Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
In my nearly 35 years of broadcasting games in Warsaw, I have had a lot of opportunities to do a lot of fun and cool things.
But last Tuesday, I had the honor of broadcasting from the Knightstown Senior Center.
That probably doesn’t mean much to you on the surface, but when I say I got to broadcast from the Hoosier Gym, that changes things, doesn’t it?
The gym that was built over 100 years ago at what was then Knightstown High School was just another old, cool gym … until 1985.
That year, movie director David Anspaugh began scouting out old high school gyms in Indiana for a movie about Indiana high school basketball for a script loosely based on one of its most iconic teams.
It was a relatively low-budget movie, with most of the main characters played by unknown college-aged kids posing as high school basketball players.
But it did have three major Hollywood names: Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper.
What they produced was the perfect depiction of Hoosier Hysteria in the form of the movie “Hoosiers”.
The gym in Knightstown became the home court for the fictional Hickory Huskers, a team from a little town trying to win the Indiana state basketball championship by beating schools much bigger than theirs.
And that gym is the place I walked into on Tuesday afternoon.
With my satchels hung over my shoulder and my equipment case rolling behind me, I walked through the west doors of the building nestled in a quiet neighborhood northwest of the heart of town.
The volunteers welcomed me with smiles and warm greetings, and they offered to show me to the table where I would be broadcasting from.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I walked through the doors and there it was—the gym from the movie that I had watched a hundred times over the last 40 years with that famous music echoing between the empty seats.
And I began to cry.
Not just a teary-eyed kind of emotional moment — a full-fledged, tears rolling down each cheek to my chin, weeping.
I was not prepared for that. I did not anticipate being there having that effect on me.
I chose not to try to hold it back.
It was remarkably unchanged from the filming. The old game clock with the rolling hands instead of a digital timer is still there. The yellow banner with the red letters is draped on the wall above the south basket. The team picture of the “1952 Indiana State Champs” is in the exact spot where the last scene of the movie put it. The scorers’ table still sits above the wall in the front row, and the microphone for the public address announcer is of the 1950s vintage. The 1952 State Champions banner hangs in the corner.
The movie shows very little space between the sidelines and the wall that separates the fans from the court. I felt the need to take a tape measure with me (if you saw the movie, you understand), and it’s 18 inches between them.
Yes, there are now modern scoreboards to accommodate the 100 high school games that are played there each winter. But the team names on those boards are labeled “Hickory” and “Terhune”.
The gym is operated by volunteers who have dedicated their lives to preserving this building and making others feel like I did.
They know the history of it, they know how we remember it, and they live to make it special for all of us.
What they are doing is working, because over 60,000 people walk through those doors to spend time in that place each year.
I broadcast the Warsaw boys game, in which they rallied from down 10 points early to win over Providence, and then the girls game where the Lady Tigers fell behind early before beating a very solid Fairfield team.
And when the games were over and fans and families were getting their pictures taken all around the building, I just sat there. It was almost 10 p.m. and there was a two-and-a-half-hour drive home ahead with a 4 a.m. wake-up call looming, yet I could not make myself start the process of tearing down my equipment.
I wanted to soak it all in. And I did.
One by one, the caretakers began to turn off rows of lights. They were letting everyone know that our time there that night was running out.
As I was pulling away from my parking place in front of someone’s house in the neighborhood, the last volunteer was driving the old Hickory team bus from the movie from in front of the gym to its shelter nearby.
I will go back there, and I will take my family with me. They do not charge admission, but they do accept donations and it’s worth every penny.
The movie became “our” movie. It was a movie about basketball, but more than that, it was about Indiana basketball, and how we love it and how we watch it and how much it matters to us.
And it’s a story about second chances.
And that old gym, built in 1921 at a cost of $19,000, is now one of our state’s greatest treasures.
