ART IMITATES LIFE IN INDIANA : REAL HOOSIERS : Basketball Is Still King in Land Where Bob Knights and Bobby Plumps Rule

It’s two hours before the basketball game between Purdue, located 60 miles northwest, and Indiana University, which is 60 miles south. An FM rock deejay takes a phone call on the air.

“Do you know why Jesus wasn’t born on the Purdue campus?” the caller asks

“No,” the deejay says.

“They couldn’t find three wise men,” the caller says.

It’s the malice that counts. A local bar announces Mutual Animosity Night. Another station does an update from courtside in Purdue’s Mackey Arena, which is still awaiting the fans and, indeed, the teams.

Nothing has happened since the last update, of course, so they play an old interview with Indiana Coach Bob Knight in which Knight claims that this is a nice rivalry, all right, but so are the Hoosiers’ rivalries with Notre Dame, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, et al.

“When you’ve had a little success . . . “ Knight allows, modestly.

The rivalry, of course, endures, but this has surely had its desired effect. There isn’t a Purdue fan listening who wouldn’t die happy if he could just strangle Bob Knight first.

Boilermaker fans stream into Mackey. Only a handful of tickets have been allotted to IU, so unless you’re some Hoosier’s dad, girlfriend or a $10,000 annual contributor, forget it. In the Purdue student section, kids roll their gold sweaters up over their bellies, a la Knight, showing the bulge from the pillows they’ve stuffed under their shirts.

“When he walks out there, they’ll boo his butt,” Purdue Coach Gene Keady says. “He loves it.”

Knight makes them wait for the privilege. He doesn’t come out during warmups. His team goes back into the dressing room and reappears, still without him.

Finally, five minutes before the game’s start, he walks out, to a boo they can hear out on the Interstate. Unconcerned, he walks over to Keady and extends his hand. Keady shakes it. They exchange a little laugh. Knight chucks Keady behind the ear with a rolled-up program. Even Knight’s greetings are physical. The crowd boos louder.

They start the game. Large bodies start flying every which way.

In “The Hustler,” when Fast Eddie Felson walks into the big downtown pool hall to stalk Minnesota Fats and inquires about a house rule, the guy behind the counter raises an eyebrow and sniffs, “This is Ames, mister.”

And this is the Big Ten, mister. This is Indiana.

COME BACK, SNORT GRINSTEAD

You want to know what happens to Jimmy, Hickory High’s star guard in “Hoosiers,” after he wins the state tournament?

He goes on to Butler University, sets scoring records, outgrows his shyness, stays on in Indianapolis and becomes an insurance executive with a heavy schedule of public appearances.

Sometimes he vacations in Palm Desert, so he can visit his daughter in Rancho Cucamonga. Honest.

“Hoosiers” was modeled on Milan, a school of 135 in a hamlet in the southeast corner of Indiana, that beat powerful Muncie Central in the 1954 state final.

The star player was modeled on the real-life Bobby Plump.

The coach, in real life, was Marvin Wood, who now lives in a suburb of South Bend and coaches women’s basketball at St. Mary’s College.

And the first thing you have to know is that it isn’t pronounced Mi- lahn .

“It’s My -lyn,” says Plump, laughing, from Palm Desert. “Those people in that other country pronounce it wrong. There’s another town in our area spelled V-e-r-s-a-i-l-l-e-s. It’s pronounced Ver- sales .”

The movie, of course, was only inspired by the Milan Indians.

In real life:

--Wood, the coach, wasn’t a newly arrived middle-aged man with a checkered past, but a 24-year-old go-getter who was in his second year at Milan.

Wood’s predecessor, Herman (Snort) Grinstead, had been abruptly fired for defying the school superintendent and buying new uniforms. Wood, teaching school in French Lick, soon to be the birthplace of--heraldic trumpets, please--Larry Bird, heard of the opportunity, applied and got the job.

“(Grinstead) and the superintendent were cross-ways anyway,” Wood says. “That was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

“They had a student walk-out in support of him before I came to town,” he says, laughing. “I wasn’t aware of it. I probably wouldn’t have come if I was.”

--Unlike the coach played by Gene Hackman, Wood was anything but crusty.

“Marvin Wood was a quiet, authoritative individual,” Plump says. “He was very quiet. I never heard him raise his voice.

