Gone hip-hop
I’ve long maintained that the best reason to live in Indiana is basketball. And please note that I’m no sports junkie. The appeal of Major League Baseball for me is almost purely historic and I’m not sure I’ve ever watched a football game from start to finish. For that matter, my interest these days in college hoops is not nearly what it used to be. And once Reggie Miller retires, what little time I devote to the NBA may well evaporate altogether.
But I have become seriously addicted to Indiana high school basketball. It’s how I spend my winters, thinking nothing of driving two and a half hours to an obscure county-rivalry game or taking in four contests in a single week. Viewed purely as sport, the games are often high drama of the first order. But more than that (and what ultimately gives the games their kick), high school basketball qualifies as one of the last true regional American subcultures, a hold-out against a bland encroaching national homogeneity, a part of people’s lives they still care about without having to be told to. The atmosphere and the details — the old gyms, older rivalries and vaunted past — are as rich and fascinating (and slowly disappearing) as those of Dutch Pennsylvania or Cajun Louisiana. Going to games is cheap and easy and, as Andy Graham has written, a great way to reconnect with your “inner Hoosier.” In short, it’s the one thing we have that no other state can offer.
Jon Wertheim is a Sports Illustrated writer who resides in New York but grew up in Indiana, graduating from Bloomington North in 1989. Four years ago, with his father battling cancer, Wertheim suddenly found himself spending significant time back in Hoosierland. One night he chanced to take in a basketball game at his alma mater and was stunned by how little of it matched his memories. It wasn’t just that the team was good, light years removed from the .500 clubs of Wertheim’s school days. It was that the brand of basketball on display was itself so different: much closer to the athletic high-octane ball trickling down from the pro game than the blue-collar celebration of fundamentals he remembered.
Indiana basketball, it seemed, had gone hip-hop.
Sensing there might be significance lurking in this sea change, Wertheim spent all of last winter Back Home Again, tracing the changing face of Hoosier hoops at all levels, “the state of basketball in the state of basketball.” The resulting book, Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip-Hop, is easily one of the best reads on Indiana basketball I’ve encountered. Wertheim manages to corral all the major hot-button topics of recent years — AAU, the class tournament, Conseco Fieldhouse, the firing of Bob Knight, Mike Davis’ ongoing trial by fire, the ascendancy of the Pacers (and the Lady Boilermakers and the Pike Red Devils), last year’s “pass-for-pay” scandal at Indian Creek, Katie Gearlds, Greg Oden, Ron Artest — and makes of them a single story. The glue holding it all together is the Bloomington North Cougars, whose season, the last for longtime coach Tom McKinney, Wertheim chronicles from start to finish.
Throughout, the author is ever sensitive to ways that changes in our state game connect with or mirror more general societal changes, both local and at large. It’s an ambitious book, but never dry or didactic. In fact, its pages are often full of howlingly funny anecdotes, like one concerning Wertheim’s junior high classmate, Pat (Son of Bob) Knight. After getting his first look at 14-year-old Damon Bailey’s game skills, the younger Knight “reported to anyone who would listen that Bailey was ‘the best player I’ve ever seen.’ As if it were necessary, he added the codicil: ‘And that includes black guys.’”
There is a wonderful profile of Indiana Fever forward Tamika Catchings, in which the WNBA All-Star comes across as a sort of female counterpart to Ron Artest, sharing his competitive intensity and guileless naiveté, if thankfully not the powder-keg ugliness. “When Van Chancellor, the Houston Comets’ colorful coach who oversaw the last U.S. Women’s National team and 2004 Olympic team, once barked to Catchings that ‘Great players get back on defense,’ she wrote him a note thanking him for deeming her a great player.”
On issue after issue, Wertheim offers balanced and nuanced readings of complex situations and personalities. He notices how, for all that Pacer fans are wary of him, Ron Artest actually possesses the most Hoosier-like game of anyone on the team. He exposes the standard arguments against pro prospects, skipping college as paper tigers, and suggests that the best reason, the symbiosis that existed for years between the NBA and NCAA, “was a terrific deal for all parties except one: the class of talented 18 year olds who were enriching universities ... while shouldering huge opportunity costs by deferring the NBA’s lucre.”
The chapter on IU contains perhaps the best writing on Bob Knight I’ve ever seen. While never pretending it was anyone but Knight himself who effected his own downfall, Wertheim also manages to communicate the profound sense of sadness, even tragedy, that accompanied the end, the shame that things finally played out the way they did.
There are detours along the way for essays on Damon Bailey, sports agent Eugene Parker, the Sagarin Ratings and a fascinating piece on the Duany family, who fled the Sudan for Bloomington in 1983, and have since become the first American household to place five children in college on basketball scholarships.
Class basketball gets a chapter to itself and it’s a good one. Though it now seems all but certain that nothing short of divine (or at least legislative) intervention will ever restore our state basketball tournament, it still should never be forgotten what a monumentally wrong decision the switch to a class system was, that John Wooden’s characterization of it as “a crime against the culture” is in no way hyperbole. In 10 succinct pages, Wertheim lays out the case against class, from the “underhanded” way the IHSAA backdoored it in, to their refusal seven years later to admit error or entertain any notion of compromise in the face of overwhelming opposition. Citing the line from Hoosiers that everyone seems to remember (“Let’s win this one for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here”), Wertheim notes, “Today all the small schools do have a chance to get there. The shame of it is, Indiana high school basketball is immeasurably worse for it.”
