at Amberson Coffee and Grocer — the no cash, no tip, no to-go cup policy seems like a wink from Portlandia, but the former gas station brick niche is dead serious about single-origin pourovers. Or there is the charred and toothsome craft pizzas of King Dough, found in the neighborhood of Cottage Home, down the narrow leafy streets of nooks in various states of rustic renovation. It’s a downtown adjacent area that feels quaint, sleepily Southern droopy, inviting for the finding of a porch to sip away high summer heat and make friends under the moon. For this there is Dorman Street, the turn-of-last-century watering hole that is all pool table and patio laughter and easy sudsy languor.  

But by now how far are we from basketball, from the state’s big screen surrogate for all things hoops and hope, Hoosiers?  

To start, the movie was Hollywood-ized at best, white-washed at worst. The school Hickory was modeled on, Milan, wasn’t much of an underdog — they had reached the state Final Four the year before. And really, they were not the team that deserved the fairy tale. Instead, the school they defeated, South Bend Central, was based on Indy’s Crispus Attucks, who would go on to win the next two state championships, led by two-time Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson. Also, the triumph of a white rural group that embodies bootstrap virtues over an all-black squad, optically, in 2025, is not the David and Goliath story the preacher extolls pregame in the locker room. 

Next, I will tell you that Rudy was offsides. 

But to the pantheon of sports movies, to underdog narratives, it mostly doesn’t matter. This is a place where inspiration stories are cranked out on a conveyor belt like that of the nearby Subaru factory. See Breaking Away. See Keith Smart. See Halliburton’s stepback launch that hits the front of the rim and improbably bounces straight up, with everything in the world suddenly possible on a moment of ricochet. Even an unlikely run to Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

See my own history: I’ve watched Hoosiers at least eight times in the past year, having made it a weekly ritual the night after games as a girl’s 1st-3rd grade head coach. Last fall I was rolling to practice in the predawn cornfields sipping coffee behind the wheel of a Chevrolet Deluxe, wondering “what kind of hand I been dealt here.” So I thought. “Team, team, team,” I’d say, preaching ball movement in throaty declarations, batting the palm of my hand with a rolled-up roster, trying to remind them of fundamentals when someone might wander off the court mid-play for a pee break. I peppered emails to parents with references — they mostly just wanted to know the details of the pizza party. “Let’s be real clear about what we’re after here.” A mom would let me know that our starting point guard had a cold. “I would hope you would support who we are, not who we are not.” We scored eight buckets, total, in eight games. “This is your team.” 

Funny, in the way a Gene Hackman character might laugh — and so often it always comes back to that laugh. That grounded and grandfatherly hehe from a mouth corner. In The French Connection it belies a type of desperation, a boiling up menace. In Royal Tennenbaums he wields it as a weapon of coy deflection. In Hoosiers, with head coach Norman Dale, it seems pure wry. When Myra Fleener calls him old, when he is ambushed and questioned about his resume or defensive scheme. But mostly when he asks Buddy to clamp down on defense. “By the end of the game I want to know what flavor he is.” He splays his hands in question. “Dentyne” replies Buddy, after fouling out. A complicity is cemented. 

What else could a coach teach? The earned laugh is a tough defense against caring too much, against the sharp weapons of the midwest autumnal blow of the world. His was a way of walking through the world, a head to the side bemusement, the knowingness of having a joke and a secret joy at being able to watch life do its mostly meaningless rigmarole.

To me it’s the kind of absurdist guffaw natural to finally experiencing the local culinary delight of Indiana. Here a pork tenderloin is a frisbee-sized monstrosity of a kind of midwestern schnitzel, pounded and breaded, but turned into a sandwich. Well, sort of a sandwich. Along with onion, lettuce, and tomato, the unholy meat flank is adorned with a hamburger bun crown, silly and undersized, resting atop the golden brown glisten like a comical clown hat. 

Out of downtown, up through Indy’s north side, an affluence growing and sprawling, into green and hip Broad Ripple, a village of coffee and bars and all things vibey, nestled along the White River, Fire by the Monon sits alongside its eponymous rail trail, offering a touted version. Pounded seemingly by an endless ball-handling drill, fried to salty crispiness, and greased by a chipotle mayo, it is a braggy behemoth begging for a post to the ‘gram. Along with the gastrointestinal, there is a very tactile difficulty that presents itself: how do you eat it? Do you need a fork and knife? Do you need a teammate? You might feel outmatched, maybe, diminished. But look for that underdog inside, feed him some Dragonfly on tap, and fight through the burn.    

