BLACK HISTORY NEWS AND NOTES

J. RONALD NEWLIN

30 I TRACES I Fall 2016 BLACK HISTORY NEWS AND NOTES

TRACES INDIANAPOLISI Fall 2016 I 31 STAR ITH THREE SECONDS TO GO IN THE BIGGEST GAME OF HIS LIFE, THE W YOUNG COACH FROM ZIONSVILLE, , CALLED HIS LAST TIME-OUT.

As his charges approached the bench, free-throw line, accepted the ball from thought, in hope or fear, “Oh, my God. the enormous crowd, which receded into the referee, and eyed what could be the That’s going in!” the dark corners of a vast building not clinching shot, as the crowd reached a The ball hit the backboard and car- designed for , fell into a muted final crescendo. omed back true toward the rim—a touch rumble of exhausted anticipation. Most The opponent shot, and missed. A too strong. No good. The crowd roared of them were cheering for the local team, lanky sophomore forward from Browns- and groaned, and players from both an undersized squad from a small, private burg corralled the rebound for the local teams erupted from their benches, some school that had improbably earned its team and immediately turned to dribble embracing, others collapsing to the floor. way into a game of historic proportions. up the floor. The members of the opposing Goliath had survived, but by the smallest Throughout the game, using a tenacious team raced back, in front of or alongside of margins. defense and a patient, opportunistic him—an impromptu tactic more of ob- Most Indiana basketball fans will offense, they had stayed within striking struction than classic defense. recognize that vignette as the final seconds distance of their heavily favored opponent, As the ball handler approached mid- of the 2010 national championship game a blue-blood traditional power from the court, another member of the local team, between Duke University and Butler Uni- East Coast. a junior center from Connersville, saw an versity, played in ’s Lucas Oil opponent racing Stadium; the young coach was Brad Ste- toward him with his vens and the sophomore and junior play- eyes on the dribbler. ers, respectively, were Gordon Hayward Instantly executing and Matt Howard. Over the course of two a familiar basket- hours and in its frenzied final seconds, that ball tactic called contest was the epitome of the nonstop “setting a pick” on action, the urgency, and the drama that an unfamiliar place has made basketball one of the world’s on the floor, he set favorite spectator sports. It was also, on a himself to absorb national scale, one of the top sports stories the impact of the of the year. Had Hayward’s half-court onrushing defender. shot gone in, it might have been the single The bodies collided most memorable moment in all of sports. and sprawled and That night ESPN.com’s Pat Forde wrote, for a split second, a “I thought we had attained basketball

IHS, MARTIN PHOTO SHOP COLLECTION, P 129 SHOP PHOTO IHS, MARTIN fraction of the final nirvana—the greatest game-winning shot Previous Page: Butler University’s Gordon Hayward gets off a failed second of the game, in basketball history to climax the greatest last-second shot in the 2010 National Collegiate Athletic Association the ball handler had story in basketball history. And, what the championship game against Duke University. Above: The Wiley High School basketball team, Terre Haute, Indiana, 1931. an unobstructed heck, give us the greatest ending in athletic view of the basket, history.” Yet it appeared that the local team’s best fifty feet away. Mid-dribble, he launched But change a couple of place names chance for a victory had passed a few sec- the ball toward the goal, in a motion that here and there, and it just as easily could onds earlier with a missed shot. The game was astoundingly closer to a controlled shot have described earlier contests in Indi- was now down to desperate measures—the than to a running heave. ana’s basketball legacy. It could have been faint hope of a foul, a missed free throw, Hearts caught in every throat, and describing the final seconds of a col- and a score from the length of the floor, every eye followed the trajectory of the lege-division national championship game with three seconds remaining. ball as the horn sounded and the game featuring what is now the University of The teams reassembled on the floor. ended. In the split second that it descended Evansville in the 1960s or Indiana State The opposing player stepped to the toward the basket, thousands of people Teacher’s College in the 1940s—before

