Jack McCallum talks "The Real Hoosiers" — SportsLit S8E04
The former S.I. writer places a dynastic, historic, all-Black high school hoops team led by Oscar Robertson into the historic reality of systemic racism, while tying that to our shaky present.
A heads-up. The book, and our conversation about it, discusses racism and violence white-majority communities have directed against African Americans.1
The tale of the Crispus Attucks Tigers and a teenage Oscar Robertson had always come in “drips and drabs” to Jack McCallum, one of North America’s foremost basketball chroniclers.
In the latest episode of SportsLit, McCallum says he needed a “dialectic” with his college-prof son to figure out how to structure The Real Hoosiers: Crispus Attucks High School, Oscar Robertson, and the Hidden History of Hoops (Hachette Books, 5 March 2024). Based on the west side of Indianapolis, the Tigers were the first all-Black team to win a state basketball title anywhere in the U.S., and they did so in the intense, no-margin-for-error environment of Indiana’s fabled single-class tournament twice. As he progressed in his research, McCallum realized where the Tigers, whose school was part of a “bewildering and openly racist big-city educational system,” fit into a longer arc.2
“As I got deeper into it, it did strike me how it mirrors a lot of what is going on today — some of our political discourse,” McCallum says in an interview recorded on May 6, with the guest in Bethelem, Pa., while the host was in Hamilton, Ont., just outside of Guelph.
“It’s mostly in the fact that Crispus Attucks, which opened in 1927, started to be built in 1922, pretty much against (United States) federal laws, as a segregated all-Black high school — it did not matter where you lived in Indianapolis, if you were Black, ‘sorry, you’re going to Crispus Attucks.’ The mentality behind it was ‘too many Blacks are overtaking our school system.’ It echoes, although nobody used the phrase (then), replacement theory. If, every place you replaced African-Americans with immigrants, there are echoes.
“But I’d be lying to you if I said I started this project intending to prove this,” adds the former Sports Illustrated basketball writer. “The further I got into it, the more I started to see the echoes myself.”
This is the third basketball book McCallum has written I have been lucky enough to read. The other two, plus one I need to read are:
Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin' and Gunnin' Phoenix Suns (Touchstone, 2006)
Golden Days: West’s Lakers, Steph’s Warriors, and the California Dreamers Who Reinvented Basketball (Ballantine, 2017)
Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever (Ballantine, 2012).
The Real Hoosiers is set in a time long before the NBA was a major sport and when the schoolboy championship was the big-time in Indiana.
“It’s certainly not a feel-good story, but there is a lot of texture to it, and a lot that fits my wheelhouse,” McCallum says.
I am a non-linear narratives stan. McCallum pulls it off, with chapters on lynchings in Marion, Ind., in 1930, as well as deconstruction of the 1986 sports drama Hoosiers. McCallum joked that the chapter on the beloved movie, which was loosely inspired by the 1954 Milan Miracle and a small-town team that beat Attucks in the state playoffs, might be all people take away from his book.
This is a lengthy episode, but one that is worthwhile. It also leads one to think about a politics of control in sports that has kept some people from getting their fair chance in sports, as McCallum acknowledges in the dedication. That ties to the Breakout Moment women’s team sports are finally getting, whether in D1 women’s basketball or the growing hockey and soccer leagues.
Here are follow-along notes for anything that might seem opaque or vague.
Intro
3:45 It is worth checking the Basketball-Reference.com page of Oscar Robertson for some background. I assume people know Robertson is the progenitor of the triple-double, the stat that reps a player reaching double digits in three stats in a game, usually points, assists, and rebounds. Russell Westbrook surpassed his record, but at the time of his retirement, Robertson had more than twice as many triple-doubles as any other player.
4:50 The mention of Dr. James Naismith was an excuse to share this Canadian Sacrilege Moment from the Comedy Network circa the late 1990s. And yes, that is one-time The Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones.
6:45 The “sick social experiment” quote attributed to Attucks coach Ray Crowe appears on page 303 of the digital ARC of The Real Hoosiers. Both Crowe and Flap Robertson, Oscar’s brother, had cameos as the coach of the Muncie Central team in the climactic scene of Hoosiers.
