Hoosier Basketball, A State Religion

Indiana did not invent basketball. James Naismith invented basketball, in Massachusetts, in eighteen ninety-one. But Indiana did something to basketball that no other state has quite replicated: it made the game the central ritual of community life in a way so complete that journalists have been trying to explain it for a hundred years.

The word Hoosiers, applied to Indiana natives since at least the eighteen thirties, became inseparable from the image of a small-town gymnasium packed to the rafters in February. For much of the twentieth century, Indiana ran its state high school basketball tournament with no classification, meaning the smallest rural school competed against the largest city school in a single bracket. That meant that every so often a school of sixty or eighty students could beat a school of three thousand.

It happened. The most famous instance was Milan, a town of twelve hundred people in southeastern Indiana, whose nineteen fifty-four team won the state championship over Muncie Central, a school roughly ten times its size. Bobby Plump hit the winning jump shot with three seconds left.

The story became the film Hoosiers in nineteen eighty-six, which many basketball fans consider the best sports film ever made. The Indiana high school tournament drew sellout crowds to the old Butler Fieldhouse, now Hinkle Fieldhouse, in Indianapolis, the largest basketball arena in the world when it opened in nineteen twenty-eight. College basketball arrived at Indiana University under Branch McCracken in the nineteen forties and under Bob Knight beginning in nineteen seventy-one.

Knight won three NCAA championships at Indiana and coached with an intensity that made him simultaneously legendary and controversial. The state has produced Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird, and Louie Dampier among dozens of NBA players. For Hoosiers, basketball is not a sport exactly.

It is a way of knowing who you are and where you come from.