32 I TRACES I Fall 2016 A PERFECT MATCH

IHS, BLACKFORD COUNTY PHOTOGRAPHERS COLLECTION, P 288 IHS Above: The Mount Comfort High School basketball team scrimmages in 1926. The man in the suit is J. B. Good, who served as the team’s coach and the school’s principal. Right: The Hartford City High School’s basketball team played without a coach or permanent home for years. This 1917 photograph is of the school’s junior squad, winner of an interclass tournament that year.

or after the Sycamores’ young head coach, moment could have been from the first driveways, the shot executed by thousands John Wooden, took a job with the Uni- decade of the twentieth century, when Wa- of prospective Indiana legends, some of versity of California, Los Angeles. For that bash College consistently triumphed over whom did indeed go on to earn that title. matter, it almost could have described a touring teams from Harvard and Yale. Basketball has been called a uniquely game featuring Indiana State’s drive to the Change the schools from colleges American game, and it is certainly unique national championship game as an under- to high schools, and that all-or-nothing in the clarity of its origins. Unlike other rated Division I program in 1979, behind moment describes the end of countless sports that evolved gradually out of earlier Larry Bird. Or it could have been about Butler CHANGE THE SCHOOLS FROM COLLEGES TO itself, in any one of a number of games in HIGH SCHOOLS, AND THAT ALL-OR-NOTHING the 1920s, when its Hall of Fame coach Pat MOMENT DESCRIBES THE END OF COUNT- Page and his young protégé, Tony Hinkle, led the Bulldogs to championships in two LESS DAVID-VS.-GOLIATH GAMES IN THE national tournaments sponsored by the EPIC INDIANA HIGH SCHOOL STATE TOURNA- Amateur Athletic Union, and the north- MENT, INCLUDING THE ONE IMMORTALIZED side Indianapolis campus hosted frequent games against powerhouses of that era such IN THE MOVIE HOOSIERS. as Pittsburgh and Long Island. The only reason that it could not have described David-vs.-Goliath games in the epic forms of competition somewhere in the a Purdue University game in that era is Indiana High School Athletic Association’s mists of time, we know exactly when and because Purdue, coached by Ward “Piggy” state tournament, including the one im- where this game began. Doctor James Lambert and featuring such homegrown mortalized in the movie Hoosiers. Naismith, a Canadian-born instructor talent as Wooden, was almost never an It also played out several million at Springfield College’s school for Young underdog. Go back far enough, and that times in games in Indiana barnyards and Men’s Christian Association directors, sat

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down in December 1891 and composed it with his charges and with his peers in from within thirty miles of Crawfords- a set of rules for an indoor game to keep nearby Lafayette. By March of 1894, the ville—evidence in part that it took the his students’ interest during the winter Crawfordsville and Lafayette YMCAs game more than a couple of decades to months. We know the date of the first staged an intercity game that was covered capture a statewide following. demonstration of the game, the names of by the local media, and basketball as a But capture a following it certainly the players, and where most of them went spectator sport was born in Indiana. did. The notion that Indiana and basket- after graduation to spread their new gospel. Basketball did not immediately sweep ball were made for each other was firmly The popular narative is that one of Indiana like a lake-effect blizzard. There established by 1925, when Naismith Springfield’s students, Doctor Nicholas are a couple of instances where early attended a state tournament final at the McCay, brought basketball to his job run- adopters, such as the Indianapolis YMCA Indiana State Fairgrounds and supposedly ning the YMCA in Crawfordsville, sharing and Shortridge High School, established declared that basketball, while invented programs with ripple-effect in Massachusetts, “Really had its origin impact, but for the most part in Indiana, which remains today the sports pages, college campus- center of the sport.” (This quote is widely es, and early meetings of the attributed to a speech that Naismith gave Indiana High School Athletic at a return visit to Indiana for a YMCA Association, which was founded banquet in 1936.) in 1904, continued to focus on The mythology surrounding Indiana football, baseball, and track and basketball has only grown, aided by an ex- field. When a state high school panding national sports media. The myth basketball tournament was of Indiana basketball has developed along established and grew through- several lines. One is that Indiana loves out the decade of the 1910s, and supports basketball unlike any other the first seven champions were state or region. Another is that Indiana IHS, BASS PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION, P 130 IHS, INBODY GLASS PLATE COLLECTION, P 469 GLASS PLATE IHS, INBODY Top: Ladywood School for Girls students in Indianapolis practice outdoors, 1927. Above: Women’s participation in sports has changed in Indiana since this 1913 team took to the court. The passage of Title IX legislation in 1972 helped start to level the playing field foromen’s w sports.

