Everything They Had (23 page)

And the pleasure of it all, the sweetness of this particular fall, will that last as well? That, of course, is a very different question. It's a lovely feeling right now, but things like this do not last a long time.

If you need a victory by your favorite sports team to give you some kind of enduring emotional upgrade, then you are, I suspect, in real trouble. It's a pleasant fix, this winning, and in this case it's long overdue and a lot better than losing. But the American League East is a competitive, expensive battleground, and no one has enough pitching and everyone's pitchers are too old. This is the time for happiness, for an amnesty on Red Sox villains of the past, a time to forget all the things that went wrong at all the last moments, and to look forward to the coming season. All good things happen in the spring, we all know that, and besides, Bronson Arroyo looks as if he's about ready to break out as a big-time major-league pitcher.

Play it (again), Theo.

I write as someone who has been able to enjoy my own profession for 46 years now, and I realize that life is crueler for athletes, taking away from them at a young age what they do best, love best, finally what defines them. I realize as well that with someone as driven and passionate as Michael, that playing is like life itself, that there is, in a benign sense, an addiction here, and that it is harder to walk away from his sport than almost any of the rest of us can imagine.

S
AY
I
T
A
IN'T
S
O,
M
IKE

ESPN.com,
May 2, 2001

Bobby Knight and I are having lunch at Andy's Country Kitchen, which is some ten miles out of Bloomington. We are friends, unlikely as that may sometimes seem to him, to me, and to anyone who knows either of us, and he has volunteered to help me on my tour of Indiana. It is critical, he feels, that I dine at Andy's. The sign outside, slightly intimidating, says
NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS.
Andy's special for this day is either the salmon patties or the chicken dumplings. Each comes with two vegetables. The price is $2.50. Bobby is delighted. “Better than the Carnegie Deli in New York,” he says. “What does a sandwich cost there—nine dollars? Maybe ten dollars, am I right?” He competes, I think, even at lunch; Bobby wants to
win
lunch. Right now in his mind he is ahead at least $6.50.

The only other people at Andy's are three hunters, and they catch my eye as we catch theirs. They are not pleased to have people here as well dressed, as
alien
, as we are—sweaters, slacks, semi-expensive clothes. They eye us with palpable suspicion. Then they see Bobby. “Bobby Knight …” one of them says, “… okay.” They are hard-looking men, more than just rural—settlers, really. For a moment I cannot think of precisely the right word, and only later does it strike me that these men are
untamed
. I see them and I think of men from those Civil War photos, severe and unbending, expecting little out of life, and rarely, therefore, disappointed by it. Slowly they begin a cross-table conversation with Bobby about hunting. The grouse hunting has not been particularly good, the weather has been too warm. Gradually they are relenting, and accepting him. As they leave, one of them comes over and asks for his autograph. I am stunned; they did not seem your typical autograph hunters. But then, given the culture of Indiana, which is the culture of small towns, and the importance of Bobby Knight in Indiana, for he is easily the most recognizable person in the state, the dominant figure in the world of Indiana basketball, it is not altogether surprising.

He and I are fascinated by the degree to which the sport has become the connecting tissue of the state. The feeling of the state, the nuance of it, he says, remains rural even now, although Indiana is a great deal less rural than it was twenty-five or thirty years ago, and the small towns are drying up. But, he notes, if people do not live exactly as they did thirty years ago, they still
think
as they did then. Even the city kids at Indiana University, he says, are not like city kids from other states. They are different—simpler, less spoiled, probably less sophisticated. There is no brittleness to them. It is as if they are closer to their past. Which is just as well for him, he suggests. The fans do not want their players to be too sophisticated. They want them to be like the kids they knew in high school. They want the kids to show that the game matters.

Indiana is not the only place where basketball has such a powerful hold: there is an area that runs like a belt through parts of Appalachia and into the South; it includes parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, and Tennessee. This is a section of the country that the American industrial surge never reached, and where the small towns, villages often, neither grew nor died; they just stayed there suspended between life and death. In an atmosphere like that, where so little meant so much, there was only one thing that male (and often female) children did, and they did it every day and every night, and that was play basketball. It was a sport for the lonely. A kid did not need five or six other friends; he did not need even one. There was nothing else to do, and because this was Indiana, there was nothing else anyone even wanted to do. Their fathers nailed backboards and rims to the sides of garages or to nearby trees. The nets were waxed to make them last longer, and the kids spent their days shooting baskets in all kinds of weather. This was the land of great pure shooters, and the true mark of an Indiana high school basketball player was hitting the open shot.

If a small town had a good player, the aficionados would start watching him play when he was in junior high school, and if, blessed event, the miracle had happened and there seemed to be more than one gifted player in the same grade, then the crowds for the junior high school games might be even larger than those for the high school. The anticipation of what might happen in three or four years was almost unbearable (although sometimes it petered out into bitter disappointment when a talented young player failed to grow physically). It was, said Bob Hammel, the sports editor at the
Bloomington Herald-Telephone
and a particular connoisseur of the sport and the state, like a basketball-crazed NBA city about to get the number-one pick in the draft. Friday night was almost a ceremonial event: it was high school basketball night. People did not go anywhere else; about the night there was a ritual observance. College and professional teams learned quickly to schedule their games on Thursdays and Saturdays.

