Hackman Watch: Hoosiers (1986)

Watched:  03/17/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  David Anspaugh

So, this movie was a staple for us middle-school basketball boys in the 1980's.  I watched it a lot during a certain period in my life, but I don't think I've seen it since those magical days of knowing "I am not very good at this, but I am tall".  We are now, of course, further from the release of the film than the movie was from the period in which it occurs.  Because I am old.  And tired.

I'll say it:  Hoosiers (1986) is an odd movie.  It stars three actors who were big at the time - Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper - but almost everyone else is local Indiana talent.  It's also a basketball movie that focuses on the coach and gives backstory to 1.5 players out of 8.  I couldn't tell you the names of half the players.  One of our main players, the star, has maybe three lines. It also has the burden of having some unspoken issues with race that just sail on by, and were uncomfortable when I saw it as a kid in 1986.

Hackman is, of course, perfect.  As a basketball coach dealing with a past where he had a moment of absolute failure - take heed fans of Bobby McKnight - he's getting a second chance to do what he loves.  It just happens to be out here in the middle of nowhere with half the players he needs and placed in a small town that thinks coaching is a democracy.  

Apparently Hackman had second thoughts and tried to get out of making this movie, and I'd love to know why.  He seems tailored to the part, in a way.  But Hackman was also famously horrible once filming was underway.

This film was part of Dennis Hopper's image rehabilitation tour as he got sober, but he still wanted to play the complex wild man, and that he does here as the alcoholic father of one of the players, who Hackman realizes has a fine mind for the game.  And Barbara Hershey understands the assignment as the no-longer debutante-aged woman living in a small town who holds some of what happens in that town with disdain, while working to make it a better place through teaching.

The basic plot of the movie is that Hackman arrives in a dot-on-a-map small town after 12 years in the navy - where he went after an incident while coaching college ball in Utica.  Folks don't seem happy to see him, suspicious of a 50 year old man coming to coach a small school.  He finds a team that acts more like a pick-up game than an organized team, and has the town's menfolk hanging about way too much, apparently with nothing else going on.

Hackman shocks locals by running drills, closing practice, and expecting players to do what he asks.  For them a winning record is 15-10 for the season.  

He woos Barbara Hershey, a prickly English teacher, and helps rehab Dennis Hopper, a town drunk who has a son on the team, and was once a great player himself. 

But it's also a story told in odd ellipses.  We know Jimmy, the star player who isn't playing, is troubled and won't play.  And then he does.  I don't know why.  I can guess, but I don't know.  Gene Hackman's friend who brought him out to coach has a heart attack, and we don't see him again in the last 1/3rd of the film.  Not even listening to the game on the radio.  There's a single kiss between Hershey and Hackman, and then that's it.  We don't even know if Hackman comes back to coach the following year.

A lot of folks consider this to be a great sports movie, and maybe it is.  It taps into the sentimentality that goes along with sports, and plays into the Americana-ness of then-legendary Indiana basketball.  And it's an illustration of how a man of principle and with a plan can find gold anywhere with the right team.  And Barbara Hershey being available, I guess.

Perhaps historically accurate, the movie is also the Whitest basketball movie you're going to find.  And that makes for a challenging final sequence where the largely Black basketball team from South Bend plays our guys, and go nameless and faceless - our farm boys finally winning in the last minute.  Which, by the way, was based on a real finals game in Indiana in the early 1950's.  But I'm not so sure it plays terribly well now.

Because this movie was something we watched over and over as basketball kids, I remember us, IRL, noting schools with older gyms we'd play in as "Hoosiers gyms", and because I was a terrible child, asking our gruff coach why he wouldn't tell us he loved us like Gene Hackman loved his players (he answered that we hadn't won state.  We did win District, as far as we could go in 8th grade.  That was neat.  We were not told we were loved.).   

Basketball is always tough on the big screen, but this one does it well, mostly by feeling like real game footage that's really been captured, which may be what happened.  I can't say.  The best is still Winning Time from HBO/Max.  

Like all sports movies, there's some that feels really real - the drills, the pace of the games which look like they just filmed the guys playing - and some stuff that doesn't feel real.  Like, players mouthing off to a new coach on day 1 or cutting up while being told new drills.

It is a good movie.  It's just sort of an odd movie for what it is.  How the coach wins over the players is never even really shown.  They're just losing at first, and then they're winning - and that almost seems more tied to Jimmy rejoining the team than anything else.  It's a big leap of connecting dots that feel separated a bit too far.  

But I am also not going to say this is a bad movie.  It works.  It's chock full of Middle Americana and beautifully shot.  It does try to get you in the feels and largely succeeds.  Our three Hollywood leads are really solid.  I guess I still like it, it's just sort of a strange little movie with it's open-ended storylines and refusal to get us to better know the players.