34 I TRACES I Fall 2016 A PERFECT MATCH excels at basketball more than any other state or region. And another is that basket- ball defines the state in some sense, in the same way in which Jacques Barzun wrote of the United States in the 1950s, “Who- ever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” The notion that Indiana has a special relationship with basketball can be easily measured and documented. One need look no further than the number of enormous high school basketball gyms in the state. As of 2013, twelve of the fifteen high school gyms in America seating more than 7,000 fans were in Indiana—and that does not include the venerable 8,900-seat Wigwam in Anderson, which was still standing but no longer in use by 2014. Most of these field houses were built in the twenty years

following World War II, when the boys’ COLLECTION, P 408 IHS, INDIANA POSTCARD high school state tournament was at its Completed in 1961, the Wigwam, the home of the Anderson High School basketball team numeric peak. In reality they were the last and the second-largest gymnasium in Indiana, also hosted games involving the Indiana Alley wave in a series of building booms that Cats of the Continental Basketball Association and the of the National Basketball Association. demonstrated the unique importance of high school basketball to Indiana’s culture. only a playing court but also room for the school a stand-alone gym that for all In the first decade of the twentieth paying customers. intents and purposes was a barn. century, many of the largest high schools Therefore, the first structures built as The success of the open-to-all-comers in the state were equipped with open, venues for watching basketball arose not in high school state tournament, however, high-ceilinged gymnasia that were perfect the cities, but in the smallest of towns. The changed such picturesque projects by the for playing basketball but not designed for Grant County Historical Society maintains 1920s. By the mid-1920s, participation accommodating large crowds of specta- that Swayzee built the first “fan-friendly” in the tournament had grown to more tors. Smaller schools played their games gym in 1912. Wingate, in Montgomery than seven hundred schools, and in 1925 the IHSAA had established a model that has lasted, with minor variations, for nine AS OF 2013, TWELVE OF THE FIFTEEN HIGH decades: sixty-four sectional sites, feeding SCHOOL GYMS IN AMERICA SEATING MORE into sixteen regional sites, with (at that THAN 7,000 FANS WERE IN INDIANA—AND time) all sixteen regional champions com- ing to Indianapolis for a three-day state THAT DOES NOT INCLUDE THE VENERABLE finals tournament. 8,900-SEAT WIGWAM IN ANDERSON, WHICH Schools were incentivized to build WAS STILL STANDING BUT NO LONGER IN arenas that could hold hundreds of paying customers before the state tournament ex- USE BY 2014. panded; the opportunity to host a round of the tournament just trebled that incentive. outdoors, as in the case of Freelandville County, won two state championships in In 1922 Frankfort opened Howard Hall, in Knox County, or found other spaces 1913 and 1914 while practicing outside which seated 3,500 fans. In short order, in town such as barns, warehouses, roller and playing “home” games at nearby New Martinsville and Anderson built gyms seat- rinks, and theaters that could hold not Richmond. The community then built ing more than 5,000; in 1926 Vincennes

TRACES I Fall 2016 I 35 IHS, INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, P 303 IHS, WILLIAM PALMER COLLECTION, P 206 WILLIAM PALMER IHS, IHS, MARTIN PHOTO SHOP COLLECTION, P 129 SHOP PHOTO IHS, MARTIN Clockwise from Left: A girls’ team from the Terre Haute area with its coach, 1941; Beverly Bridges collects an autograph from Crispus Attucks High School basketball players Albert Maxey, Stanford Patton, and Bill Brown; Brown takes a shot during Attucks’s 1956 championship game victory over Jefferson High School of Lafayette; and Eddie Arnold (left) and H. Hollywood (right) receive honors from Debbie Hough at the 1974 Lockefield Gardens Dustbowl Basketball Tournament in Indianapolis. Arnold received recognition for fifteen years of participating in the tournament and Hollywood received the tournament’s most valuable player award.