“He thought he had a problem in training his first season. There were a couple of boys who were staying out late. So New Year’s Eve, he told us, ‘I want you in by 1 o’clock. Anything you’re going to do, you can do by then.’

“I double-dated that night. We were coming back, took a short cut and got a flat tire. We changed that thing faster than it’s ever been done outside the 500-mile race (which is what Hoosiers call the Indy 500).

“We got home at five minutes before 1. We didn’t get right out of the car. We must have been studying or something. At 1:03, a little green Pontiac pulled up. I’m thinking, ‘That can’t be him. He can’t be checking up on me.

“He said, ‘What time do you have?’ I said, ‘About 1.’ He said, ‘I’ve got 1:03. We’ll go by my watch.’

“The next day after practice, he told me, ‘I think I have to make an example of you.’ The next game, I couldn’t play, I couldn’t dress, I couldn’t sit on the bench. I was up in the stands watching and here comes our center, Jim Wendelman.

“I said, ‘Jim, what’re you doing here?’

“He said, ‘He got me at 3:30.’

“We watched the game. We didn’t want Milan to lose, but we didn’t want them to win by 20 points either, which they did. Marvin Wood didn’t have anybody staying out after that.”

--Wood changed the system in his first season, and some players muttered but none quit. He had a full complement of 10. There was no meeting of townspeople to dismiss him and no dramatic intervention from his star player. Plump wasn’t sitting out. He’d have given up breathing before basketball.

There are similarities, though.

In Hickory, Hackman endures a barber shop command performance where the citizens ask how he coaches, tell him what they think and let him know what they expect.

That didn’t exactly happen to Wood. He knew better than to walk through the door.

“Every small town has that group,” Wood said. “A group of downtown coaches.

“The leader was my landlord, and he lived right across the street. They asked a lot of questions and they wanted my opinions but they did it in a positive way.

“I’ve had a coach tell me of losing games and having someone paint a yellow stripe around his car. I tried hard to avoid those kind of communities. But they have some in the state of Indiana. They have a lot of them in the state of Indiana.”

--The Indians may have warmed the cockles of everyone’s heart, but they weren’t a surprise.

The year before, 1953, they had been all the way to the semifinals, under Wood. They had been good in ’52 when Plump and his classmates were sophomores. Snort Grinstead had even tossed some older players off the team at mid-season to open spots for them.

In ‘54, they went all the way to the last page of the storybook, beating Muncie Central on Plump’s shot in the closing seconds, 32-30.

Of course, you can forget the timeout huddle in which Hackman tells Jimmy to decoy and someone else to take the shot, and the kids all get vacant looks on their faces, and Hackman finally goes back to his star.

Anyway, in the movie and on the game film that the producers used as a guide, Jimmy-Bobby drives right, pulls up, shoots a 15-footer. It goes through.

A state goes wild.

“The day after the tournament, we came back from Indianapolis,” Plump says. “We were in our Cadillacs. Chris Volz Motors in Milan had told us: ‘If you win the sectionals, we’ll take you to the regionals in Pontiacs. If you win the regionals, we’ll take you to Semistate in Buicks. If you win Semistate, we’ll take you to the finals in Cadillacs.’

“We got to Shelbyville, 20 miles outside of Indianapolis, and they took us through town with fire trucks. Greensburg (another 20 miles down the road) did the same thing.

“Then we get to where 46 and 101 meet to turn for Milan. That’s about 18-19 miles from home, and there were all these cars lined up on both sides of the road. We thought there’d been an accident or something. People were walking into My -lyn. They walked 19 miles.

“There were 35,000 people there. There were people from Ohio. There were some people from Illinois who came to my house.

“Everybody in the county? It couldn’t have been. I don’t think there were 35,000 people in our county.”

A merchant offered the team a week’s vacation in Europe.

Plump received a letter addressed only, “Plump, Indiana.” Thirty-three years later, he’s still asked if he’s the Bobby Plump.

The Indians may have preserved the tournament in its original form: state-wide, single-class, everyone in.

Said the losing coach, Jay McCreary: “Had the Bearcats (Muncie Central) won--and I still think we should have--we’d have class basketball, like they do for football.”

THE IU-TOLLAH OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLLA

We’re talking media saturation here.

America continues to discover its heartland and, you lucky Hoosiers, this winter it’s you. There is a best-selling book, Knight’s profile by the Washington Post’s John Feinstein, who spent a season with him and wrote “A Season on the Brink.”

