Doc Alert: Something to Cheer About

The racial politics of high school basketball in 1950s Indiana sidestepped in the Oscar-nominated Hoosiers, appear front and center in Betsy Blankenbaker’s Something to Cheer About. Released in theaters last Friday (five years after its DVD debut), the documentary celebrates the on-court preeminence of Coach Ray Crowe’s all-black Crispus Attucks basketball team from 1951-1957 and the team’s community value as an academic and athletic success model for blacks and whites alike in Indianapolis.

In the 1954 state tournament, Attucks was upset in the semis by all-white Milan High (represented in Hoosiers as Hickory High) which used the cat-and-mouse delay game to successfully unhinge Attucks’s high-scoring attack. But Attucks’s nearly turnover-free fast break proved unstoppable during back-to-back, Oscar-Robertson-led state title runs in 1955 and 1956. The film reveals another layer of Attucks’s up-tempo approach: Coach Crowe pushed his team to rapidly build a big lead in the game’s early moments to weather the anti-Attucks bias of the referees down the stretch.

Something to Cheer About is showing at NYC’s Quad Cinema until Thursday. Do not hesitate: this short run will very likely be your one and only chance to see it on the big screen.
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Jeffrey Lane grew up playing basketball in New York City. As a high schooler in the mid-nineties, Lane captained a mostly white team playing against nearly all-black competition and realized then that basketball is an awesome forum for understanding race in America. Today Lane writes on the construction of race in sports and just published his first book, Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball.
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This post is part of our ongoing partnership with The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival which runs from April 25 to May 6 right here in NYC.