Gene Hackman played Coach Norman Dale in the 1987 movie “Hoosiers,” one of the most successful sports movies of all time, although during shooting, Hackman’s fear was that the movie was so bad it would ruin his career. Hackman passed away in February of last year at 95.
John Grindrod | The Lima News
Looking back at my youth, I have to laugh at the way I was. Really, I think, regardless of the era in which people come through their teenage years, most young people, especially boys, exhibit a great deal of bravado. And, while it’s surely a false type, intended to mask a myriad of insecurities that lie just beneath the surface of the young, it’s an arrogance that boys tend to demonstrate tenaciously.
In order to show that bravado, any sentimentality, especially when it produces tears, is an anathema. For me, those youthful days are almost indistinguishable after so many decades that have passed.
As for me now, I’m absolutely an unabashed first-degree sentimentalist. Tarrying too long in front of one of the childhood photos of my daughters, thinking too long about family and friends now departed, watching the national news some evenings of yet another act of incomprehensible brutality and, sometimes even watching a movie all have the potential to cause me to tear up.
When it comes to tear-inducing movies, one that has prompted me to turn on the waterworks every time I’ve watched it, which I believe is now at least five or six, is the 1971 made-for-TV movie Brian’s Song. It’s the story of backup Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo, who succumbed to cancer in 1970, and his at-first unlikely and ultimately profound friendship with teammate and future Hall Of fame running back Gale Sayers. Piccolo, who was white, and Sayers, an African-American, were assigned as training camp and road-trip roommates as rookies in 1965, the first time the Bears had assigned players of different races as roommates.
Whenever I think of the movie, I always think of a dear friend, Pat Killian, who passed away a year ago last December. We spoke of the tear-inducing nature of the film when we were in our early 20s seeing it for the first time.
The scene that got to us both was toward the end when watching actor Billy Dee Williams’ Sayers deliver a speech at the Pro Football Writers’ Awards Dinner in 1970 shortly before Piccolo’s passing. Sayers told his audience during his acceptance speech that Brian was far more deserving of being recognized for his courageous fight against cancer than he was for returning from a serious knee injury.
Pat’s and my tears flowed when Williamson in the movie said, “I love Brian Piccolo, and I’d like you all to love him too. And, tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him too.”
Over the years, when we both re-watched that movie, we always called each other afterward so the other knew that, yep, we cried yet again. While there were so many times where laughter bonded us over the years, in the case of this movie, it was actually our mutual tears that reminded us both that there is certainly no shame in shared emotions among true friends.
Recently, and it seems appropriate in this month of basketball madness, I watched for the fourth or fifth time, another sports-related movie, this one, a movie I first saw in the theater in 1986, Hoosiers, the story of a small Indiana high school’s run to a state championship that was inspired by the Milan High School team that played David to Muncie Central’s Goliath in winning the 1954 state title back in a time when all Indiana schools, regardless of size, were thrown together in the same tournament.
The movie is always in the top five of any list of sports-genre’s best, which would have shocked the late lead actors, Gene Hackman, who plays the embattled coach of Hickory High, Norman Dale, and Dennis Hopper, who plays Shooter, a former Hickory player and alcoholic father of one of Dale’s players. Both accomplished actors during filming thought their playing in the movie was a huge mistake and would have a deleterious effect on their careers. How wrong they were.
What I discovered in watching the movie for probably the fourth time is I am far more sentimental now than ever. I think upon the first viewing I only teared up when Jimmy Chitwood, who returns to the team right at the point when a disgruntled community is ready to run Dale out of town on a rail, hits that final shot in the title game from the top of the key at movie’s end.
However, in my most recent viewing, this time there were three other scenes that moved me. Shooter’s attempts at sobriety and his failures to achieve it despite still loving his son, the impact his father’s actions has on Shooter’s son, Everett, and his forgiveness of him after Shooter enters an alcohol-detox program, and the scene where the runt on the team, Ollie, only in the game because another player fouled out, makes two underhanded free throws to send the Hickory Huskers to the finals all got to me even before that final rock slung by Chitwood’s David smites the heavily favored South Bend Central’s Goliath.
Yes, indeed, I think with age comes more sentimentality, something in the brashness of my youth I simply would never have believed. And, it’s something of which I am certainly not ashamed.
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].