On this and most other subjects, I found myself in near-total agreement with Wertheim’s assessments. The lone exception was the book’s core premise: that elements long defining basketball at the pro level (physicality, speed, slam-dunks) are now dominating the high school game as well, rendering it virtually unrecognizable from what it was a decade ago. In Wertheim’s view, old-school touchstones like screens, cuts and stalls are on the verge of extinction. “A horizontal game,” he writes, “[is] now being played vertically.”
There is of course more than a little truth in those words. On average, kids today are bigger and quicker than they used to be and the NBA’s influence is more apparent than ever. (Larry Bird notes that he barely thought about the NBA before his senior year of college, while today’s kids might set their sites on it as early as junior high.) The ability to execute a crossover dribble is the norm these days, not the exception, and it seems the game is played a little higher above the rim every year. All of which helps explain, for instance, how Indianapolis schools, with their deep reserves of athletically gifted players, have dominated the state tourney over the last decade like never before.
Even so, I think Wertheim overstates his case. Unrecognizable? Drive out on a Friday night to almost any school in hoops-mad counties like Greene, Montgomery or Ripley, and you’ll see the game played pretty much the same way it was 30, let alone 10 years ago. And it’s not only the small schools: At the Richmond 4A Sectional this month, Muncie Central took their traditional horizontal game up against a decidedly more vertical (and ranked) Anderson team and was able not only to match them but to win by 21 points. (A bigger test for Central will come this Saturday when they meet the ultimate hip-hop opponent, Lawrence North, in the State Finals.) If high school ball were as undifferentiated from the college and pro games as Wertheim maintains, I for one wouldn’t be nearly as interested in it.
Just as Indiana basketball players tend to be more versed in fundamentals than kids from other states, so too are fans here generally more knowledgeable about the game, more appreciative of its formal beauty, its poetry — especially old-school ball, “the way the game’s supposed to be played,” as they say. Sure, dunks can be exciting, but there’s still something more deeply satisfying about a dead-on jump shot. Great individual efforts will never go out of style — but, in its own way, five marginally talented players working the ball and pulling off the upset is just as compelling.
This preference for substance over style is one reason Bob Knight cut such a figure here: His system of sublimating individuals to the good of the team was Hoosier to the core. It’s why Reggie Miller, a jump shooter who coaxed more out of his gangly frame than anyone knew was there, has been such a perfect fit with the Pacers.
Since most of the game’s modern innovations have come not only via the NBA but through black players, the typical Hoosier distrust of new school is often assumed to cloak a simmering racism. I’ve certainly lived here too long to doubt that’s sometimes the case. But, as much as the book’s hip-hop comparison rings true (“Both cultures,” Wertheim writes, “are less about race than about ethos ... Formal training is less important than improvisational skills”), let me offer a different musical analogy: To me, the changes in the game that privilege a general athleticism over more specific hoops skills, one-on-one moves over teamwork and defense, are akin to the wrong turn that rock took in the ’70s, when faux-technical prowess (i.e. flashy guitar solos) took center stage at the expense of more bedrock virtues like economy and rhythm. Discovering the world of Indiana high school basketball some years ago was like finding a secret enclave of punk rock (or, perhaps more accurately, an isolated valley where rockabilly had never lost its power or stature).
And it remains a haven for old-school fanatics. It’s where you’ll still find oddball (and successful) programs like Loogootee, making regular use of the four-corners; or Gibson Southern, that runs a pure Princeton-style offense, never shooting anything but backdoor layups or wide-open threes. It’s where, every year, stars emerge whose forte is the long-range jumper, where invariably some group of modestly talented seniors use the advantage of having played together since fifth grade to put together an 18-3 season. As much as the pro game may be encroaching, it’s going to be a while before it totally erases charms like these.
I saw so many great games this season. Twice I watched teams claw back from 20-point deficits to win in overtime. I witnessed spectacular individual performances from the likes of Dominic James, Greg Oden, Josh McRoberts, Jason Holsinger, Eric Gordon. I was part of a packed house at Scottsburg (in a gym called the Pressure Cooker) where the halftime score of their game with Jennings County was 49 to 47 (somewhat more than the Pacers average in a half). I bought homemade pie from Band Boosters and ate way too much popcorn.
But I’m not sure I had more fun all winter than the night I drove on a whim to Medora, one of the tiniest, most isolated schools in the state, and watched them duke it out with their lone rival, Crothersville. Two teams with ugly records, playing in an even uglier gym, it was deep farm basketball (Medora’s starting guards, a sophomore and a junior, both sported goatees) at its most obscure, a game that couldn’t have mattered to anyone but the 1,100 fans on hand (roughly half the towns’ combined populations). But when Medora’s best player, Steven Watson, muscled his way to the hoop with 12 seconds left, to notch his team’s first win over their rivals in the last 11 tries, it mattered so much that I felt privileged to be there. In the world of Indiana high school basketball, sometimes talent is less essential to a good game than emotion, an advantage I don’t foresee the NBA taking away any time soon.