opened its coliseum seating 6,000; and in 40,000 tickets were sold to a final four to abandon the one-class tournament in 1928 Muncie dedicated a 7,500-seat field capped by Bedford–North Lawrence’s Da- 1997. But by that time Indiana’s fascina- house. Each of these facilities, and dozens mon Bailey scoring the game’s final twelve tion with basketball had had generations to of others, were designed in part to provide points in a 61–60 championship-game spread to other levels. a home-court advantage for at least one thriller over Concord, an established power By the dawn of the television era, round of the state tournament. More than that had recently graduated future Na- Hoosiers loved their college basketball, ninety years later, they remain the largest gyms in most states in America. INDIANA’S HIGH SCHOOL STATE TOURNAMENT PEAK- Indiana’s high school state tourna- ED IN TERMS OF TICKET SALES IN THE LATE 1950S, ment peaked in terms of ticket sales in the WHEN A SECOND ROUND OF NEW GYMNASIUMS AL- late 1950s, when a second round of new LOWED THE TOTAL NUMBER OF SESSION SALES TO gymnasiums allowed the total number of EXCEED 1.6 MILLION. THOSE NUMBERS BEGAN TO session sales to exceed 1.6 million. Those DWINDLE THROUGH THE 1960S, BUT ONLY BECAUSE numbers began to dwindle through the 1960s, but only because school consol- SCHOOL CONSOLIDATIONS WERE CAUSING FEWER idations were causing fewer teams to be TEAMS TO BE PLAYING IN FEWER GAMES. playing in fewer games. The state finals continued to sell out, even after moving to tional Basketball Association star Shawn too. For two decades before the advent the 17,000-seat Assembly Hall in Bloom- Kemp. of cable television and ESPN in the late ington and then to Market Square Arena That 1990 game was an anomaly; com- 1970s, local stations’ broadcasts of Purdue, in Indianapolis in the 1970s. In 1990 the peting interests and dwindling attendance Indiana, and Notre Dame games became finals were held in Indianapolis’s profes- were among the factors that caused the appointment television. Before cable sports sional football stadium, and more than IHSAA to make the controversial decision networks began paying college basketball

36 I TRACES I Fall 2016 IHS, WILLIAM PALMER COLLECTION, P 206 WILLIAM PALMER IHS, COLLECTION, M 513 IHS, FLANNER HOUSE COLLECTION, P 303 INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER IHS, IHS, WILLIAM PALMER COLLECTION, P 206 WILLIAM PALMER IHS, COLLECTION, P 129 SHOP PHOTO IHS, MARTIN Clockwise from Bottom, Left: Shortridge High School cheerleaders are in tears after their team loses to Attucks in a sectional game, 1956; Oscar Robertson attempts a shot against Jefferson High School in his final high school basketball game (he scored thirty-nine points); a pickup game in Indianapolis, circa 1960; a circa 1925 Hoosier basketball player displays the proper shooting form for his era.

teams to play in every available time slot, barnstorming exhibition games between Iowa, and Rock Island, Moline, and East small-town Indiana had settled into a rou- ever-changing teams that may or may not Moline, Illinois). tine. All activities needed to be scheduled have featured recognizable stars; and Indi- The original NBA featured seventeen on Monday or Tuesday evenings, because ana had no lack of such teams. teams, three of which—the Anderson Wednesday night was church night and The modern NBA was created prior to Packers, Indianapolis Olympians, and Fort Thursday night was Big Ten night. the 1949–50 season. It was a merger be- Wayne Zollner Pistons—were supported by The final evidence of Indiana’s em- tween two leagues with different business local ticket buyers and advertisers in Indi- brace of basketball at all levels may be the models—the Basketball Association of ana. The Packers lasted only one season and curious history of professional basketball America, based in the larger eastern media the Olympians three. The Pistons thrived to in the state. Professional basketball was the markets, and the somewhat older National the point that they were eventually lured to last of the major team sports to develop in Professional Basketball League, which, like Detroit, where they won multiple champi- a recognizable modern form in America, the early National Football League, had onships a few decades later. lagging behind even hockey. All through grown up in Great Lakes factory towns A decade later, the established NBA the Great Depression and World War II, such as Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the was challenged by a new league set up in the model for professional basketball was Quad Cities (Davenport and Bettendorf, secondary markets, the American Basketball

