Bobby Plump Plunks One

Okay! For the person who asked for the story I told Mike Moore years ago: here it is. Be patient, please: the context of that game is important.

The story I told Mike Moore all those years ago is not just about the Milan-Muncie Central Indiana State Championship game of 1954. It's also about the very different world in which that game was played.

Back in the fifties we all thought the phrase March Madness meant Hoosier High School Basketball. And maybe it really did. All Indiana high schools dismissed their students half of Wednesday and all of Thursday and Friday to attend the Sectional Tournaments. Did other states do that? I can't be certain. I was just a kid. And I thought the entire world was Indiana.

That was just before Indiana went full-blast into School Consolidation. Before Indiana high schools consolidated, nearly every cross-roads village had it own rickety high-school building, and its own rickety gymnasium. I've since been told that in those days, if you could guarantee the score board would work on Friday night, you were thought amply qualified to be a Superintendent of Schools anywhere in the rural areas of Hoosierland. Could be true.

Back then, quaintly-countrified, small-town Indiana was fairly sprinkled with tiny conferences made up of tiny teams that ruled Friday nights. And understand: even small-school teams played highly competitive basketball in Indiana. The movie Hoosiers got that right.

You can't now imagine how these tiny schools and their cracker-box gymnasiums resisted school consolidation. What on earth could small-town-folks do on Friday night if they lost their basketball teams. Such traditions die hard. Imagine a time when gray-haired old men stood around in bars talking about their early high-school hardwood prowess. Really old men recounted games going back to their early childhood -- clear back to the days when basketballs had laces. Believe it. Old-timey basketballs really did have laces.

But back in that pristine time depicted in the film Hoosiers, Title IX meant the card in the library card-catalog that fell between card eight and card ten. Talented high-school girls worked in the office or as teacher-aides or hall monitors. Often, they just sat around looking pretty -- if they could.

Or if a girl was good-looking and athletic enough, she got a shot at cheerleader. Even ugly-athletic might get her a cheer-leading spot.

But in those bad-old days, few girls were ugly. And even fewer were athletic. In fact, few males dared say the words ugly, girl, or athletics in the same sentence. At least not in mixed company.

That was a more primitive time in which a young woman never got a shot at the basket, unless she played in the annual Girls Athletic Association tournament. And females were girls, not young women. Everybody knew girls were too delicate for any sport except golf. Babe Didrikson Zaharias earned females that privilege. And even she went by her professional-wrestler-husband's last name.

Never mind the tumultuous sixties. The world of the fifties was still a MAN'S world. At the time, few saw the fairer-better times coming just up the road. The word equality was seldom heard in any context. A woman's place was still in the home. Or possibly slogging away bravely over a hot typewriter keyboard.

The employment gains made by women during WWII were virtually washed away in the torrent of men returning from the war. Men were guaranteed by law their former jobs following the war. Rent a DVD of The Best Years of Their Lives, and you'll get a fairly accurate picture of how that time focused upon the work dilemmas of men, and ignored women except as home-bodies. And I do mean bodies. Even the Korean Conflict hadn't changed our male-centered culture all that much.

Of course we did see some bright, tough women in business leadership positions. But that was almost exclusively in movies playing opposite Spenser Tracy. What can I say: It was a largely unenlightened time. Mad Men gets it about as right as any series I've ever seen. In the World of Work, men were MEN. Women were virtually invisible.

I'm sorry! You may wonder about this seeming digression into the peculiarities of that time. But for anyone young nowadays to completely understand the madMAD world of Hoosier High-School March Madness in the late forties and fifties, this fixation upon boys, and boys' sports -- to the total exclusion of young women at that time -- must be understood. That fixation upon male participation in athletics was at the core of the craziness that afflicted Hoosierland every spring.

Exclusion of females seems crazy now. But to include young women in high-school sports back then seemed even crazier. It just wasn't done -- except on the college level, where the delicate coeds of the time played either offense OR defense to spare them the necessity of running the full length of the floor. I know. I KNOW. Enough.

But understand this one thing more about so-called boys' sports of that period: there were at that time no sissy-distinctions among teams based upon school size. You wanted to play, you played with the Big-Dogs. That's how tiny Milan, Indiana, found itself on the floor against super-sized Muncie Central in the championship game of spring, 1954.

But the story is not only about the State Championship season of tiny Milan, Indiana. It tells a truth about an entire place in a specific time: Hoosierland in the early fifties. Still, the aura of that period embraced a number of earlier decades. Time was slower back then, locked in place by largely unyielding traditions. I realize such a concept is difficult to fathom in our present time of lightning changes.

So now at last: the short tale on the end of this very long dog.

The night of the final game, I was there with friends.

Even the long drive down to Butler Fieldhouse in Indianapolis was thrilling. It was an early morning drive over roads then narrow and curvy.

I distinctly remember my impression of Butler Fieldhouse. To my eyes it was an immense seating area sloping majestically down to a tiny patch of golden, glowing hardwood. This was where God sent the athletically proficient as a special reward. From my vantage-point high above the floor, the bank-boards appeared the size of postage stamps. -- the view from the cheap-seats.

It was a long, emotionally exhausting day. We saw both elimination games of the final four in the morning. Late afternoon featured the consolation game that decided third place.

After hamburgers and fries we regained our seats for the final game at around 8:00 pm. You saw Hoosiers. You saw Bobby Plump take that final shot. You heard the buzzer while the ball was still in the air. You saw the ball burn the net.

What Hoosiers did NOT adequately show was the split-second following the shot and the buzzer. At least the movie didn't present the astonishing spectacle I witnessed.

And that's too bad! Because had the film shown that moment, Hoosier March Madness might be more fully understood, right down to the present moment.

What I saw, what every spectator saw, following that buzzer and that long, spectacular shot piercing the net, was what must have been the entire populous of tiny Milan rushing out onto the floor in one mad burst of uplifting emotion. The players were swept up into a frenzy of lifting hands. The sight and the emotional wallop were absolutely overwhelming.

Of course that spectacle doesn't sound like much today. Modern television has shown us too much. We're over-fed and addled.

But in that much-simpler time, that fantastic finish brought a torrent of tears pouring from my eyes, coursing down my cheeks. And when I wiped my eyes best I could on my sweatshirt sleeve, I looked around me into that crowd high above the floor in Butler Fieldhouse. And I couldn't find a dry eye anywhere. Probably 8o% of the spectators had backed the tiny Milan underdog team.

I mean: that was, and still remains the American Way.

In that powerful moment "score one for the little guys" really meant something. And it captured for me for all time the spectacle of Indiana high-school basketball.


So that's the accurate background context and the true story I told Mike Moore all those years ago.

Thanks for asking.