Hoosier Hysteria

I dropped my grand-daughter off at school the other evening. She was attending a high school football game. She was excited. They have a good team and have won almost all their games this season. Her excitement reminded me of Hoosier Hysteria during my school days. Basketball was the game in Indiana back then. May well still be and it may still be called Hoosier Hysteria, but each year the whole state would be caught up in the play-offs for the county, sectional (groups of counties) and state championships. Of course the state champion each year would generally be from one of the huge high schools in the big cities, Indianapolis, Muncie, South Bend or such, but not always. In 1954 when I was a freshman in high school, Milan, a very small town in southeast Indiana upset the whole state with it's David vs Goliath winning of the state championship in Indianapolis. The movie "Hoosiers" is based on that win (with a liberal amount of fiction thrown in). The producers of the movie added a special flavor of the game for us Hoosiers by hiring Tom Carnegie to announce the game, and filming it in the Butler Fieldhouse. When I was a student back then listening to the games, first on radio then later seeing them on television, Tom Carnegie was always the distinctive voice of the announcer of these games and they were always in the Fieldhouse.

My senior year in high school (56-57) our small town team won the county championship then the sectional and went on to the state games at the Fieldhouse. We had visions of being another Milan but had the misfortune to face Crispus Attucks, one of the best teams in the state at our first game in Indianapolis. Though our team played a good game they had boys seven and eight inches taller than ours, and we lost. Of course they were the town's heroes, putting our little town in the state records and being seen state wide on every television set there was. Chrispus Attucks went on to second place that year loosing to South Bend Central in the final game.