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Association. The league with the red- the flagship franchise of the league, win- contentious. Probably no other state can white-and-blue basketball and the three- ning three championships and routinely match a top three of homegrown talent point shot was an aesthetic success, if not a attracting large and raucous crowds to its to rival the resumes of Wooden, Bird, and universal financial success. An Indianapolis games in the fairgrounds coliseum. Oscar Robertson (to say nothing of the franchise called the became The league was successful enough to Indiana-alone resume of Ohio-born Bob start winning bidding wars with the NBA Knight); but outliers are not definitive. A for talented players, including the Pac- better argument can be made from the fact ers’ success attracting local talent George that, as of 2014, Indiana had produced, McGinnis after playing one year at IU. The per capita, more NBA players than any league was not as successful, though, as the other state. eight-team American Football League had It is the actual nature of the game been at forcing a full merger with the Na- and its rules that explain why it took root tional Football League. In 1975 the Pacers in Indiana at the start of the twentieth were one of only four franchises from century when spectator sports in general that league to be admitted into the NBA, were a new and growing phenomenon. By COLLECTION, P 303 becoming Indiana’s first major-league the end of the first decade of the twentieth franchise since the Pistons had left for De- century spectator sports were becoming troit. After a few rocky years, the team has established as an institution across the fielded a series of contending squads since eastern United States, including Indiana. It the mid-1990s. was not yet certain that basketball and not The notion that Indiana excels at bas- some other sport would be the game that INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER ketball more than any other state is more flourished in this state. IHS, By the 1920s Indiana led the nation in 5,000-seat basketball arenas for the same reason that it also led the nation in Carn- egie libraries—both were a function of a rural state’s relatively dense population and gradual urbanization in an era when new technologies and new economic realities were changing American society. It only made sense that the state would embrace spectator sports as increases in leisure time, mass communications, and easier travel made them possible. But why was basket- ball the sport that Indiana adopted? And is there an Indiana character? The image of a Hoosier as the embodiment of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian ideals—indepen- dent, self-reliant, self-made descendants of pioneers, but also conservative and resis- tant to change, is an enduring one. COLLECTION, P 303 IHS, WILLIAM PALMER COLLECTION, P 206 WILLIAM PALMER IHS, James Madison’s landmark 1986 state Top: Kentucky State University players attempt to stop a shot from their opponent from Indiana history, The Indiana Way, concludes with a University–Purdue University at Indianapolis during a 1985 game. Above: Robertson is mobbed by Attucks cheerleaders congratulating him on helping his team win the 1956 Indiana high chapter called “Hoosiers Past and Present” school basketball championship. During the last four games of the tournament, Robertson scored that tries to identify an Indiana character. 106 points. By the late nineteenth century, Madi-

son wrote, “East Coast savants created a INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

