Sports are a positive story, a wholesome story and a universal one. Perhaps the rest of the world can’t understand the particular striving of the boys in “Hoosiers” surrounded by farmland, processing stalks of sorghum in one scene, which my dad’s family also grew. (He said that school in his rural Indiana town would let out for planting and harvest every year.) But anyone can understand wanting more, which is one of the great ironies of small-town sports. Doing well can be mean getting out, leaving that beloved community that raised and supported you. The dream is to leave. The lifelong dream is to come home someday and return the favor of help.
Way back where I come from we never mean to bother / We don’t like to make our passions other peoples’ concern,” Dar Williams sings in the lonesome tune “Iowa (Travelling III).” And though the song is about a different misunderstood flyover state, she could have been singing about the state of my birth and the oft-mocked ways of any Midwesterners, really. We take forever saying goodbye, and we don’t let our emotions get the better of us — ever. We bottle it inside. Sports are a time to get it out, a socially acceptable venue in which to not only scream, shout and weep, but also aspire.
“I thought everybody in Indiana played basketball,” Coach Norman Dale says to his players upon first meeting the then-small team. “Sir, most do,” one of the athletes replies.
I think of my dad, aunts and uncles playing in the dust, on an old netless rim attached to the barn at my grandparents’ farm, how my sister and I tried to join, still too short to make a basket without assistance. So many Indiana houses, no matter how small or humble they look, have hoops. And so many kids spend their twilights there still hoping and shooting and trying again until the night falls.