Knight accorded Feinstein complete and unprecedented access, but Knight says he hates the book. Everyone else in Indiana can’t wait to read it. Book stores have been hard-pressed to keep it in stock.

Knight has accused Feinstein of breaking an agreement not to quote his profanity. This raises a question: If the swear words had been censored, would anything have remained?

Knight has since used words like whore and pimp to describe Feinstein. Feinstein, a respected reporter, denies that there was any agreement. It is not impossible that there was an honest misunderstanding.

The book actually seems to bend over backward to be fair. At the end, Feinstein formally endorses Knight. After returning to the Post, he consistently defended Knight in print, on occasions like the Indiana faculty senate’s passing of a resolution for a bill of rights to protect athletes.

Like Knight, Feinstein’s book is open to various interpretations.

On one hand, it details Knight’s devotion to the game, his constant state of torment, his insistence on an academic commitment, his loyalty to former players and theirs to him.

On the other hand, it’s a chronicle of the daily torrent of abuse he visits upon everyone around him, of his love affairs with every prospect he hasn’t yet gotten his hands on and his torture of every one he has.

Take Damon Bailey, an eighth-grader so precocious that Knight deigned to scout him.

Wrote Feinstein:

“Knight had talked about Damon Bailey so much. . . . that it had become a running joke among (Indiana) players and coaches. Whenever someone made an extraordinary play, the oft-made comment was: ‘That’s good. Almost as good as Damon.’ Larry Bird was a great player. How great? ‘Almost as great as Damon.’

“The night before the Ohio State game, Knight had told Fred Taylor (Knight’s coach at OSU) all about Damon Bailey. Taylor was skeptical. He began listing other phenoms that Knight had been head over heels in love with. No, Knight insisted, this was different.

“An expedition was arranged. Knight would play chauffeur for three of his professor friends. A second car would carry (assistant coaches Ron) Felling and (Royce) Waltman. Knight led the way down the back roads of southern Indiana toward Shawswicke. When a third car suddenly appeared, cutting between Knight and his followers, Waltman drew back in mock horror. ‘Oh my God!’ he cried. ‘It must be the Purdue staff. They’re trying to beat us to Damon.’

“ ‘Yeah, I can see it now,’ (Felling) said. Tomorrow’s paper will have a headline: ‘Bailey Signs with Indiana; Will Choose High School Later.’

“When Knight began turning down tiny back roads, Felling began going on in lyrical tones: ‘This is what basketball is all about. A boy, a dream, a hoop. The back roads of southern Indiana on a cold winter’s night. Coaches flocking from all over to see the young wonder. The gym appears in the gloaming. Hearts skip a beat. Could it be, yes it is. The Home of Damon.’

“The Home of Damon was a rickety, steamy old gym that was packed full with about 1,500 people. ‘Welcome to the home of the Farmers,’ said the sign.

“The Farmers had not lost in two years and were pounding their opponent, Oolitic, 16-0. . . . Bailey was about six inches taller, at 6-1, than anyone Oolitic had. He dominated. He made swooping moves to the basket. He put the ball behind his back. He also missed several jump shots and looked almost human at times. . . .

“The coaches and the professors sat high in the stands watching. Knight stood by the door. At halftime, he was like royalty at a party. Everyone lined up to shake his hand, say hello and take his picture. They all knew why the legend was here. He was here to see Damon.

“In the stands, Waltman turned to Felling. ‘What do you think?’

“ ‘I think,’ Felling answered, ‘that the mentor has slipped a cog.’ ”

Swoops of fancy notwithstanding, you could not make a living on the number of cogs Knight has slipped.

Down two years ago after the failure of his experiment--he was trying to win with obedient but only marginally athletic players--he’s back. He had to compromise his principle of no junior college players, but that wasn’t insuperable. He decided that some didn’t seem to be such bad kids and now starts two, Dean Smart, an exciting guard, and Dean Garrett, an improving 6-11 center from San Clemente.

Famous for having teams peak for the tournament, he’s taking this one down the stretch in his inimitable style.

He thanked the faculty senate for departing from its normal activities, which he described as deciding where to plant petunias around campus.

He ripped Steve Alford, who had just tied the all-time Indiana scoring record.

He ripped ESPN for starting the Hoosiers’ game at Wisconsin a half-hour later and making it hard for his players to get to class the next day.