A community's identity came as much as anything else from its high school basketball team. These were towns too small and often too poor to field football teams. (In the Fifties, before a major statewide program of consolidation, there were some nine hundred high schools playing basketball and perhaps two hundred playing football.) Basketball became critical in determining a town's identity. It was what the state needed, for there was so little else to do in these small towns. In the days when all this took place, when the idea of basketball was bred into the culture, there was neither radio nor television; it became in those bleak years the best way of fending off the otherwise almost unbearable loneliness of the long and hard winters. There were few ways for ordinary people to meet with one another. The lights in a house went on very early in the morning, and they were turned off very early in the evening. Guests and visitors were rare. There was church, and there was basketball, gyms filled with hundreds, indeed thousands of people, all excited, all passionate. In a dark and lonely winter, the gym was a warm, noisy, and well-lit place.

Basketball worked in Indiana not just because kids wanted to play it but because adults needed to see it, needed to get into a car at night and drive to another place and hear other voices. So it began, and so it was ingrained in the customs of the state. What helped fan the flame was the instant sense of rivalry, the desire to beat the next village, particularly if it was a little larger. The town of five hundred longed to beat the metropolis of one thousand, and that metropolis ached to beat the city of three thousand, and the city of three thousand dreamed of beating the big city of six thousand. If it happened once every twenty years, said Hammel, that was good enough. The memory
lasted
, and the photograph of the team members, their hair all slicked down, stayed in the local barbershop a very long time.

That helped create the importance of basketball in Indiana, but what crystallized and perpetuated it was the state tournament. It helps explain why this sport dominated the theology of Indiana as it failed to do in similar states. Outside of Indiana there were state tournaments, but they were divided into classes, usually A, B, and C—A for the large metropolitan high schools, B for the medium-size schools, and then the C for the small country high schools. Indiana was, and is, different. There is only one tournament. Big schools play against little schools. This not only focuses all the attention on a single competition, which strengthens the sense of unity within the state, but also allows the dream to live. In a thousand hamlets in an essentially rural state, the dream is that a tiny school with a handful of boys will go to the state finals and fulfill the ultimate fantasy—beating one of the big city schools, Muncie Central or Indianapolis's Crispus Attucks.

The entire state roots for this to happen again, as it happened once before, in 1954, when little Milan beat Muncie Central as Bobby Plump took the winning shot with three seconds on the clock. In an odd way the tournament summons the dream, and the dream unifies the state; when the dream happens, or at least almost happens, the state rests again comfortably in its myth, that this is still a simple and quiet rural life.

In truth, Bobby Plump and several of the key players on that team did not come from Milan: they were even more countrified than that. They came from Pierceville, about three miles away, a village that consisted of about forty-five people, and to them Milan was the big city, the place they went to if they were lucky and their parents went shopping on Saturday. Milan had a population of one thousand people, and sometimes on Saturday Plump's father would say that they would go to town and do their trading. Mr. Plump would shop and go to the Odd Fellows, and then Bobby would be able to take in a movie and have something to drink at the soda fountain. Plump remembered feeling bashful and awkward every time he went to Milan, because it seemed so big.

Pierceville, by contrast, had only a grocery store, a service station, and a post office. There was one church, but no resident minister; instead, preachers came on loan from surrounding churches, or local laymen conducted the service. There was no such thing as a fast-food franchise or a movie theater. Gene White, who played on that team, didn't eat in a restaurant until he was thirteen years old, and the restaurant, naturally enough, was in Milan. Cities had restaurants. The Milan kids, White remembered, seemed snobbish at first, and better dressed with more expensive clothes, which probably meant that they bought a better brand of overalls.

This was southeast Indiana. It was all farm country, but the farms were small and the farmers scratched out a marginal living. No one owned very much land and no one ever had very much money; there weren't many people to make money from. In the Plump family, with six children, there was neither indoor plumbing nor a telephone. These were not lives of poverty, as an outsider might have thought; instead, they were lives of simplicity. They had all the basics but precious few luxuries. Growing up, Bobby Plump remembered, there was an unwritten rule that there were a lot of things you just did not ask for, because they could never be attained—like telephones. Bobby Plump wanted one so that when he called a girl he didn't have to walk over to his neighbor Glen Butte's house. Some of the boys' fathers had to travel a considerable distance to hold jobs. It was, in fact, a classic slice of small-town rural life. None of these boys owned a car; their mobility limited, the one thing they could do was play basketball each day.

Of the fathers of the boys who grew up in Pierceville, Plump's worked at the small pump factory in Lawrenceburg, Gene White's father drove a school bus and ran a feed mill, Glen Butte's father drove a truck and farmed, and Roger Schroder's father ran the family general store. It sold groceries, canned goods, clothes, and indeed became the first store in the area to carry television sets. It was also the place where everyone hung out. Mr. Schroder had put two benches in the front of the store, and that was where people came and sat and talked. The store took the place of a local paper, serving as the community's source of information. That made the Schroders the most prosperous of the Pierceville families. The other boys assumed that though they would not go to college, Roger would, because his older sister was already in college. Plump once asked his father if he could have gone to the university without the championship season, which brought a scholarship. “You're the youngest of six kids,” his father reminded him, “and I couldn't afford it for them, and I don't see how I could have afforded it for you.”