robust stereotype of an illiterate rustic, a IHS,

38 I TRACES I Fall 2016 A PERFECT MATCH stereotype they used to contrast Hoosier the town drunk played by Dennis Hopper anapolis Motor Speedway, home of another with Yankee.” And this was before the who Coach Dale (Gene Hackman) offers great American sporting tradition, the rivalry between New York and Indiana’s a chance at redemption, constantly relives Indianapolis 500, which held its first race professional basketball teams of the 1990s his own missed shot from a sectional game, two months after the first state high school developed as a national “Hicks vs. Knicks” decades before. The players themselves basketball tournament in 1911, was built as storyline. Such a stereotype also played, no had a sense of history (“Let’s win this one a testing ground for that industry. The suc- doubt, into an image of beloved under- for all the little schools that never had a cess of Indiana authors such as James Whit- dogs, which is not unique to Indiana but chance to get here.”) Thirty years after its comb Riley, Lew Wallace, Booth Tarkington, certainly plays into the state’s continuing release, the movie is considered an Ameri- Meredith Nicholson, and Theodore Dreiser self-identity. can classic, and it still depicts an image of led to editorial posturing that Indiana had In 1986 the movie Hoosiers was Indiana stretching back nine decades. supplanted Boston as the literary center of released—a film affectionately written The early twentieth-century Indiana in America. Indiana’s political importance as a and directed by Indiana natives in the which these stereotypes are rooted—and in swing state led to Hoosiers being nominated 1980s and set in the early 1950s, in a which basketball took root—was rural but as presidential or vice presidential candidates rural community that revolved around its not rustic. It was the center of the nascent in eight of fourteen national elections before basketball team and its history. Shooter, American automobile industry. The Indi- and after the turn of the century.

Fans and students cheer on the Attucks basketball team during a game in 1958. The expressions on their faces show the intensity of Hoosier Hysteria.

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What was it about the nature of the fall and spring, but where the excuse for a ly. Each may have different roles, but game of basketball that reflected or rein- community gathering helped fill the social all are expected to be able to defend, re- forced such character traits, to the extent calendars of a long winter. bound, dribble, pass, and score. There are that it became a state sport? Certainly, the Even more important, perhaps, it is a no proletarian linemen who are denied fact that basketball quickly developed as a team sport that rewards individual effort. access to the ball, no pitchers and catchers sport requiring five-man teams meant that For a state that embraced the mythology of (or goalies) given special equipment and any school (or club or business) could field the rugged pioneer and the self-made man, dispensations. Indiana fans have a special a team, no matter how small. It was also the image of the farm boy (or later, farm affinity for the well-balanced team where less expensive to outfit a team than football girl) or gym rat practicing jump shots and every player plays every role, dating back or baseball. Before the race to build gym- ball-handling through countless hours of from the recent successes of “The But- nasia began, it required only uniforms and solitary practice—at one of those ubiq- ler Way,” through Branch McCracken’s a ball. It was even a team sport that girls uitous barnyard or driveway goals—is an earliest “Hurryin’ Hoosiers,” and no could play and which fans could appreci- indelible part of the Indiana landscape. doubt before. ate watching girls play. Although Indiana In actual practice, basketball strikes Because sports in general tend to be COLLECTION, P 129 SHOP PHOTO IHS, MARTIN did not start a state tournament for girls a complex balance between individual a meritocracy, where talent and results high school basketball until 1976, and excellence and excellent teamwork. Partly trump birthright and entrenched inter- then only after a long hiatus that began in because there are only five players in the ests, there were events in Indiana’s social the Great Depression, competitive inter- game at a time, instead of nine or eleven, history that happened on basketball scholastic girls basketball dates to the first the relative impact of each individual is courts that would not have occurred in decade of the twentieth century as well. magnified, especially on such a compact board rooms or at ballot boxes. Indiana’s The fact that basketball was an in- playing surface. One great player can make history of progress toward racial equality door, winter sport fit perfectly within a good team a championship contender, in is a complicated one, even in basketball. the rhythms of an agricultural economy, a way that not even an elite quarterback in The state was infamous in the 1920s for where young men were in the fields in the football or a triple-crown hitter or an ace the extent to which the Ku Klux Klan had pitcher in baseball infiltrated various levels of government, (certainly over the and in the 1920s most of the state’s larger course of a full cities established segregated high schools. season) can match. These schools often became sources of At the highest level, community pride in the years before the history of the integration, but separate was not equal. NBA over recent Indiana’s segregated high schools (and its decades suggests parochial ones) were not admitted to the that the correlation high school state tournament until 1942. between having the But in smaller communities where best player (Bird, there was not critical mass for a segregat- Magic Johnson, ed school, basketball was an enterprise Michael Jordan, where some black players were able to or LeBron James) demonstrate their worth. In 1930 a junior correlates with being named Dave DeJernett led Washington the winningest team High School to a state championship over more than in any a similarly-integrated Muncie Central other major Ameri- team led by Jack Mann. DeJernett was can sport. recognized as the first African Ameri-