9:00 Forgive me for free-associating, but it is worth reading up on neurological stress disorder.
11:45 When High-Flying Bird was released in 2019, Will Leitch called it, “The Most Radical Sports Film I’ve Ever Seen.”3
14:00 Robertson took the assist-king crown from the Celtics legend Bob Cousy during the 1968-69 season. Magic Johnson became the all-time leader in 1990-91, and then John Stockton set a record that looks very safe.4
15:00 The Robertson vs. National Basketball Association case was filed on April 6, 1970, and effectively settled six years later, which cleared the floor for the NBA-ABA merger. The term “Antitrust City” is a reference to a passage in the late Peter Gent’s novel The Franchise (Random House, 1983).
Interview
28:45 McCallum notes, “The new is always mysterious” to sports watchers, adding, “I would wager that myself and 100 other journalists looked foolish when we were trying to figure out how European players fit into the NBA game.” He mentions the Hall of Fame player Šarūnas Marčiulionis, the Lithuanian lefty who had quite a following with the “Run TMC” Golden State teams in the early 1990s.
31:15 Indeed, the Indiana schoolboy championship was created in 1911 by the Indiana University Booster Club, as Jack writes on Page 89. It was not until 1998 that the state switched to multiple classes for team sports.
36:00 The roll call of Indiana basketball figures is awe-inspiring: Robertson, Larry Bird, the great UCLA coach John Wooden, and on down to charismatic “country jump shooters” like Steve Alford, the star of the Indiana Hoosiers’ last NCAA championship team in 1987.
Indiana beat Syracuse in that ’87 championship game on the margin of a corner jumper by Keith Smart in the final seconds. As a 10-year-old ’Cuse fan in rural southeastern Ontario, it hurt.
37:00 Key quote about Oscar Robertson: “To me (he) is the ultimate guy who controlled the game. If you somehow got 30 or 40 immortals out there at once, and grouping up guys, Oscar is taking the damn ball.”
A line from Ray Crowe about how Oscar “ran the whole game” conjured up halcyon Willie Mays. But that was before my time, so I subbed in Henry Aaron for cross-sport comp and Jack took that to the hoop, and over the wall.
41:00 Robertson and Jerry West have released authorized bios, if anyone is interested. Robertson’s is The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game (first published in 2003, per GoodReads). West has released West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2011).
46:00 In 1997, Robertson, who was 58 at the time, donated a kidney to 33-year-old daughter Tia Robertson to help her recover from lupus.
53:00 “The Lithuania story” alludes to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which McCallum covers in his book Dream Team. Along with the NBA megastars repping the U.S., the men’s basketball medal podium included newly independent Croatia (silver) and Lithuania (bronze).5
Four years earlier, some of the Croatia and Lithuania core players had played in the Yugoslavia-Soviet Union gold-medal game. By 1992, neither nation existed. In a forerunner to crowdfunding, Lithuanian players such as Marčiulionis did the legwork to put together a team that could qualify; two years out from those games, Lithuania did not even have an Olympic committee.
If I remember correctly, members of The Grateful Dead were Golden State fans and liked Marčiulionis’s game. Tie-dyed warmup shirts were sold as a fundraiser, and worn by the team during the Olympics.
In 2012, NBA TV adapted Dream Team into a documentary. Lithuania’s story is told in a doc called The Other Dream Team that débuted the very same year.
58:00 It is good to have said one can still enjoy Hoosiers and The Real Hoosiers.
1:01:00. A bunch of sports movie titles fly back and forth here. Before decluttering recently, I had DVDs of both adaptions of Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. In, the 1997 UK film, the main character is a teacher who is ride-and-die with Arsenal during the 1988-89 footy season. The 2005 American remake is a Drew Barrymore-Jimmy Fallon RomCom trading off the Boston Red Sox “reversing the curse” in 2004.
1:04:00 The Attucks grads from bygone years whom McCallum mentions include Charles Henry DeBow, one of the Tuskugee Airmen.
