‘The Real Hoosiers’ is the remarkable story of Oscar Robertson’s high school team, and ‘Kingdom on Fire’ recaptures the complexities of John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty
Eighty years ago, an extraordinary collegiate basketball game took place. It’s such a shining moment, it’s madness that March 12 isn’t an annual hoops holiday. On that Sunday morning in 1944, when most folks were at church, the Duke University medical school team traveled across town to play the all-Black North Carolina College Eagles behind locked gym doors.
In 1954, Attucks lost in the state tournament to Milan High School, the rural team that inspired the fictional Hickory High in “Hoosiers.” McCallum uses that film, and the racial dynamics of its conservative “Behold, the smart, scrappy white kids!” ethos as a jumping-off point for how much more improbable the Tigers’s real-world heroics were. For starters, they didn’t have a gym.
McCallum, now in his mid-70s, pulls all the tricks from a Hall of Fame career out of his righteous writer’s bag to show what these teenagers endured while compiling an 85-6 record in Robertson’s three varsity seasons.
Strictly speaking, there is no direct link between the Marion grotesquerie and what Crispus Attucks players overcame during their dominant run, but does there need to be? Political and cultural eras bleed into one another, and they certainly did for Wooden, the Hoosier farm boy who went on to claim 10 NCAA titles as a coach in the California sunshine, including seven in a row during a time of massive American upheaval.
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