IHS, MARTIN PHOTO SHOP COLLECTION, P 129 SHOP PHOTO IHS, MARTIN On the other can to win a state championship on an Tip off for a game involving Garfield High School in Terre hand, the rules of integrated team in the United States. In Haute in 1945. Such battles were commonplace when play- basketball allow and a grisly though unrelated counterpoint, a ers from opposing teams each had control of the ball, but since the early 1980s the alternating-possession rule has require each player few weeks after the game, the last public limited the jump ball to one per game. to contribute equal- lynching in Indiana took place. Integrat-

40 I TRACES I Fall 2016 BLACK HISTORY NEWS AND NOTES COLLECTION, P 303 INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER IHS, Left: The basketball court at the Penna Gymnasium, Vigo County, Indiana, September 1926. Right: Players and coaches from Indianapolis Wash- ington High School celebrate winning the 1969 Indiana high school basketball tournament. Washington defeated Gary Tolleson High School 79–76 to finish its undefeated season. ed teams such as Washington and Mun- in part, with hastening the integration of but sports have provided a venue where cie were not welcome in many places in Indianapolis public schools that feared more is possible. Indiana. never winning another sectional. In 1947 The extent to which these features of In 1939 the long-standing rivalry of Shelbyville’s Bill Garrett became the first basketball truly reflect an Indiana ap- the Indiana-Kentucky High School All- African American athlete to play basketball proach to sports and to life, versus whether Star game was initiated, and the panel of in the Big Ten at Indiana University. But Indiana fans and commentators have sportswriters that selected Indiana’s team not every aspiring black athlete in the late projected that approach onto the game, named Franklin High School’s African 1940s and the 1950s found such doors is open to debate. Certainly for a culture American star and future Cincinnati Reds open. that claims to value individual effort and player George Crowe as Indiana’s first “Mr. As recently as the early 2000s, it was “self-made-ness” over innate talent, soccer Basketball.” But a decade and a half later, deemed remarkable that the head coaches and even baseball are sports that lend themselves more to success on the part of CERTAINLY, FOR A CULTURE THAT CLAIMS average-sized athletes that are willing to work hard to master skills. Measuring such TO VALUE INDIVIDUAL EFFORT AND “SELF- correlations would be difficult to do, and MADE-NESS” OVER INNATE TALENT, SOCCER beyond the scope of this article. Regard- AND EVEN BASEBALL ARE SPORTS THAT less, by the second decade of the twentieth century, basketball was Indiana’s game. It LEND THEMSELVES MORE TO SUCCESS ON has remained so ever since. THE PART OF AVERAGE-SIZED ATHLETES J. Ronald Newlin is the former director THAT ARE WILLING TO WORK HARD TO of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle, Indiana. A graduate of Indiana MASTER SKILLS. University with a master’s degree in U.S. history, he has worked and consulted for a Crowe’s older brother, Ray, was coaching of four of Indiana’s flagship sports fran- variety of nonprofit organizations in the an Indianapolis Crispus Attucks team that chises—the Indiana Pacers’ Isiah Thomas, state, including the Indiana State Museum, was still segregated and still had no home the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy, IU Indiana State Library, Indiana Historical gym. The dominance of Ray Crowe's basketball’s Mike Davis, and Notre Dame Society, and Indiana Cooperative Library championship teams built around football’s Tyrone Willingham—were Afri- 4FSWJDFT"VUIPSJUZt Robertson and a host of other future can American. The road to racial equality college and professional stars is credited, has been rocky in Indiana, as in America,

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