1:11:45 McCallum’s mention of basketball being played in auditoriums with stages calls to mind a chapter in Charley Rosen’s Depression era-set novel The House of Moses All-Stars (Mariner, 1996). The touring all-Jewish basketball team plays one game against an all-Black team in Chicago in a dance hall. After the game, the facility gets a presto-changeover for a dance. This was part of the ‘city game’ 60 years before the NBA got on to the fusion of hoops and trendy music.
1:14:00 Now called Hinkle Fieldhouse, the arena at Butler U was the largest basketball arena in America when it opened in 1928. The Butler Bulldogs, whose men’s team were Final Four runner-ups in 2010 and ’11, still play there.
1:18:00 The 6-on-6 basketball McCallum mentions would seem to fall into those “pseudoscience-fueled imposed limitations” that Sarah Spain reminds of us in the tweet posted high up in this post.
I have to share how Melissa Ludtke described what it was like to be confined to that bastardization of Dr. Naismith’s beautiful invention.
We competed with six players — not as the boys did with five. And four of our players had to stay in only half the court, either as a “stationary” forward or guard. They were not allowed to cross the center court line. Two of our players, aka the “rovers,” could be anywhere on the court, but not even a rover could dribble the ball more than three times before she had to pass it. Consequently, our games were tortuously slow affairs. All movement essentially ceased whenever a girl ran out of dribbles; her opponents knew she would, so they swarmed her which made it tough to pass the ball out of what resembled this rugby scrum surrounding her. These were grinding slogs, with few points scored.
Is it any wonder that nobody came to watch us play? (Let’s Row Together, Feb. 16)
Relatedly, my mother, who ran track in high school, told me the longest footrace for girls was the 880-yard run. Anything else would be too strenuous.
Just a thought, but there are good substitutes for Hoosiers that are focused on the 1970s in women’s basketball. Check out The Mighty Macs (2009) starring Carla Gugino, Ellen Burstyn, and Marley Shelton. A good read by Melissa Isaacson is the book State: A Team, a Triumph, a Transformation, a memoir of her days as a teenage basketball player in late 1970s Illinois.
Take ’Er Light
Inspired by Jeremy Larter’s awesome comedy Who’s Yer Father, I decided to add a finishing segment called Take ’Er Light. It’s an improvement, ideally, over the lightning round Neil Acharya and I sometimes use. Think of it as a cooldown. We get into some heavy subject matter, but we can wind down nicely with some questions about the work and life of the guest(s).
Some context:
1:22:00 Previously, our basketball book episode with Rich Cohen in December 2022 charted the explosion of the three-point shot.
1:25:00 The scene in Almost Famous that Jack mentions entails Philip Seymour Hoffman portraying Lester Bangs running down The Doors.
It would be remiss not to mention an episode connection. Previous guest Morgan Campbell has a cousin, Jeff Jones, who tours with Burton Cummings, the OG CanRock frontman of The Guess Who. That’s poetic!
1:26:30 The Juha Widing reference is covered in our 2021 episode with Scott Morrison. As mentioned, the founding governor of the L.A. Kings, Jack Kent Cooke, ordered the team’s radio voices to pronounce the Finn-Swede forward’s name Why-ding instead of the proper Vee-ding. At that time, W was not even part of the Swedish alphabet!
Wrap-up
Tack så mycket, Jack McCallum, for the insight and time. I was glad to see Jack tweet that he had fun discussing The Real Hoosiers. There was so much more I could have asked, but we were pushing the 90-minute mark.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Feb. 24-March 14, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.
The events examined in The Real Hoosiers happen exclusively in the United States, and being specific seems like the right play. A recent post lists our episodes with a Black history theme.
The Real Hoosiers, p. 186.
New York Magazine, Jan. 23, 2019.
My mind is a lint trap for retaining late-night talk show host jokes from the 1990s. The night after Johnson took the assists crown, Arsenio Hall quipped, “Magic has helped more guys score than the pickup line, ‘I’m a Kennedy.’ ”
Canada did not qualify for the men’s basketball competition. Steve Nash was just finishing up Grade 12 that year.