The Milan Debacle
The following is an excerpt from our man Jeffrey Lane's excellent new book: "Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball". We deeply dug the chapters on Tupac and Biggie's influence on basketball culture and the selling of Allen Iverson, but his work on "The Milan Miracle"--the true story behind Hoosiers--and its impact on race and sports in Indiana seemed like the perfect fit for our ongoing look at sports in film.
The movie Hoosiers captures both the enormous pride Indiana takes in its basketball tradition and the throwback aestheticism routinely attached to this pride. Two former Indiana University students, director David Anspaugh and writer Angelo Pizzo, collaborated to recreate an immortal slice of Indiana folklore, the "Milan Miracle," which is considered by many the greatest Cinderella story in all of hoops history.
In the film, the undersized but resilient boys of Hickory High overcome the odds and a minuscule enrollment (only 161 students) to capture the state title. (Hickory High is modeled after Milan High School in Milan, Indiana, which was the source of the real "Milan Miracle" in 1954.) The accuracy of the film is close enough for a Hollywood production; more important, what basketball means to the people of Indiana comes across in spectacular fashion. The sport is infused with monumental significance and powers: it represents the fabric of rural life and the glue that holds fathers and sons together, and it is a means of personal salvation for both a town drunk and a disgraced coach who assaulted a player (sound familiar?).In the movie underdog Hickory High triumphs over the big-school favorite, and a farm town bests a "big" city. It is also the true story of little, all-white Milan High School, in a town without a single black resident, which outplays both integrated and all-black schools on its way to a state championship. Although the year is changed in the film, the basketball season of the real "Milan Miracle"--1953-54--was the last before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision banning racial segregation in the schools in Brown vs. the Board of Education.
Read more...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.------------------------------------------------------------------------
This post is part of our ongoing partnership with The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival which runs from April 25 to May 26 right here in NYC.
1 Comments:
Wow. That excerpt was a good read. If you were a baller who was also plugged into social issues in America, two movies stand above all: Hoosiers and Hoops Dreams. I don't own many movies but these two are standouts in my collection.
I love Hoosiers but I remember reading a while back that Oscar Robertson hated the movie because his Attucks team was transformed into an integrated composite of Attucks and Muncie. He felt that it totally glossed over the important details of the racial issues of the early 50s. After reading this excerpt I gotta agree with The Big O.
Post a Comment
<< Home