The Fever’s Sophie Cunningham has almost certainly never had one. You can tell by the way she moves — endlessly antagonizing, instigating, wielding a delirious circus scoop shot that will make Sportscenter’s Top 10 plays, the crowd offering a collective, low-pitched “Soooophie.” And again, Clark is out of her seat, apoplectic, disbelieving, in a ref’s grill. Kelsey Mitchell, refusing to die, unrelentingly probes, pounds, tests the defense, bursting toward the paint. Chloe Bibby goes 3-3 from the “cheap seats,” there never being a seed of doubt about any of them from the time she caught the ball. On the other side is the mid-range purity of Dallas’ Paige Bueckers, a frustrated groan every time Li Yueru appears too big, too strong, on her way to 20 points of physical layups. 

A first time WNBA game attendee might be surprised by the pace, the shoe-squeaky stew flowing so easy, with little ebb. Some 4th quarter momentum minutes are wasted on coaches challenges going to infinity, but there is Freddie Fever waving to my daughters on the lull, and suddenly we are in the last scene. 

Off the inbound Mitchell seems rushed, never getting a clean handle or look. Her jumper clangs off the side of the backboard, stillborn from release, and like that the squads are unceremoniously good-games-ing. The Fever do not win this game. Life is not a sports movie — sports isn’t even a sports movie. Now the season ticket couple in front of me will drive back to Kokomo or Carmel in a postgame radioshow of quietude and darkening acceptance and potholed highways lined by August corn, buoyed only by my futile reassurance of “well, it was a good game.” For my failures as a man and father, these are the types of situations where I thrive. To my wife I point out the poetic discrepancy between the end of The Natural the movie and the end of The Natural the book. I note how losers know more about life. Even Shooter Flatch missed the last shot at Sectionals (but was he fouled?). My kids mostly ignore me as trope-laden white noise, they are more simply consoled by Caitlin Clark t-shirts from the pro shop.

Back in the harsh light of day, some 40 easy minutes straight east of Indy off I-70, and a half century away, sits Knightstown, home of the fictional gym of Hickory. Suspended in time and hope and boomer optimism of heartland and hard work, it is an open doors community center and point of pilgrimage. The movie plays on a loop in the lobby, the Picket Fence works, again, in perpetuity. Middle aged men in Hickory polos mill about with the good-natured jocularity of gym teachers between classes, “remember when”-ing, looking up at the door with hopeful, “where ya from?”’s. Polaroids of Hackman on a bike in town. Maps of the local landmarks, like Shooter’s cabin in the woods. My family feigns interest at the glass cases. I buy a t-shirt. The locker room is covered in visiting team jerseys and dripping sentimentality of the squad, down there, together in the trenches. A silent slow clap resounds, for Hackman now, wherever he is. “Welcome to Indiana basketball.” 

If there is no organized game, you can get shots up, the ball echoing around the place, the classic red font of Hickory adorning one wall, framing the loose shootaround as a moment of your life, from someplace back when there was infinite future, where there might be a string section, where you would do something that would be shown again and again, in slow motion. I pretend there is no three point line, focusing on mid-rangers, some off of one foot for time period verisimilitude.  

A coach reads the sweat on my brow. “You can’t end on a miss. Gotta end on a make.” I know this. Everyone that’s ever hooped knows that. But what am I going to say? Something Jimmy Chitwood, like, “I’ll make it.” Am I going to tell him how I’m a coach, too, and how practice starts in a few weeks and I’m optimistic, building game plans in my mind to get more iso looks for our own team’s Sophie on the block? Or am I spurned enough to look all the way back, to the driveways and playgrounds of my past? Tell him how, yes, I was on the bench for Jeff Lindbergh’s buzzer-beater in the championship game? Tell him I got cut from the 8th grade team? How these days I’m left all alone, due no respect, at the three-point line? 

Am I going to get into the distillation of thoughts and fears of a dying world, how, for some reason, I boil it all down into this globe-shaped orange ball and the watching of other people put it through an iron hoop? Should I tell him how this place seems unreal, this echoing wooden mausoleum frozen in an ember that is as much Twilight Zone as Norman Rockwell? Or how my hopes for anything good for the future and my children are indeed tied up in the seams of the Spaulding coming off my middle and forefinger just right? “It’s gotta work out this time. Or that’s it for good.”

He’s right though, and I don’t want to let him down. So I will dial in, I will not be caught watching the paint dry. I will dribble hard to my left and pull-up from the elbow. I let him know: “thanks, Coach.”