Said a Purdue booster at Gene Keady’s weekly lunch:

“Those sports writers write that. How come they don’t write about the times he practices them from midnight ‘til 2 in the morning? They write everything else. How come they don’t write that, too?”

Against Iowa, Knight had his players beat the count on in-bounds plays by throwing the ball off pressing Hawkeye defenders. Darryl Thomas banked one off Brad Lohaus’ nose.

The state geared up for the Purdue game. The Hoosiers are local royalty, the Boilermakers more like a large cult, but their team is no less imposing and sits directly astride Knight’s path. Keady is a rough-hewn type whose teams play a style Knight can recognize. They even get along.

“I always liked Bobby,” Keady says. “He and Eddie (Sutton, on whose Arkansas staff Keady worked) are pretty good friends. One time, Eddie got mad at our players and dismissed practice. We got on a plane, flew to Indiana and watched practice.”

No wonder they got along. There wasn’t enough of a sense of proportion among them to fill a thimble.

“He probably would be a lot closer if we weren’t in-state rivals,” Keady says, smiling. “He won’t allow anyone to think he likes somebody at Purdue.”

Keady will have his four best starters back next year. Knight will have three.

Hearts skip a beat.

YOUR NEW, IMPROVED HEARTLAND

In these parts, it takes all winter to retell the lore, which may be the point.

The state high school tournament started in 1911, 20 years after Dr. James Naismith invented the game and 10 years after IU and Purdue first played it against each other.

Thus came the first collisions of such as the Alices of Vincennes, the Jug Rox of Shoals, the Hot Dogs of Frankfort and the Black Cats of Terre Haute Gerstmeyer.

Black Cats?

You bet. They had a set of twins and another player who was their uncle. They were known as Arley, Harley and Uncle Harold. Their coach gave the twins Nos. 43 and 34. Rivals claimed that if one was in foul trouble at halftime, he would have them switch jerseys.

In the ’53 finals, however, a foul was charged to Arley, the team’s best shooter, that actually belonged to Harley. Arley fouled out early in the fourth period, and the Black Cats lost, 42-41, to South Bend Central.

This wasn’t some country fair, this was a sport being born.

Everett Case coached the Hot Dogs to four titles before the Reynolds tobacco people lured him to North Carolina State. Case cranked up the region’s first power and began the process that resulted in today’s Atlantic Coast Conference.

John Wooden played at Martinsville, in a gym that seated 5,200--400 more than lived in town, he remembers--and reached the state finals three straight years, 1926-1928.

“I started the practice of looking back at (Nell, who would become his wife) in high school,” Wooden says in “Indiana’s Game,” the video made by the Indiana High School Athletic Assn. “She was playing in the band.”

And it’s tournament time again.

On a blackboard in the lobby of an Indianapolis hotel, they’re counting down days to spring: 25, 24 . . .

We’re headed into the country. The day is hazy, the temperature balmy, in the 40s. The fields are barren. Overhead, a V-formation of ducks heads north.

This is New Castle, population 18,000, 40 miles east of Indianapolis, the home of Steve Alford and his father, Sam, who coaches there. It has a courthouse with a statue of a Civil War soldier, dedicated to the men of Henry County, 1861-1865. On Highway 3 are the familiar fast-food franchises and a redwood-paneled building, the New Life Raquetball and Fitness Center.

The school will be one of those institutional three-story buildings, with sagging wooden floors and a tiny gym where Stevie toiled in rural isolation, right?

Get real.

It looks like somebody’s corporate headquarters. Next to it is the New Castle Field House. It seats 9,325 and is--no lie--the largest high school facility in the country. It has excellent sightlines, a Tartan floor and an indoor running track.

Sam Alford is sitting in his office, working on a film exchange for his first-round opponent, Shenadoah. Like his son, he has a luxuriant head of hair but his is graytipped here and there.

He was supposed to be an older man, of course.

“I’m 44,” he laughs, “goin’ on 65.”

He’s had a long string of successes. He coached Steve. He had Jerry Sichting, now a Boston Celtic, at Martinsville. He’s had five teams in the round of 16, called the Semi-State. He works the big summer camps--IU, Purdue, B/C--and has spoken at clinics overseas.

His worst record?

“I’m working on it,” he says, smiling. “We’ve won seven.”

That means they’ve lost 12. Any heat?

“Very little here because we’ve had such good seasons back to back. (He grins.) Now if it’s the same thing next year, then I’ll catch a lot of heat.

