Hackman, 95 at the time of his death, was the owner of a remarkable 101 acting credits across an award-winning career. He won Oscars for his roles in “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven.” He drew unforgettable characters from “Superman” villain Lex Luthor to “The Poseidon Adventure” hero Rev. Scott early in his career to unforgettable turns in “Mississippi Burning,” “The Firm,” or “The Birdcage” later on.
But it is as Norman Dale that sports fans will forever remember him most, the leader of the tiny band of Indiana dreamers who took a chance on their coach and took a chance on themselves, believing in both enough to defy the odds and win an all-schools high school state championship. An underdog tale at its core, the movie, inspired but not completely based on the 1954 championship season by Milan High School, is about so much more.
It’s about second chances, such as the one Dale’s old friend Cletus Summers offers him with the chance to coach Hickory, promising a clean slate after Dale’s anger got him booted from the college game. Like the one Dale pays forward to Wilbur “Shooter” Flatch, the alcoholic dad of one of his players who gets to unearth latent coaching skills on Dale’s staff, and who ultimately, gets help with his disease. Like the one Jimmy Chitwood gives himself, letting go of the sadness of the loss of his former coach to ultimately give Dale a shot, or the way he knows he can make the final, game-winning shot.
It’s about belief, by the players (eventually) in Dale and his seemingly crazy requirement to pass the ball four times before taking a shot, or his incessant conditioning drills that set the team up to outlast the bigger, stronger teams opposite them. Belief, like what Dale shows when he says to his bench during a crucial late timeout, “After Ollie makes his second shot and . . . [turning to manager turned emergency player Ollie] . . . you will make your second shot.” Or what Dale reveals in his most stirring locker room speech.
“If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don’t care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game,” the coach says. “In my book, we’re gonna be winners.”
And it’s about love, and not just in Hollywood’s obvious connection between Dale and fellow teacher Myra Fleener, but between a coach and his players, between Fleener and the way she looks out for Chitwood, about the community and its support for the team, about a coach who reignites his love for the game.
Hackman is the engine that makes it all go.
Noted movie critic Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, credited screenwriter Angelo Pizzo for knowing his subject so well, convincingly portraying the complicated dynamics of small-town sports.
But, as Ebert correctly pointed out, “all of his knowledge, however, would be pointless without Hackman’s great performance at the center of this movie. Hackman is gifted at combining likability with complexity — two qualities that usually don’t go together in the movies. He projects all of the single-mindedness of any good coach, but then he contains other dimensions, and we learn about the scandal in his past that led him to this one-horse town. David Anspaugh’s direction is good at suggesting Hackman’s complexity without belaboring it.”
For Anspaugh, a first-time director who would later also direct another Pizzo underdog classic in the Notre Dame tale “Rudy,” getting the movie made is as much a triumph of the underdog as the film itself. While the script was inspired by real life, Anspaugh had no such blueprint, fighting for more than two years to sell and finance the idea, even moving on from the original casting of Dale, Jack Nicholson, to Hackman. In interviews in later years, the director revealed how much Hackman made him earn his stripes on set, how there were no predictable signs this 39-day shoot would turn into an iconic cult classic.
“I can’t explain how popular the movie still is other than it moves people,” Anspaugh told “Variety” in a 2016 interview commemorating the 30th anniversary of the release of “Hoosiers.”
In a 2020 Associated Press poll of sports journalists, it was ranked the No. 1 sports movie of all time. The American Film Institute lists it fourth all time in the genre, behind “Raging Bull,” “Rocky,” and “The Pride of the Yankees,” just ahead of my all-time favorite, “Bull Durham.” In 2001, the US National Film Registry selected “Hoosiers” for preservation in the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
As Anspaugh put it, “It’s a sports film that doesn’t really feel like a sports film. It’s really more about a place and time and people and community and second chances and fathers and sons. But who knows? Angelo and I, we still shake our heads and go, ‘How in the hell did this happen?’ ”
I know one reason: Gene Hackman. May he rest in peace.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @Globe_Tara.