“That’s one thing about Indiana. Indiana fans are fickle. The turnover’s still pretty good in Indiana. You don’t produce a winner, you’re gone.

“My first job was just a little old school, 100 students, Monroe City in southern Indiana. There were a lot of similarities to what the movie says. It was a small town, 500 people, and they lived and died basketball Friday and Saturday nights.”

How about barber shops?

“Barber shops are still pretty hot spots. Pool rooms, filling stations, barber shops. . . . There’s always 2-3 places in town where you can go on a Saturday morning and get your ear bent.”

At conference rival Anderson in ‘71, Coach Woody Neal had a cross burned on his lawn. That was his final season there.

At another rival Marion, Bill Green, now the state’s winningest coach, once had his contract renewed by a 4-3 vote. He had already won one title at Indianapolis Washington with George McGinnis and Steve Downing. He then won two more at Marion in 1975-76.

His successor, Larry Little, had an .850 percentage but no titles. The Marion folks gave him five tries, up to the ’81 final four when Stacey Toran, the Raider safety, then of Indianapolis Broad Ripple, beat him with a 60-footer at the buzzer. Then they forced him out.

Green returned, won back-to-back titles again in ‘85-86 and is favored this year. He has two three-year starters at guard named Lyndon Jones and Jay Edwards who are so spectacular, Marion brought back its dunkometer. Knight has signed both.

Milan’s dream lives and not by accident.

They like to say the small schools are the backbone of the tournament, but some of these Cinderellas have been pumping iron in the basement.

How? Consolidation.

Overall enrollment is roughly the same as it was when Milan won, but the number of schools has almost halved, from 751 to 388.

And when they say the biggest reason for combining districts was to field better teams, they may not be kidding.

“I’ll put it this way,” IHSAA Commissioner Gene Cato says. “Kokomo had two high schools, which weren’t very successful (in basketball). Now they’re back to one.”

Thus Scott Skiles’ Plymouth Pilgrims, who upset Gary Roosevelt in the ’82 finals had a school of 800 in a town of 7,500. The Warsaw Community Tigers, ’84 champs, had 1,600 students.

Schools such as New Castle have feeder systems, in which the elementary and junior high coaches work under the high school coach and players grow up in one system.

At the same time, busing and declining enrollments undermined Indianapolis inner-city schools, which couldn’t afford things like feeder systems in the first place. Only six Indianapolis schools have ever won the tournament. The first, Oscar Robertson’s Crispus Attucks, closed this year. So did Marshall, the city’s largest school.

But amazingly enough, real fairy tales still come true.

The Dragons of Argos, a school of 192, got to the final four in ’79 before Anderson knocked them off. Lyons & Marco, with 135 students, got to the round of eight in ’85.

It’s all Indiana, mister.

FADE TO BLACK

Purdue beat Indiana, 75-64. Sometimes it looked like tag-team wrestling with pauses to shoot a round object into a hoop. But it was exciting and a good time was had by almost all.

Marvin Wood left Milan the year after he won and went to New Castle, which was already a power.

He coached at three more schools and never got back to the finals.

“The year we won,” Plump says, “he was making a speech at New Castle and he said, ‘You might as well come with me.

“He went in to talk to the superintendent. I was thinking, ‘What are we doing here?’

“All of a sudden, I realized, they were talking about Marvin going to New Castle! I was crushed.’

“Years later he told me, he had just won the state tournament at a small school, it seemed like if you go to a large school, it should be easier. But it didn’t work like that.

“He didn’t win again, but I have to believe if you talk to the people he played for, they’d say he was a success.”

Bobby Plump is 50. He’s grown from 5-10, 148 to 5-11, 182. He has a wife and three grown children. He’s seen “Hoosiers” four times, including its Milan debut. Since the only theater was closed, they had to have it over in Batesville.

Wood says he got over pressing to win another title.

“It’s something you have to adjust to,” he says. “It was a big adjustment. It was a major adjustment.”

He and his wife, Mary Lou, have seen the movie twice.

“I tell her, ‘I don’t know how we got all this publicity out of the movie, but we’d better live it up while we can,’ ” he says.

“I remember when we got back to Milan and they asked if anybody had anything to say. She stepped forward and made a little speech.

“She said: ‘I know you are going to be all right as long as you think about this. I learned a long time ago, it’s nice to be important, but it’s much more important to be nice.’ ”